“OMG, please bring Jared, he’s so fun!” “So glad Jared can make it!”

“Your friends are my favorite people,” Jared says.

“We all have to do this again soon” they say.

This is a justified fantasy, but it’s just that for most partnerships–a fantasy.

Whenever girls insist upon bringing their boyfriend everywhere, it has major, “sorry, he’s not crate trained yet” energy. It’s very, “sorry, I’m between nannies right now,” and “every time I leave him at home he chews up the couch” or “I have to feed every 3 hours, he won’t take a bottle.”

Most women who brings their Jared (interchangeable with boyfriend at this point) everywhere are–I think–hoping for total synthesis and imagine dinner parties where Jared seamlessly joins the friend group, the girls love him, and it’s one big happy family. But this is not going to be the case for 85% of straight relationships.

I did not expect this boyfriend-bringing to be a full-blown plague in my mid-20s. It started in college, when my best friend confessed to me with some shame the following: “Honestly this is maybe bad to admit, but I like bringing Jared with me to parties because he does all the talking for me. Like if someone starts to chat me up, they’re really chatting us up, and he can take care of the whole conversation and I don’t have to think about it. It’s so relaxing.”

So, I thought at 21, we’re just admitting it now, that our boyfriends are just adult pacifiers?

Oddly enough, I actually really liked this friend’s Jared. He was talkative, funny, could girl out, participate in gossip, hear about my sex and dating life and was fully supportive, never interrupted my friend or me, listened well, and contributed interesting and relevant comments, jokes, ideas. We even developed some inside jokes that still make me laugh. He had good social skills, plain and simple. He was raised by a single mom and a sister, so maybe that’s something?

So look, I’ll be real with you. There are boyfriends who friend groups will like more than others. I actually looked forward to hanging out with this guy. You might not be dating one of those. And you know what? That is okay. It is fine that your friends accept your boyfriend and tolerate him on occasion, but that they do not love him and want to hangout all the time. Your friends will meet him and come over once in awhile, but you guys don’t all have to hang out altogether all the time, at every outing. And the most important thing is that you like him.

If you like him, then so what? Right? I sense that sometimes maybe people are seeking validation that they have an amazing boyfriend by bringing him around all the time in the hopes that everyone will adore him. But the truth is, even if he was amazing, we would still not want him around all the time. Even my friend’s boyfriends who I have really, really liked and considered myself friends with: I would still only want him around at like 40% of things! So don’t worry if your friends don’t want him around.

Here are the main reasons you need to stop bringing your boyfriend to every hangout:

1. He is non-verbal. No seriously, half of you are dating men who seem to be in some sort of recovery from voice box surgery. It is hard to tell if it was a routine surgery or a removal of the thing entirely. If history is a teacher, then I should really be grateful for a man who doesn’t speak. But at a gathering? At a picnic, a diner booth, a dinner party? These are small venues where a guy who seems to be sleeping with his eyes open is just creepy. I don’t care if he is “shy.” It is not my job to coddle and cajole a 26-year-old man into engaging with a group of other human beings. If he just started preschool and is starting to regress a little socially–leave him at home with a sitter, maybe one who specializes in occupational therapy.

2. He makes it awkward for the girls to queen out. I recall many years ago, when a friend foisted her boyfriend upon a picnic we were having. As the resident Samantha Jones of the group (welcome to my blog Carrie, you messy bitch) I had recently come out of a weekend where I managed to sleep separately with three people in 48 hours. I couldn’t exactly regale the table with my exploits (“so we started making out in the back of the car, but then the next day I actually hooked up with the woman who was driving us to the afterparty”) in front of Jared. I just don’t really feel comfortable having a super hetero guy I barely know, know about my business.

   There’s a lot of other stuff women probably don’t want to talk about in front of someone who’s both a stranger and a dude: their chronic yeast infection, their Ozempic prescription, their fight with their mom, their shitty boss, their annoying co-worker, their traumatic childbirth, their cup size randomly changing, their IUD insertion.

   And not to get too repetitive here, but there’s just stuff we can’t say around a stranger, regardless of relation or gender. My friends sometimes bristle when I ask if I can bring a new woman to the group. But at least this is a woman, and usually there’s some instant social intimacy there. But a boyfriend–this is both a stranger and a straight guy. And if he’s not mesh-able with the group then….

3. When he does talk…it makes me miss guy from #1. I recall two years ago, at 23, when I began to realize that this might just be my life now. I figured: if you can’t beat them…So I decided to just totally open up and be myself and trust that Jared and I could be friends, that he could be fully integrated into the group, that it could be like having another woman around, that I could be a good friend and make my friend really happy by getting along with Jared.

   So, I bravely began sharing about my dating life. And then, he began giving me advice. Advice I did not want to hear. Advice I did not ask for. Advice that was at best tone deaf and at worst lightly misogynistic. I come to my group of friends to have a–dare I fucking say it–safe space where I can vent about something without having to explain or justify it.

4. A lot of straight men just do totally unhinged and unacceptable stuff socially: playing a video game on the phone at the table, checking sports game scores, shouting at the game if there’s one on the TV at the bar, burping, interrupting people mid-sentence, doing that thing where after taking a sip of a drink they unhinge their entire mouth and go “tsaaaaaahhhhhhh” and gas the entire table with their beer breath. It kills the vibe.

5. If I am being totally honest, the few times I have been the one dating someone in a friend group where everyone else was single, I sensed jealousy. And you know what? That is okay too. When you’re single and your five other friends are as well, it’s so nice to just hang out as single women. Don’t be bitch #6 who forces everyone to watch the subtle communication, inside jokes, cheek kisses, and hand holds of a couple.

   I get it–there are times I am dating someone I am really excited about and I wish I could bring them around all the time and just make them a part of my friend group. But the truth is, myself as a romantic/sexual being is somewhat different than myself as a friend, and so for different needs I attract different people, and they might not all get along. I mean–even some of my friend groups wouldn’t get along with each other. Just think of your boyfriend as a friend group you love and enjoy, but who wouldn’t mesh with your other friends. Who cares? You’re the one who gets to have sex tonight.

6. I wish this did not need to be said but–some of you are gooey and mushy in public and it’s sickening. I am happy you’re in love, but I’m not that happy. At 20 this stuff made sense; it’s your first relationship. But now some of you are 26 and struggling to eat your meal because you refuse to let go of holding hands at dinner. I have had to bare witness to pet name usage and puppy eyes. I have had to watch couples “psshh psshh psshh” whisper to each other for several minutes on end, never breaking eye contact, having what looks like a bloodless blood oath, in the middle of lunch at a busy restaurant. Sometimes it is the bad goo too–the detritus vibe of a fight you had the night before. I don’t care how smiley you are, we can all feel the fact that there’s some weird tension between you too. Don’t bring bad spirits around.

7. Okay, last one. I don’t want to hear about straight guy stuff from a straight guy whose dick I am not benefitting from. If a guy is a truly great fuck, I’ll tolerate 15 minutes of nodding along to boring nonsense. But this is after getting my pussy eaten from the back (if you know, you know). And if I find him boring–I am not going to seriously date him, let alone bring him out with the girls. Life is short, the work week can be a long unforgiving slog. I have this one Saturday afternoon to actually enjoy with my friends. Do not force me to sit through 20 minutes of pretending to care about his stock portfolio, his basketball team, his new video game. That is your job now, diva.

So, as a resident hag femcel, I believe it is my right to write the bylaws of when you can bring your boyfriend.

Thou Shall Leave Him at Home:

1. When is it not your initiated hang out. If Serena texts the group chat, “hey, does anyone wanna go to the new bookstore on Larchmont and get coffee tomorrow?” and then Jen and Ana say they are down–do not, and I mean DO NOT show up with Jared. Do not even ask, “can Jared come?” Unless Jared is a meth-ed up twink you met in a theater elective in undergrad, do not bring him to the bookshop-opening-day-matcha outing.

2. If this is an all-girls-and-gays hangout. We have gathered here today at brunch to talk about the Everlane sellout and anal douching mishaps and Miranda July’s new book, not football or finance.

3. When it is someone else’s full-on thing. A dinner party, a birthday, a graduation celebration. Treat these like weddings: if you did not get a plus one, do not assume one.

Thou May Bring Him:

1. If you find out (through Partiful +1 receipts or word of mouth) that other people are bringing their partners. At that point, it’s clearly just a big party and everyone is bringing everyone. But of course, try to read the room.

2. If he is explicitly invited. I dissuade women from asking if they can bring Jared because– girl–we fucking know he exists. If we wanted him to come along, we’d have already asked. The not-asking is the not-invitation.

Thou Shall Bring Him:

1. If it is your initiated gathering; i.e. “hey, Jared and I were gonna go to the beach tomorrow if anyone wants to join”

2. If this is your celebration–your birthday, your grad party, your engagement party. Then duh, he will be there. Please provide alcohol.

3. More of a point 1b, but if this is something you and Jared are hosting together, like a dinner party in your home, then yeah I guess he gets to be there or whatever.

4. If a friend initiates a hangout that includes her and her boyfriend. It would be hypocritical to hangout with Jared #1 but then say you can’t bring Jared #2. The exemption to this clause is if: this is an occasion that this other girl and Jared #1 are hosting and have not offered a +1. In general, I think this is unfair, but if her and Jared #1 have invited the girl group over for a movie night in their home and didn’t include space for the other Jareds, then so be it. But note that this exemption is not allowed frequently or widely. If girl #1 and Jared #1 are frequently inviting people to their hangouts but then excluding other couples–an assessment of retribution or reparative justice may be in order.

5. If this is clearly a couples/big group invite thing. Like, if this is a beach outing with 25 people or some big house party and it’s the type of thing where everyone will be shifting and moving around the whole time, swimming or dancing or what have you, then who cares. The issue is really bringing Jared to intimate/small things.

xoxo, femcel

If you clicked on this article, you probably already know what I mean. Polyamory people are like that. But what is that?

There’s a certain ick factor I get from a certain type of polyamorous person (#NotAllPolyamorousPeople). I have a leg to stand on here because I have been in one long-term open relationship, and have been partnered with people who were polyamorously married. I’m in “the scene” or whatever the fuck. But much like Chrissy writing about being non-binary, I have to ask—as an occasionally non-monogamous person—why do y’all have to make it so embarrassing?

I am not entirely pro-monogamy or anti-polyamory. I’m down to have a bohemian open kind of thing in my relationships. Mainly, I’m really just open to what the relationship calls for, what the dynamic beckons.

What I am exploring here is why I get a particular ick from a particular style of polyamory.

Theory 1: Missionizing. Or: polyamory is Mormonism for liberals

Human beings get the ick from anyone missionizing. It’s cool to believe in something, but when someone pushes that belief onto you, it gets creepy; connecting with a belief system (whether it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses or ethical non-monogamy) is a deeply personal thing, so it’s odd when a person believes they can universalize this singular, individualized thing. Like, you don’t know me. Do you think this particular divinity is going to improve my life? That this style of dating would work best for me?

In my dating and social life, I’ve noticed that the people most committed to polyamory were also raised religiously Christian. It’s interesting how these former believers think that by banging half the city, they have overcome their strict, judgmental, exclusionary, morally self-righteous upbringing. Instead, they traded the Bible for Polysecure, the congregation for the polycule, and church for the dispensary.

They still have the same evangelical cadence, the same conviction that they’ve discovered not just a lifestyle that works for them, but the lifestyle that would liberate everyone else if only we’d stop being so repressed and provincial.

Finally, the logics of “acceptance” and “community” in polyamory and Christianity are very similar. In Meghan Daum’s early-2000s essay “According to the Women I’m Fairly Pretty,” she spends a week with a polycule house which is also, not surprisingly, obsessed with different sci-fi and fantasy media. They call their familycule the Ravenhearts; one of their members is famously credited with coining the term polyamory.

They have a calendar for who sleeps with who, meetings about who has committed which grievance. Daum endeavored to figure out what I want to know: why does this leave an icky taste in our mouths? That’s when she lands on it: There’s no hate like Christian love, and there’s no exclusion like polyamorous acceptance. Both groups say that they are truly open, that they love and accept everyone–just so long as you join their ranks. Daum concludes:

“This is where the Ravenhearts lose me. It’s not their polyamory I have a problem with. It’s their forced iconoclasm. It’s their paraphernalia. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to sleep with anyone who isn’t just like them. The result is that too often ‘deeply connecting’ seems more a matter of shared membership in a subculture–a subculture that is based around the premise of ‘not fitting in’ and has an entire system of toys and tchotchkes and T-shirts to consumerize the idea of not fitting in–than it does with actually connecting” (112).

Theory 2: Therapizing, or: I like being jealous

I LIKE BEING JEALOUS! I LIKE IT WHEN MY PARTNER IS JEALOUS! Like, in small doses and mostly playfully and in a healthy way. It’s hot. But, yeah, I fucking like that.

The main way poly people therapize you is by saying that jealousy is “always about something else,” that it’s “information.” Yes–the information is that I am jealous. If I had a dollar for every time a polyamorous person told me, with the tone of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a child incapable of sharing, that my jealousy is “actually about personal insecurity” or “a different issue in the relationship,” I would be able to build a city that does not accept polyamorous people.

Aside from the fact that I do not want straight men with poorly-painted nails to explain my emotional interiority to me, I generally dislike this desire to annihilate and abolish jealousy in romantic relations.

We are overly-therapized. We are trying to do away with all the scary, negative, bad, “toxic” human experiences. But fuck that. Jealousy is fun as hell. I don’t want to “unlearn” my jealous inclinations.

One time I dated a woman who very obviously was getting the eyes from a lot of other women at a party we went to together.

When we got home, I told her that it sparked a bit of jealous anxiety in me. I pinned her down and told her, “you’re mine, do not ever fuck anyone else.” We verbalized a fantasy to one another about my tying her to my bed frame, never letting her be seen by anyone else.

Then she flipped me over onto my stomach and said she’d show me “just how much” she “doesn’t want anyone else,” that I would come to know how much she wanted me and only me–a want so profound I would come to regret its physical impact. As I felt her fourth finger enter me, I only regretted not telling her earlier that I often felt jealous.

It was hot. The reassurance, the admission of jealousy, the mutual sense of ownership and possession thereafter. This is what poly people want to get rid of and you’re laughing; someone who still has the Buzzfeed app on their phone is trying to take away hot, semi-toxic sex and you’re laughing.

Put simply: I want to feel jealous. I want my partner to occasionally get jealous. I want to have the kind of sex produced from that jealousy. I love when I catch that envious glint in my partner’s eye, that worry that I might leave, and they come up to me at the function to put their arm around me.

Everything in moderation. Ice cream for one breakfast a month, TV binges every other week, MDMA twice a year in Europe. A bad thing once in a blue moon makes the bad thing a good thing—a way for human beings to prove that they can engage with something toxic, without being ruined by it. It is actually better to do the bad thing once in a while, do it well, than to not do it at all. What else is free will for?

Jealousy is closely linked with arousal, a sensation poly people do not exactly inspire or aspire toward. I can only imagine what disgusting, overly sincere, sappy conversation would ensue with a poly if I told them I felt jealous.

“Well, what is this really about?” they would say, eyebrow furrowed like a therapist trying to unlock some Freudian desire to fuck a flower vase and not a perfectly normal part of the human condition.

Sure, it could be a sign of insecurity, but it could also just be a sign of desire and possessiveness for my partner. Oh yeah right, I’m not supposed to want to “possess” my partner because this has “connotations of private property ownership and capitalism.”

I hope my love for my spouse and the love they have for me is exactly like private property ownership: protected with a shotgun, single-mindedly labored at and saved up for, profoundly cherished.

Theory 3: Moral Judgment & Sexual Interest

My main issue (as someone who fucks and dates proliferously) with the poly community is the way in which a centuries-old practice has become commodified by publishing and Millennial therapists with TikTok accounts.

I’m not polyphobic because I am pro-monogamy. I date in a way that has often had me fighting the p-word accusation.1 “But Your Honor, I did not maintain a manipulative emotional monopoly over multiple women at once.”

I’m not the first person to write this, but the issue is the strange moral bureaucracy that now accompanies dating.

Polyamory, at least in its contemporary urban-professional form, feels like HR-managed desire. Every impulse must be processed, named, workshopped, disclosed in a Google Calendar invite with pastel color coding. Nobody can simply lust; they have to “navigate attachment structures” and “honor everyone’s boundaries” and “hold space.”

What if I told you that my attachment style is my mouth to your clit/dick?

Instead, the language is antiseptic. Sometimes, the greatest sign of emotional intelligence is the ability to do something with minimal verbal communication, to feel the emotional tone of the moment, to pursue it without adjudicating on it.

I think back to that hot, jealousy-ridden sex with my then girlfriend. Wasn’t turning it into a fun sex game a way of communicating that rose above the rote, brute force therapy circle thing? We locked eyes and without saying it aloud, acknowledged the insecurity and newfound security in our relationship. And then we both came.

I just don’t think people should turn their sexual and romantic activity into a political ideology. I don’t want some guy with a gage to virtue signal to me because he has three fuck buddies. I don’t want people who look like they worked at GameStop and Hot Topic from 2013-2016 to think they deserve to recommend books to me.

Every time I ask a polyamorous person what it practically means to be poly, they tell me something like, “Well, I’m seeing a few people, and I’m sleeping with all of them. They vaguely know about each other, I have stronger feelings for some and weaker feelings for others.” Isn’t that just dating in a big city? What are you doing differently than Charlotte York?

There’s also the heterosexuality of it all. Straight people dating like gay men call themselves polyamorous. Straight people realized they could fuck more than one person at once and started dedicating blogs and political thought to this practice, when gay dudes have been doing this without a second thought since forever. And it’s not just the gays, it’s really lots of artists and members of the avant-garde who had open marriages, different kinds of arrangements, etc.

Kathy Acker, a true experimental postmodern writer of the late-20th century, was married twice and seriously partnered more times than that. None of these relationships (which often overlapped) were monogamous, but they weren’t polyamorous either. They just did what they wanted.

In Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane di Prima (1 of the best memoirs ever, and 1 of the only female-written things from the Beat generation) she describes her dating life, which largely consisted of sleeping with multiple women or men at once who not only knew about each other, but knew each other very closely from being in the same friend group or even family. She lives and fucks and loves as she pleases, following the natural dynamic that arises within herself and between others. Oh and guess what, they never called this a fucking polycule.

The first gay English language erotica, Teleny (1893) doesn’t even consciously approach the question of whether or not to put a label on the two male love interests. They experience jealousy; they have their first kiss then fuck other people, then have a weekend-long fuck fest, before discussing exclusivity, at which point they go to a sex party where they decide to not fuck anyone else, for now.

Polyamory is hardly new, and the old way did something better. It flows naturally, decided purely by the dynamic of the actual couple rather than the impositions of some totalizing belief system or theory. They follow the stream of their relationships, their body, the vibe.

There are no unwavering rules, no ten commandments of ethical non-monogamy. And what’s more, they don’t need them. Things are not always perfect, but people are clear-eyed, respectful, and self-aware enough to know when a new partner would be the right thing, when to stay and when to go. Not everything needs to be discussed, labeled, adjudicated.

There was “open communication” and “boundaries” and consideration for the “comfort of the other person.” But they don’t label any of it. They do what feels right, and none of it feels moralistic or ethical. It’s not immoral or unethical either.

Asking if my sex life is moral or ethical feels a lot like asking if a table is feminist; this is not the purpose of a table. A table cannot be feminist or anti-feminist. And I’d wager that the second you start trying to will a feminist table into existence, you’ll get some schlocky, hot pink, bizarrely shaped countertop which is actually an insult to feminism. Likewise, the second you start trying to force “ethical” onto “non-monogamy,” you get the relational and philosophical equivalents of a mass-produced fuschia desk labeled “feminist table,” like something in the props department for Portlandia.

And if you have to clarify that your movement is ethical in the title, maybe it isn’t?

Critical Intimacies by Erin Williams, one of my favorite blogs on here, has written a lot and very well about the rise of “hetero ‘ethical non-monogamy’” as a “new intimacy purity regime.” She draws upon Foucault, who famously reversed the idea that 19th-century Victorians were prudish puritanicals, whose greatest sin was being fearful and repressive toward sexual speech. Quite the opposite, he tells us. They talked about sex constantly, and were responsible for many of the sexual typologies, pathologies, stereotypes, and ideas we still have today. And so, when the 1960s left said that to liberate ourselves we must talk about sex, Foucault intervened.

Williams writes, “His argument was that the modern injunction to speak truthfully about desire (to confess it, analyze it, and produce it as knowledge) was power’s most sophisticated operation. Repression was the crude version. The incitement to discourse was the refined one. Speaking your desire doesn’t free you. You are produced as a subject by the requirement to speak it, to make it legible, to submit it to examination and management.”

In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, the theorist Katherine Angel also invokes Foucault to tell us that talking about sex is not giving up power. Saying yes to sex does not mean saying no to power.

To be clear, I think that talking is better than not being able to speak at all. As someone who spends time with repressed people, I’ve always found Foucault’s argument a little too strong. Certainly, for many people, being able to talk about sex and romance is very liberating. The question is how.

xoxo,
femcel

The original note: I miss those 2000s era romcoms about women who had some sexy vague job in media/PR/journalism but whose role seemed to be primarily rushing down Manhattan avenues in pencil skirts and having a martini at lunch time. I miss my strutting media women!!!!

Born in 2001, I grew up under the distant guidance of movies made just before and after I arrived in a Los Angeles maternity ward—films that would quietly shape my expectations years later, streaming on my middle school laptop.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (advice columnist). Bridget Jones’s Diary (publishing/broadcast). 13 Going on 30 (magazine editor). Never Been Kissed (newspaper reporter). The Wedding Planner (wedding planner). Just My Luck (Public Relations executive). The Devil Wears Prada (fashion magazine assistant). Confessions of a Shopaholic (financial journalist…technically). 27 Dresses (features writer). The Proposal (book editor-in-chief). Morning Glory (TV producer). What Women Want (advertising executive). Two Weeks Notice (environmental lawyer, but aesthetically still in that “frazzled big-city professional woman” canon). Picture Perfect (advertising executive).

And of course, Sex and the City (sex and dating columnist).

It was these movies that made me want to be a journalist. Or work in marketing. Or copywriting. Or really, any vague media job that involved writing, but mostly meant strutting down a busy Manhattan avenue in a Chanel suit and Manolo Blahnik heels, gossiping while rapidly downing a latte, sipping martinis at fabulous work events, and sleeping around with Matthew McConaughey / Hugh Grant / Mark Ruffalo / Michael Vartan / Dermot Mulroney / Chris Pine.

There were, however, inklings of disillusionment with this dream. The first came in elementary school, when I overheard my mom gossiping about a stay-at-home mom in our neighborhood community.

“Yeah, her parents are pissed because they paid a shit ton of money for her to go to NYU law school. She thought being a lawyer was all about wearing Gucci blazers and designer handbags, then she found out all the fashion is mostly wasted on being trapped in an ugly corporate office for ten hours a day with heinous middle-aged men. So now she just tailors children’s clothes from home.”

All to say–do not let my mom get a hold of your life story and its failures.

But also to say, this was the first moment of disconnect between what I torrented on my shitty $250 PC in the early 2010s and the cold, corporate reality.

Those movies released during my childhood worked on me like cultural osmosis anyway.

But then, the shows that continued to raise me said something else about being a young woman in a big city.

Girls, Orange is the New Black, Broad City, Insecure, Breaking Bad–all the 2010s shows that told you over and over again: the economy is terrible. There is rampant inequality. You will either work a terrible, low-paying job or make meth. Broad City’s Ilana is a parody of the idea that working in advertising could be glamorous. And I can’t even get into the Girls of it all (stay for section 3 on that).

But still, I had this barely conscious delusion that I would work as a journalist, which would entail writing big, muckraking pieces every week, going out constantly to conduct exciting interviews, using my opportunity to be out of the office to have a bagel and black coffee with a cigarette for dessert. Then I’d rush back to the office, and a thirty-second montage would enable me to finish writing the next big, front page article before dashing off to put on some mascara in the back of a taxi before meeting my girl-and-gay friends.

I was 15, okay?

Unfortunately for me, my two high school internships (at local newspapers) were kind of like this. I wasn’t interviewing congress people or famous actresses, but I was writing really great Arts & Culture profiles, going to City Hall meetings, and since I was paid a very low stipend, could pretty much come in and out as I pleased. I came to work late and left early, and without any real responsibilities, did in fact spend all of my evenings after work doing fabulous shit with fabulous friends in my hometown of LA, which felt at the time like pre-Manhattanite training. My friends and I got our fake IDs by MacArthur park and used them every other night, partying and drinking and smoking like the protagonists in an early-2000s romcom.

At 16 and 17, in the summers after 10th and 11th grade, I lived that dream. Of course, I could live it because I was expendable, a little summery frill for these tiny papers with a small team of actual, over-worked staff journalists. I could take three-hour-long lunch breaks. I could pitch whatever the hell I wanted, write the story, and then go home.

My rude awakening came the summer after high school. I got a much more real internship–this time the stipend was enough to live off of. Because of that, I really had to be there from 9-5.

And that’s when I realized: work is not glamorous. I was just 18 and three months old. What a perfect time to learn that the movies were a total lie.

At this full-time internship, my stories were largely assigned and lackluster. The majority of them did not involve leaving the office. I took a lot of phone interviews, which was a terrible thing to have to do in an open office of 30 other people when you’re freshly 18 and super self-conscious. I was also under-assigned work, which meant many days where I was done by 2 p.m., or could have waltzed in at 11:30 a.m.

So I experienced one of the real tasks of work: pretending to work. I would read articles that were in the wheelhouse of what our paper and accompanying magazine covered, to make it look like I was doing research and not bored out of my mind while arbitrarily staying until 5 p.m. It took me 50 minutes to get home via train, by which point I was too exhausted to do anything fun. I was new to this city, and so I didn’t even have friends to text for weekend plans. I had one fling, with a Google employee 15 years my senior. I guess I missed my parents.

I fucking panicked. What would I do now? I was about to major in History or English and join my college’s student newspaper and apply for internships with local papers. But I wasn’t doing it because I wanted another basic-bitch office job; I wanted to write. I didn’t want to be sitting on my young hot ass nine hours per day, bored, face glued to a screen and surrounded by non-movie-star-looking people, arriving home with just enough time and energy to reheat leftovers and pass out while watching something bad on Hulu.

I did not only want to write, but to write fun, sexy, exciting stuff. I wanted to have creative expression. And most of all, I wanted to have a glamorous fucking life.

What these movies did successfully was not only tell us that a glamorous life would require a glamorous job, but more importantly, that work could ever be glamorous. I want to (1) explore these movies as a cohesive genre beyond their typical label of “romcom,” (2) what has shifted with The Devil Wears Prada 2, and (3) the intermediary period of 2010s Millennial media which challenged the narrative of the early-2000s career-woman romcoms.

I will call this genre–because it is a genre in its own right–Capitalist Glamourism.

Unlike Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”), Capitalist Glamourism glamorizes work and brings other aspects of an enviable life—friends, fashion, true love—into such close proximity with work that it becomes difficult to tell whether they are separable at all.

I was inspired to write a longer, full piece based on my note because it clearly struck such a chord–3,000+ likes! Tons of comments were left by you: that this was the life you were promised, that these movies made you want to go into journalism, that these movies made you want to move to New York.

And it’s no wonder. Capitalism Glamourism made it seem like without the right career, you won’t have the friends, the guy–the life in general.

Early 2000s romcoms are a case study in hypnotic conditioning; you know that trick where a hypnotist shows you broccoli, then chocolate, then broccoli, then chocolate–all in rapid succession, such that you might really think that broccoli tastes like chocolate?

Well, Capitalist Glamourism shows you the work, then the romance, then the work, then the romance. The work, then the glamorous outfit, the work, then the glamorous outfit. These movies hypnotize you into thinking that working tastes like romance, that having a 9-5 means having a perfect outfit and a perfect strut.

I got tricked into think that having a job means falling in love with Matthew McConaughey, that working at a magazine is endless model-walking down a Manhattan sidewalk to get a quick coffee from a stand, rushing into an office where you enter into three minutes of the most clever banter a writer’s room could summon–with a bitchy gay guy, your pretty assistant, or spunky bestie-cum-co-worker.

If only. The camera shuts off when there is the real drudgery of work: sitting for eight hours straight, completing meaningless tasks, or worse–pretending to be busy when you have no tasks at all but can’t go home, dealing with condescending or rude co-workers or supervisors, and so on and so forth.

The hallmarks of this genre are clear:

1. A career in media. This could be PR, TV, magazines, journalism, copy editing, advertising.

2. Having a fabulous apartment. This is really important.

3. Falling in love through a meet-cute with a perfect, handsome man.

4. A gaggle of supportive, loyal friends who are there for witty banter and saving the day.

5. The conflict of the plot hinges and turns upon the woman keeping her job, which is tied to keeping her friends, lover, and apartment. But it is really about the glamourousness of the job.

6. Actual work is never shown, but what I call “glamour labor” is shown constantly: fun pitch meetings, event planning, fun work event attendance.

Its plot arc is fundamentally this: Jane, a professionally ambitious 24-year-old in New York City, faces [XYZ calamity which threatens, simultaneously, her love life and professional life]. To fix the situation, she must [do something which brings her back both to her job, and her love interest]. By the end of the movie, she now has the career, an even bigger apartment, and the guy.

(There is probably a gender-specific feminist analysis one could do of these movies–the way in which their goal is to humble independent career women and remind them that at the end of the day, they still need to marry a man. The Wedding Planner and The Devil Wears Prada are the clearest example of this, whereby women are at first lauded for their careerism and independence, but then ultimately knocked down a few professional ego pegs by the reminder that other things come before their jobs; this thing that comes first is always heterosexual love/a man, never their mental or physical well-being, relationship with friends or family. If these movies are good propaganda for taking a media job that will never pay more than $55k, they’re perhaps even better propaganda that your sappy boyfriend is more important).

Let’s use Just My Luck as a case study. In Just My Luck, Lindsay Lohan’s character is literally born lucky. Her luck is introduced to us in the three intertwined ways in which a woman’s life could be fabulous: a fabulous apartment, a meet-cute with a hot rich guy on the way to her glamorous career at a PR firm.

The first serious scene is a pitch meeting to a record label CEO (the pitch meeting is the only time you ever see these women work). Her pitch is so terrific she gets the account, a company credit card, and a huge promotion.

When she loses her luck, the first major blow to her life comes in the loss of her career, then the loss of the guy, then her apartment. While there are other little signifiers of bad luck–the weather turning on her, her newfound clumsiness, the main ways the movie lets us know that she is now an unlucky woman is that she has lost her glamorous PR job, her tall trust fund baby, and her insane apartment.

Her bad luck is introduced through painstaking scenes of actual labor—her new, horrible job as a janitor.

These scenes matter because they break the core rule of Capitalist Glamourism: you are not supposed to see women working. For an ostensible film(s) about an ambitious career woman, we see a lot more clips of her at dinner with friends, going out on dates, and taking latte-sipping breaks on Park Ave. The apotheosis of this, of course, is Sex and the City. We basically never see these women working, all of whom work some Capitalist Glamourism career: columnist, art gallery director, PR executive, attorney. Sometimes, we see Samantha or Charlotte working, but of course only when it’s glamorous–a party, usually.

Once again, Capitalism Glamourism will make you think that working is an endless stream of launch parties, event planning, exciting pitch meetings, and lattes. It does this by only showcasing those elements, never showing you the real work.

By contrast, when Lohan’s character loses her luck, we get long, long clips of her real material labor. We see many scenes of her new, horrible job of working at a bowling alley. Shots linger over her shitty outfit–sneakers, plain jeans, flannel. (Today this outfit would be considered cool and y2k grunge, but I digress).

The message is clear: a fabulous job means no job at all. It just means strutting in a fab outfit.

Just My Luck is a perfect case study because she is able to reverse her luck by kissing the right guy. Here, in a perfectly distilled plot point, is the point: the luck is the career which is the guy. They are all inseparable. This is the promise of Capitalist Glamourism.

In these movies, the good life is all about nailing a pitch meeting for some sexy, big-budget PR event, then taking a four-hour long lunch break to have rapid fire, witty banter with a girlfriend or gay co-worker, strutting effortlessly down a Manhattan avenue–latte in hand, cashmere scarf dangling in the wind, Chanel heels clacking against the pavement.

Jump cut to said PR event, where the protagonist rushes around with a headset, clipboard, and a gorgeous man mysteriously following her. Everything goes perfectly, and after her 20 minutes of “work” before she falls into a gossip session with her endlessly supportive, loyal, great listener friends.

What’s fascinating is the meta layer. These actresses are actually working—as actresses. We are watching them work to perform work. Laboring to simulate labor—while actually laboring.

These movies doubly conceal reality. The actress playing a PR executive makes the job look breezy, while the film itself conceals the labor of acting. We don’t see her agent pressuring her, her boyfriend cheating publicly, the director harassing her, or the million other indignities actresses faced in the 2000s (and likely still do). The illusion compounds itself.

Lindsay Lohan, Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Aniston–they all doubly concealed the act of labor. We don’t see what happens after the pitch meeting and you’re stuck at a desk until 5, and we don’t see what happens after the director yells cut and the actress has a mental breakdown. It is a hall of illusory mirrors of fabulousness.

The Devil Wears Prada 2

First of all, this movie was fucking genius. Thank you to screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (who wrote the original TDWP) for understanding the fucking assignment.

When we heard there was a new Devil Wears Prada coming out, I think a lot of us asked the same question: Have you lost your minds? How the fuck are you going to reboot a movie which was based implicitly upon the infallibility, financial stability, and cultural prestige of a print magazine? You’re going to make a movie, in the year of our lord and savior 2026, about a woman who works at a print magazine? What will you do next? Revamp the horse and buggy? Give us a gritty prestige drama about a door-to-door saleswoman who sells vitamin C serum on the Lowest West Side?

Working at a print magazine in the way one did in 2005 feels almost artisanal, like we’re all about to pay AMC $21.95 to watch a movie about a woman churning butter.

Brosh McKenna felt the collective, doubtful, almost incredulous hive mind and delivered us this (as a brief summary, feel free to skip if you saw the movie): Andy Sachs, now at the height of a prestigious and meaningful print journalism career, is suddenly fired via text message. When Runway is faced with criticism for sloppy journalism about a fast fashion brand, the old geezer who owns the media conglomerate which owns Runway asks Andy if she could return to Runway as Features editor, to give the magazine more gravitas and serious journalistic integrity. Miranda, who does not remember the “smart fat girl,” isn’t pleased.

But now, Miranda knows her vintage Chanel heels are clacking on very thin ice. She lets the corporate overlord do whatever he wants. When he suddenly dies, his son brings in six of the most homely looking people I’ve ever seen (consultants, duh) to drastically downsize, cut, and gut Runway. Cut to Miranda having to fly (gasp) coach to Milan Fashion Week.

At this point, the movie is less so about how to save the magazine, but more so about how to save the movie/the genre itself. The collective anxiety over a Devil Wears Prada 2 is less so about the fact that magazines have died, but in a more meta sense the fact that with the death of print, comes the death of this particular genre. Women like Brosh McKenna then have the same issue as women who once made a terrific living with their journalism degrees. It’s not that the character Andy has to save her career in media, it’s that she must find a way to save herself as a media entity, as a figure of a particular genre, as an avatar of a supposed reality. If we cannot reboot magazines, we cannot reboot Capitalism Glamourism.

Andy finds a buyer for not only the magazine, but the entire media conglomerate which houses it and other publications. Miranda congratulates her on saving herself–on finding the wooden plank floating by the Titanic. They all live happily ever after.

(As an aside, Caleb Hearon acts as assistant #2 to Miranda and is CRIMINALLY UNDER USED. They gave him lines that could have been read by my brother, dad, or any random guy off the street, and not an incredibly funny, irreverent homosexual comedian.)

The film’s self-aware anxieties about private equity firms gutting businesses for short-term profit, the loss of old guard media CEOs who saw value in patronizing the arts, and the loss of their patronage in a world of ugly management consultants, begin to expose just how contingent—and fragile—that glossy fantasy of media work always was.

One of the best deliveries of this anxiety comes in the form of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Runway staff have a big, pre-Milan Fashion Week dinner in front of the famous mural painting, housed in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.

The movie unsubtly interprets the symbolic role of this painting in two ways:

1. Miranda, believing that Andy is about to royally fuck her over, says the painting is all about the ultimate fallibility of man, his selfishness, his evil nature.

2. A frightening Musk-Bezos-Zuckerberg parody character, Benji Barnes, is about to buy out Runway and replace Miranda as EIC with his girlfriend, Emily Blunt (DUN DUN DUN). Miranda begins saying something to him about the sentimental value of tradition, of maintaining things as they always have been. After all, surrounded by all of this beautiful, old art and history, wouldn’t he agree? No–in fact, he says that to him, these paintings and churches and old ass buildings represent just that–a trace of a forgotten empire, the way in which society moves on, keeps what is convenient to keep, but ultimately discards with unprofitable, outmoded ways of life.

But I believe these analyses, offered didactically within the script’s diegesis, are red herrings for the true meaning of the painting.

This painting represents the loss of patronage, and the loss of a world which appreciates and values art for art’s sake. Without these things, there is no art. Not only is there no art–there are no such things as fashion magazines, and no such things as frilly fun movies about glamorous career girls who work at fashion magazines.

Leonardo da Vinci, like hundreds of other artists in his generation and beyond, was well-patronized. Da Vinci in particular received patronage for The Last Supper by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza (1452-1508). The Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) called Sforza the “arbiter of Italy” due to his patronage and taste for art. Are there any wealthy politicians or businessmen today who would be considers “arbiters” of anything other than AI investment and private equity enterprises?

The concept of a patron to the arts now feels as quaint as a movie about a woman trying earnestly to make a sustainable life and career at a print magazine, or any other old-timey shit like baking pies from scratch or believing that art might be sustained by taste rather than metrics.

These old world patrons did not benefit financially from patronage. They got prestige. In the case of the Church or political figures, it would cement their power. Arts patronage was not totally purposeless, but it was certainly done at a loss. As we all know now, a ruler does not need to pay for a million frescos to maintain power, he just needs to say insane shit and find new groups to scapegoat every so often. Once again, the concept of political or institutional authority via arts patronage feels quaint, outmoded, improbable.

What the movie is getting at, is that the risk to print magazines and world of arts and fashion at large is not at risk because of the fallibility of man, or because a new world wants to move into frame–but because we no longer live in a world where art for art’s sake matters, where art without a clear profit margin benefit is feasible.

Immanuel Kant, in his philosophy of aesthetics, termed the concept of “purposiveness without purpose.” Beauty, and the true appreciation of it, is separate from worldly concerns. It has a purpose without purpose. Today, this is a difficult position to understand, let alone defend.

We see this when Irv–the media CEO who was holding onto Runway–dies. His son, played by BJ Novak, inherits the media conglomerate (a copy of Conde Nast) that houses Runway. BJ Novak wants to gut the entire operation, saying at one point that his father had stupidly held onto the print magazine out of some sort of sentimental value for its cultural prestige. God forbid a millionaire wants to patronize the arts!

Here, we see a clear generational juxtaposition: the last wealthy class, born in the 1930s-1950s, who believed that part of the purpose of their wealth was to patronize the arts, and did derive some person benefit from patronizing cultural institutions like museums and Vogue, versus the new guard who don’t give a shit about these paper dinosaurs, who will gladly lay everyone off and use the sale of office space to fund a new AI venture.

I think it’s no coincidence that BJ Novak was cast for this role; his other most memorable role (in my opinion) was Ryan in The Office, another office dramedy wherein he also represented the new guard looking to crush jobs and the human touch with the promise of automated technology. This casting is to remind us of what is happening here.

The role of The Last Supper is to show us that this old guard of patronage is gone. And with it, so too is the appreciation of human art for art’s sake, without huge profit margins.

Taken from French theorists of the 19th century, the term “l’art pour l’art,” (Art for Art’s Sake) argues that art is intrinsically valuable regardless of its subject-matter, its relationship to the so-called “real world.” Art is not meant to have real world utility, like generating profit or influencing politics or offering a moral lesson. It is valuable unto its own in a timeless way.

In his lecture, “The English Renaissance of Art,” Oscar Wilde makes the greatest case of all for l’art pour l’art. Lamenting 19th-century English society’s dwindling appreciation for the arts (oh, if he could only imagine us now), he writes, “there is no surer test of a great country than how near it stands to its own poets.” Despite Wilde’s belief that art should be entirely divorced from real world concerns, he knows he must make art relevant to the general public.

He says he will now “dwell on the effect that decorative art has on human life–on its social not its purely artistic effect.” To him, even though art must not seek to replicate reality, its purity has an effect on the real world.

He argues that when a society appreciates art and beauty, it improves youth, the nation, decreases war and hatred. Being surrounded by beautiful architecture, painting, and parks influences the mind. Isn’t there something to this?

Don’t you feel a sense of bleakness set in as you walk around a community of modern prefab houses in a sidewalk-less suburb, or those heinous new modern “affordable luxury” apartments? Think of the way your mind is taken off of hateful ruminations or worry when instead, you walk upon a beautiful street, a gorgeous brownstone, a breathtaking painting, a stunning dress, a well-crafted shoe.

Wilde says explicitly: “National hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.” True artists cited by Wilde, like Goethe, would never use their pen to write against another country.

He tells us that there are two kinds of men in the world. There are men who find life interesting “for its pulsations and not for its purpose; the passion for beauty engendered by the decorative arts will be to them more satisfying than any political or religious enthusiasm.”

Are there any wealthy men today who find life interesting for its pulsations and not for its purpose? Wilde tells us this: “industry without art is barbarism.”

And as we know, the contemporary 1% are all about industry without art. In fact, they want something which poor Oscar Wilde could not have even predicted–industry which is art, art which is industry. Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime make shows which are subliminal advertising for their company, and obvious ploys to bring people further into their subscription-based ecosystem. The tech 1% want all art to be made by artificial intelligence, for all art to emerge directly from industry.

The Last Supper, this painting of a well-patronized artist, haunts us because there used to be such a thing. Quite literally, it is the ghost of a past where art for art’s sake mattered, when the wealthy saw it as one of their raison d’êtres to patronize beauty. Art has never served a purpose. Maybe at one time it helped serve the Church or political figures. But no longer. It used to hold prestige for the wealthy, it used to be something they indulged in out of joy or sentiment or the desire for reputational status.

But now? What prestige does art hold to a monster like Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos? We’ve seen what these guys do to art. But we’ve mostly seen what they don’t do—patronize, support, engage. The wealthy used to at least pay writers, painters, critics, photographers. They used to hold onto magazines and newspapers even if they didn’t make a real profit. They used to care. And now?

We are told that this is the ultimate meaning of the painting via Emily Blunt. After Benji Barnes leaves her, she asks, “Where will I find a patron like that ever again?”

The inclusion of the word patron here is a clever wink from the screenwriter. This is the central question and anxiety of the movie internally and externally–where will artists find a patron?

Because the other anxiety of the movie isn’t an internal one; it’s not about saving the magazine; it’s about saving this genre of Glamorous Young Woman Working at Manhattan Media Job.

When the magazine is at risk of being totally gutted, we get a glimpse of what would happen to Capitalist Glamourism as a genre.

We see Miranda fly to Milan in coach. There is a great flash cut between her walk past first-class–quiet, champagne flowing, elegant–to coach: the masses, coughing, wearing downstream-of-high-end polyester from Ross and TJ Maxx. When Miranda’s assistant is told there’s no champagne in coach, the passenger beside her excitedly offers: “there’s snack packs!”

Here, the worry is not about the end of the magazine. It’s about the end of Capitalist Glamourism itself. Because we don’t want to watch movies about broke journalists roughing it; we don’t want to watch box-dyed blonde middle america get their jollies from coach-section snack packs.

We want to watch fabulous media executives in first class, watch elegant women in high-rise apartments, watch a girl strut down 5th Ave in her vintage Chanel. We’re not watching these movies for the actual work, but for the glamour. When the magazine collapses, the grander stress is not that the magazine is dying, but that this particular genre is too.

When Andy saves the magazine, Miranda congratulates her on saving herself. Andy insists that it was about saving both of them. Miranda insists: no, this was about saving yourself. About Andy individually grabbing the last floating plank of wood beside the Titanic.

This scene has a deeper meta meaning. It’s superficially about Andy saving herself professionally, but it’s really about the character type of Andy Sachs saving herself within the genre, saving her character form at large, enabling her reproduction across other new movies.

Because the anxiety is clear: without a glamorous magazine, there is no glamorous movie about a glamorous girl working for said magazine. Andy doesn’t need to save herself within the internal logic of the singular movie plot—but across all movie plots in general. She needs to stay alive and relevant and generically replicate herself in the media ecosystem.

The anxiety is about the loss of the genre. We know the magazine is saved not because of a scene of real magazine work, but because of the hallmarks of this style of movie:

In the penultimate scene, we get Andy clacking down the street, walking past a hotdog cart, taxis, the avenue and into a luxe skyscraper office building. She then struts quickly down the hall as her underling hands her a latte, the two launching into some cute banter. It is this—not the draft of an article she hands Miranda—which signifies to us that the magazine has been saved. But more importantly, the genre has been saved.

Because it’s not about the magazine, it’s about the image. The industry. And uniquely the industry also sells images.

Brosh McKenna answers our hivemind: I will save this genre. I will make it work in 2026. Andy Sachs and Brosh McKenna are in the same position. McKenna’s job–of writing Capitalist Glamourism movies–isn’t yet a relic. (Brosh McKenna also wrote 27 Dresses).

The Millennial Turn Against Capitalist Glamourism

It is no wonder that the women most marketed to by Capitalist Glamourism revolted against it. I was lucky enough to come of age around these films, but also around shows that disillusioned Capitalist Glamourism for me–Girls, Broad City, Insecure. These women lived and worked in big cities but had decisively unglamorous lives. Millennial women only had the glamorous media job romcoms to grow up on.

And so in those TV shows, but also in a smattering of Millennial Novels and Memoirs– Severance by Ling Ma, Luster by Raven Leilani, Halle Butler’s novels, Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney, Famesick by Lena Dunham, and Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn–the disillusionment with the life promised to us by Capitalist Glamourism is a dominant theme.

This piece is already too long, so I won’t do an in-depth analysis of each novel. But altogether, they all more or less say: We were promised a glamorous life of strutting and creative writing. What we got instead was student loan debt, apartments which rent-burdened us, jobs which didn’t pay enough to afford to live in their cities or buy the outfits we wanted to wear while working them. The men are not like Chris Pine. The friendships are fleeting and hard to come by, all of us too stressed and screen-addicted and tired and atomized to casually run into each other and spend time together every evening after work.

In Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn, the book jacket reads: “Like many of her peers, [Anna] had listened to her parents or watched Legally Blonde one too many times and thought it looked kind of badass. But between the unflattering suits, kissing up to old judges, and spending her days sequestered in a soul-sucking cubicle, she quickly learned that the law wasn’t quite as glam as Hollywood made it out to be.”

And honestly, thank Gd for that, because she instead became a novelist to some of the funniest and smartest contemporary lesbian writing we have.

In terms of Millennial fictional works, Ling Ma’s Severance best captures the disillusionment with Hollywood. In it, the protagonist Candace follows the traditional stream for women of her generation: major in something related to art, move to New York, where she gets a job at Spectra, a Manhattan-based publishing company. While Candace likely imagined a glamorous life of art-directing and creative envisioning for the books produced by Spectra’s factories, she works instead in the Bibles department.

The novel’s opening scene of her job features not just the disappointment and exploitation of the relatively privileged women in media offices, but the more violent exploitation that these media jobs enable.

Candace is handling an order for a Bible which comes with a gemstone. The order gets cancelled because during the process of sanding down the gemstones, the dust gets blown into the workers’ lungs (in this novel, the factories are in China), slowly killing them. When Candace explains this to the client, she doesn’t care at all. She simply threatens to go with a different production company.

This is an even deeper excoriation of this media job fantasy; who are the laborers behind those glossy pages? The perfume sample inserts? Who makes the beauty products and clothes in the advertisements? Behind this whole system, is a far less glamorous, more bleak and horrifyingly unethical form of labor which sustains the illusion—a form of labor so concealed we forget it’s there at all. Other millennial novels like this one disabuse us of the idea that there is anything glamorous, virtuous, or good about this work.

And yet, Candace stays at Spectra for the promise of working in the Art department, of being an “Art Girl”:

“The Art Girls, for they were all invariably girls—colt-legged, flaxen-haired, in their late twenties, possessors of discounted Miu Miu and Prada, holders of degrees in Art History or Visual Studies, frequenters of gallery openings, swishers of pinot, nibblers of canapés—carried themselves like a rarefied breed, peacocking through the hallways in Fracas-scented flocks. They worked exclusively on the most detail-intensive, design-savvy projects— coffee-table books and color-sensitive exhibition catalogs. Their clients were galleries, museum presses, and, most important, the big glossy art publishers. Phaidon, Rizzoli, and Taschen. Lane, Blythe, and Delilah. Everyone wanted to be an Art Girl. I wanted to be an Art Girl.”

And don’t we all want to be art girls? Despite it all?

What’s funny is that now, a lot of the hallmarks of those 2000s films are outmoded. For instance, who the hell is wearing those suits and heels to work? Is anyone even going to work now?

My mom, telling me about her and my father’s first years as attorneys in the early aughts, said, “When I started working in those law offices, having the right suit was a huge deal. All the women bragged about their $900 Armani suits and judged me for getting my $85 Jones New York suits from the outlet mall. But who the fuck were they wearing those suits for? We rarely ever saw clients.”

What my mom–fortunately for her credit score–didn’t understand, is that these women were wearing that suit for the movie shot, for that 30-second clip of them surpassing the multitudes of Manhattan, for emerging from the subway, latte in hand, wearing a fitted skirt suit that cost more than their rent. The part after–the ten hours stuck in an office building–didn’t play.

When I asked my mom more about it, she said: “The biggest scam show was Sex in the City. That show made a whole generation of women think ‘Oh, I’m going to have a career and have a pencil skirt and a latte and my life is gonna be great.’”

My mom then offered another anecdote. A woman at her law firm, who had perhaps lapsed into some form of corporate psychosis from reading too many litigation briefs, would use her lunch breaks to walk up and down the blocks of Downtown LA talking rapidly into her flip phone. Only, there was no one on the other end. The co-workers called her “reality tv show lady.”

Only, she wasn’t trying to star in reality tv—but something far less real, and far more fictional, more glamorous. My mother said that it seemed as if her female co-workers in those years were all living and dressing for a camera that wasn’t there. After a few years, when they realized it was all a lie, maybe this one woman in particular decided to salvage what she still could of her fantasy. Honestly, what better way to spend your one hour of freedom than pretending you’re in the movie you were promised?

As a follow-up, I asked where my Jewish father got his suits–Brooks Brothers?

“No,” my mom said. “He thought Brooks Brothers was too WASPy. Ironically, he got his suits instead at Hugo Boss, which was a Nazi uniform supplier.”

—femcel

American Spirits is her new novel out April 14. Here is the synopsis before we get into our questions:

A love letter to pop music, American Spirits charts an icon’s fall—and an obsessive fangirl’s rise.

Thirty-eight-year-old Blue Velour has finally achieved the critical acclaim she’s long been chasing. Over the last decade, she’s released six studio albums to mixed reviews, landing her somewhere between performance artist and niche legend. But her latest album, Blue’s Beard—a cheeky reference to the subreddit fanatically dedicated to her suspected secret relationship with longtime producer Sasha Harlow—has rocket-launched her reputation. Blue hires nerdy superfan Rose Lutz as her assistant to handle the pressures of the upcoming tour.

When the pandemic shuts down the tour, however, Blue decides to hole up in the redwoods with Sasha to make another album. An aspiring singer herself, Rose is frothing at the mouth to be isolated in a cabin with these two legends, but what begins as a creative retreat spirals into a flurry of chaos and betrayal—culminating in a tragic act that changes their lives forever.

Now, read below to learn more about crafting an internet fandom-inspired novel, celesbian gossip (is Chappel Roan actually gay?), and writing out of the pandemic. We have three sections: gaylors and lesbian music gossip (1), musical influences on American Spirits (2), and all about the book (3).

And make sure to check out upcoming (totally free) launch events/parties:

Los Angeles
Tuesday April 14, 7 pm - 9:30 pm.
Bar Henry
1228 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026, USA

San Francisco
Wednesday April 29, 7 pm
The Booksmith
1727 Haight St, San Francisco, CA, 94117

Washington, DC
Wednesday May 27, 6 pm.
Busboys and Poets 14th & V
2021 14th St NW
New York City

New York City
Tuesday June 2026, 7 pm.
Nightclub 101
101 Avenue A,
New York, NY 10009

1–gaylors and lesbian music gossip

Femcel: In your previous novels, there were some really funny parodies of ‘types’ in our 2020s queer scene. There’s hot straight celebs who call themselves queer for social capital, female PhDs who also call themselves queer despite always only having a boyfriend, evil bloggers (I felt seen), and so on. Are there any other current queer types you’re observing or commenting on in American Spirits?

Anna: Gaylors! I am not a Gaylor, but I am so fascinated by them! They’re like: Taylor is singing about love that must remain a secret, therefore she is gay—without recognizing that doomed love is literally the most common theme in art. They also seem to think that because they are gay and they relate heavily to her music, Taylor is therefore also gay. I love the flawed logic and also the inherent narcissism (most people relate to Taylor’s music, hence why she’s a billionaire). There’s a subreddit in American Spirits that’s like a slightly cooler version of the Gaylor subreddit. I read a lot of the actual Gaylor subreddit for inspo in this book and loosely paraphrased one post almost directly because it was so unhinged, I was obsessed.

Femcel: It is really fascinating to me how Swift became this big figure for some lesbians. I know she sort of leaned into it, but I am still captivated by the fact that people were even captivated by her in this gay way at all. To me she is just so, so straight. The point about, “I’m gay, I relate to her writing about love, so she must be gay” is really interesting to me. It’s like lesbian by association or relatability. Given how many straight women also relate to her music, I wonder if it’s just that she’s simply relatable. I’ve also never met a Gaylor (maybe I should just count my blessings) so they’re kind of like mythical characters of the queer community. They’re my lesbian Big Foot.

I also really like this idea of fictional internet worldbuilding, I’m excited to see how you reproduce chronically online discourse and culture. Reddit was the last social media I was able to fully kick–there is something about the total, honest insanity that the site allows for because there’s no photos or identity there. I am a little bit dying to know–what was the gist of this post, or what level/flavor of unhingedness was it+how did it speak to you?

Anna: Ask and you shall receive: https://www.reddit.com/r/GaylorSwift/comments/1gtugb1/why_wouldnt_she_just_come_out/ :)

It’s a masterclass in narcissism, cringe, and mental gymnastics.

Femcel: In my experience as an LA native, if you spend enough time in the lesbian scene here, you eventually come upon some celesbian gossip through friends of friends of friends (everything I’ve learned about King Princess I’ve learned against my will). Is any of the stuff in your novel pulled from anything you’ve seen and heard as a lesbian in LA? More broadly, what has inspired or enabled your imagination of the world of sapphic celebrity?

Anna: A lot of the gay lore in American Spirits came from the Gaylor subreddit and also real-life interactions with Gaylors, who have an amazing talent for turning almost any conversation into how Taylor Swift is gay and have zero qualms calling you names if you fail to enthusiastically agree with them. They inspire me, they really do!

Femcel: Yes. While I love the idea of a beautiful, enchanting woman who inspires me, I’ve always found the best Muse for my art to actually be the most insufferable people I’ve ever met. I know this book is also partially inspired by the Lana Del Rey fandom; if people don’t know so much Lana Del Rey music & lore, what do you think they should know before reading?

Anna: I don’t think you have to know anything about Lana Del Rey to read this book. This is definitely a book for fangirls, especially of pop music, but I hope anyone interested in art and love will find something for them here.

Femcel: The synopsis of the book made me think about the current lesbian music world. Big names like Billie Eilish and Chappel Roan seem to keep it really quiet regarding who they date, while some others like Hayley Kiyoko and King Princess have been more public. But it is interesting that in a time of acceptance, many gay celebrities are still keeping their relationship status super hush-hush. Of course, straight celebs do that, but it kind of seems like they do it less? There’s a lot of A-list hetero hard launches, not so many lesbian ones. If I’m not making something up, what do you think is up with that? Do you think there is something gay about rumor, suspicion?

Anna: I think we’re in an interesting time. Queer women used to have to feign heterosexuality to protect their careers. Today, I think a lot of women feign queerness for clout—looking at you, Jojo Siwa! I think everyone loves rumors and suspicion, regardless of their sexuality.

Femcel: Speaking of, what are your lesbian celebrity hot takes?

Anna: I don’t think Chappell Roan is gay. Same with Billie Eilish. And Kyle Richards. Kinsey 1 at most, all of them.

Femcel: Okay, I am low-key obsessed with the theories about Roan not being gay. And Richards. Feel free to elaborate.

Anna: Chappell has that sour, self-serious, morally superior personality many lesbians possess, but have we seen her with a woman? She just seems like the type of bitch who would talk about how much she likes eating pussy while being married to a man.

Re Kyle, I think she was ignored and degraded in her marriage for a long time. Her husband was a known cheater and emotionally absent. Then this young woman approached her, pursued her, and made her feel hot and special. She needed that badly in that moment. I don’t think she’s gay, I think she just found what she needed in a woman at a very specific time in her life.

2: musical influences & book launch events in LA, SF, DC, and NYC.

Femcel: I see the Lana Del Rey influence in the novel, but are there other musicians who inspired any aspect of the book? Taylor Swift, Janelle Monae, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX?

Anna: So many musicians inspired the book. Taylor Swift, as I mentioned above—she is such a foil to Lana, with Lana as a reckless natural and Taylor as a fastidious tryhard. There’s some Amy Winehouse in this book. Britney Spears. Julee Cruise. Janis Joplin. Kurt Cobain. Jim Morrison. Patsy Cline. Nina Simone. With the exception of Taylor and Britney, these are all artists Lana has publicly proclaimed fandom for or been likened to by critics. I wanted to immerse myself in her musical universe when I wrote the book.

Femcel: Who are your favorite musicians besides LDR?

Anna: I love female auteurs like Lana. Björk is queen. Joni Mitchell. Erykah Badu. Missy Elliott! I am a late-in-life Britney Spears fan, and also a late-in-life Taylor fan—but I loathe Taylor’s persona and fans, so she’s complex for me. I also love Charli who you mentioned. Wuthering Heights is my favorite album of 2026 so far. And of the new wave of pop girlies, Addison Rae is my fave—I adore her.

Femcel: In your last book Perfume and Pain, Los Angeles is like a side character in the novel. Neighborhoods, specific streets, outlet malls, and highways are relevant. Do we have that same cultural geography in American Spirits? What role does LA play in this book? Or is it less present due to the pandemic?

Anna: I’d say more that California and the American landscape are characters in this book. The novel takes place in Malibu, Northern California, Larchmont Village in LA, I-80 and various other freeways, and New York City.

Femcel: Which subreddits/fandom spaces have you spent the most time on?

Anna: I follow a lot of Lana Del Rey and Real Housewives fandom TikToks. I haven’t been on Reddit as much recently, but I have the utmost respect for the platform. Oh—I don’t think this is a spoiler—there is a character who gets banned from the fictional subreddit in American Spirits, which was easy for me to write as I was actually banned from the Southern Charm subreddit (for suggesting that Shep is gay).

Femcel: What can readers expect at your three promo events in LA, SF, and DC in April?

Anna: I’m going to do an event in NYC too, just nailing down the details. I think it’ll be on June 2. The DC event is on May 27. The LA and NYC events will be reading lineups with more of a party vibe. In SF, I’ll be in conversation with Kate Folk, whose novel Sky Daddy is one of my favorites of the last few years. And in DC, I’ll be in conversation with my sister, which I think will be so fun.

3: okay, now The Book!

Femcel: It’s really interesting that you made a superfan a main character in the story. What is the role here of fan spectatorship and witnessing? Why not just make Rose Lutz a regular publicist? What about the current superfan world inspired this book?

Anna: I am a fangirl at heart, so that was the character I could inhabit most naturally. She was certainly easier to become than the pop star. I tried to document a kind of symbiotic and at times erotic relationship between the star and fan. Most people think of the fan as the more desperate one, but the pop star often needs the fan even more.

Femcel: I loveee this. It’s also interesting to me that this is a pandemic novel. Did you write this during the pandemic, or was the idea for this novel something that lingered and got onto the page after 2020-2022? And what role does the pandemic play in the book?

Anna: I wrote the bulk of American Spirits in December 2023 and was listening to a lot of Taylor Swift at the time. The decision to set part of the novel during the pandemic was entirely inspired by Taylor, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner recording Folklore in that Hudson Valley cabin in 2020. In my book, I wanted to create a similar situation to get my characters isolated, crazed, and dramatic. I also think a lot about how art was consumed in 2020, and the very different lens through which critics viewed it, so there’s some commentary on that in the novel.

Femcel: What was your pandemic like?

Anna: The pandemic brought out our worst tendencies, didn’t it? I became even more contrarian than usual, and I loved not having to socialize.

Femcel: I love the suspense of the synopsis, and I am really curious about the writing process for this novel. Clearly, something cataclysmic happens between the three characters in the middle/end of the book. Whatever this climactic event is--did you go into the novel knowing first that you wanted it to lead there? Or did you just want to start writing a novel about a rumored-to-be-lesbian pop star and see where that went? Or did the entire plot outline come to you all at once? Or a secret fourth thing?

Anna: I had a vague idea of the cataclysmic event, but other than that, I went in with nothing. I just wrote. This novel poured out of me. It was by far the most enjoyable writing experience of my life, and I hope I get to experience something like it again before I die. Not to be dramatic! Thematically, the book is partly about the euphoria of creation, so it makes sense that I had a uniquely ecstatic experience writing it.

Femcel: Perfume and Pain was inspired in part by the genre of lesbian pulp fiction. Are there any genre or style inspirations for this new book?

Anna: Fanfiction! I don’t read much of it, but everything I write has an element of fanfic. Frankly I haven’t read much lesbian pulp either, but everything I write seems to come out a bit pulpy. I guess these are less genres that I deliberately pay homage to and more genres that I can’t avoid in my own writing no matter how hard I try lol.

Femcel: If it doesn’t involve any spoilers, why is the book called American Spirits?

Anna: The surface reason is that the main characters are smoking American Spirits throughout the book, but underneath that is the idea that they’re channeling the ghosts of American music.

Femcel: Out of all your books, which would you want to be made into a movie or series (if any)?

Anna: American Spirits, for sure! Then Vagablonde. I love hyper-stylized films and series about music—see, e.g., Vox Lux, Teen Spirit, The Idol—so those are the adaptations I’d be most eager to be a part of.

Femcel: If you had an unlimited budget, who would you cast for the three main characters in American Spirits (and why)?

Anna: For Blue, Dakota Johnson. Because she has that sultry je ne sais quoi and is always trolling.

For Rose, Suzanna Son. Because she has an innocent jailbait vibe, a great voice, and can pull off being a redhead.

For Sasha, Sandrine Holt. Because she looks great in a blazer and, put simply, has daddy energy.

And you didn’t ask about Ella but she is my favorite character and Miriam Petche must play her.

Femcel: Thank you SO MUCH Anna for joining, this was super fun. Excited to dive into American Spirits in less than 2 weeks!:

As A sOcieTy, we have developed a large taxonomy of ways two people can relate to each other, from the more concrete – friendships, acquaintanceships, relationships – to the more ephemeral and hyper-generational – situationships, friends with benefits, queerplatonic partnerships.

I want a friend with whom I have sexual tension, flirting, maybe the occasional teasing touch — but nothing more. I call this an erotic friendship. 

I have this with a former-lover, now-friend named Jen. I’ll throw an occasional come-on at them, but there’s a mutual understanding that the come-on is for the come-on’s sake. No one is actually going to come.

One time they asked if they could spend the weekend at my house after a difficult week. We watched a documentary about Scientology the first night, their head resting on my chest. The weight of their skull on the soft-hard tissue above my breast, their hand dangling on my torso, lulled me to a regulated half-sleep. 

I began gently tracing the back of their neck and shoulders with my nails. I heard small gasps of release and pleasure at the soft touch of my fingertips drawing scattered lines and squiggles along the side of their neck, the collar bone, the top of the spine.

During the commercial breaks I asked them what they thought the difference was between a religion and a cult. 

“I can either think and answer that question, or I can keep getting the scratches from you,” they replied. “But I can’t do both at the same time.”

I kept scratching, knowing the pleasure of a delicate touch. We could talk about what makes a religion different from a cult (Castigation for leaving? Money laundering? Exploitation? Mandated isolation?) later. We continued holding each other, scratching arms and necks and chests.

I could feel my clit tighten as we reached the moment two people in such a physically intimate situation would normally just finally fuck. Only we didn’t, and even though we joked about it — half mockingly, half tantalizingly — we knew we wouldn’t. That’s because we have an erotic friendship, not a friends with benefits. Jen and I have a friendship that is “just” erotically charged.

I had an erotic friendship with a guy this past summer. We dated conventionally, but I cut it off with after four weeks. Then we spent two weeks “trying to be friends.” For a brief week we really made it work – in multiple ways. I’d come to his house, he’d make me a home-cooked meal better than most of the fare I could get in restaurants in LA, we’d mildly flirt before watching a movie in his living room, and this would turn into some more intimate cuddling before going to sleep in separate beds. 

There were playful taps and touches, but every time we hit that moment where we should actually fuck, we’d retreat; like soldiers charging for the frontlines, only to turn around at the last second, indulged in the fantasy of winning. If you never go to battle, you can never kill the fantasy.

It was ideal aside from the fact that he would intentionally make offensive jokes, then blow up at me when I was inevitably a little uncomfortable upon said offensive joke. “You’re so difficult! You’re so hostile!” he’d shout, and I considered holding up a mirror to him as he growled.

I don’t want to sleep with you, but I want to talk about sleeping with you. I want to anticipate it. I want to live in the anticipation. Sometimes the moment before is better than the moment itself. 

Think about a rollercoaster. Isn’t it that drop in your stomach at the top of a big plunge better than the dive itself? What if you could just extend that moment forever – the anxiousness, the excitement, the scream, the silent prayer? 

There’s a reason roller coaster cameras are placed just a moment after the descent begins – this is the most exciting instant of the entire experience. The goal of capturing that face is a means of capturing the affect of a deeply ephemeral moment. The photograph tries to transform an instant, a moment, into a physical archive of that feeling for forever — usually for $18.95-24.95. 

Imagine if you could similarly photograph / expand the moment before sex; the “pregnant pause” we like to call it in English. But it is not just English or American rollercoaster cameras which indulge in the unique pleasure of the pleasure before pleasure. 

Other languages have idioms or words for this pre-kiss tension. In German, the word could be Spannung. My German History professor explained that this word is associated with a literal, physical tension.

“It’s when you create such a high tension, so as to tear apart. It’s used often to describe the the pull of the bow string to make it super tense and full of tension, right before releasing the trigger on the bow and arrow.”

This is exactly what I want, but forever. I want to exist in that pull, that tension. I don’t want to pull the trigger, I just want to hold my finger on it. To feel that pull, that tension, that Spannung.

I once had a truly excellent lover, Italian of course. He wanted to delay actual penetration for as long as possible. He drew out the moment of anticipation with almost an hour of foreplay every time we hooked up. He explained it to me like this: “Once you have sex, then it’s over. Even as you have sex, the sex is over.” 

***

I have made the mistake of converting an erotic friendship into a real relationship. This comes from the lack of words I had for what I want. This is the danger of linguistic lacunae; without a descriptor for the thing you desire, it is easy to fall back to familiar paradigms which offer a vocabulary assigned to experience.

But I was having experiences with no vocabulary for them.

I would have a close friend, and then sense a mutual erotic attraction. I figured: well, we’re good friends, and we have sexual chemistry. Is that not what a relationship is? Why not just consummate this — sexually, romantically, monogamously?

But friendship with sexual attraction does not have to be teleological; friendship with sexual attraction and some erotic expression can be the telos. The erotic friendship can be the endpoint — the goal.

***

I recently went on a date with a guy who I didn’t really feel any romantic or sexual chemistry with, but he was hot and nice. I thought: he’ll be perfect for an erotic friendship. We can hang out and be affectionate and scratch each other’s backs and chat about our week over dinner and a movie at his home.

The issue is I didn’t really communicate that this is what I had in mind for him.

When we sat down in his bed to watch Mean Girls, I hoped for some cuddling, some scratches, some massage, and then to go home. He grabbed my head and neck and tried to kiss me a minute in. We hadn’t even gotten to Tina Fey pulling her undershirt up with her sweater and he was trying to get to first base! When I explained that I didn’t want to have sex, but that I’d like to be physically affectionate and exchange massages, he told me he was a licensed masseuse for two years. Jackpot, I thought. But then he said “But to give you a proper massage, you would need to take your clothes off for the technique, so maybe another time when you’re more comfortable.”

WHY DO MEN DO THIS? WHY DO THEY THINK I AM THIS STUPID? I HAVE BEEN TO MASSAGE PARLORS BEFORE. YOU CAN GIVE ME A PERFECTLY SATISFYING SHOULDER AND BACK MASSAGE WITHOUT SEEING MY ASS.

I more or less told him this, and so he gave me a “shoulder massage.” I put this in air quotes because the massage was so bad I felt it was almost intentional, as a means of getting me to take my clothes off, because apparently the half-centimeter of fabric on my back makes the difference between painful, erratic jabs at my spine or the luxury of a professional massage.

I get it, a lot of guys cannot do the erotic-but-not-sexual thing. They need to consummate. I, on the other hand, explicitly do not need to. Oftentimes, I don’t even want to. 

This is sort of an aside, in case there are any heterosexual men still reading this, but you guys often ruin your chance at going further sexually by pressuring a woman to go further sexually. Give me my agency and I will give you head.  

***

Have you heard the phrase “Life imitates Art”? It comes from an essay by Oscar Wilde, provocatively entitled “The Decay of Lying,” in which he advocates for more lying. He argues that art during his time (late-19th century) had become too realistic. Art was trying to imitate life. In fact, “this is so realistic” or “this is so unrealistic” is still a common litmus test for the quality of a novel, film, or work of art. 

However, is this really the grand purpose of art? To imitate the vulgarity of daily life? Wilde argues the opposite, that art should be as unreal, imaginative, unimitative, pleasurable, and fantastical as possible. And from there, life will imitate art – art which imagines something much more beautiful than whatever society has come up with. It should be that life imitates art. 

I am drawn to this idea that there has been an unfortunate decay of lying in art. I feel this in another art form, a much more ephemeral one: the lost art of seduction. An erotic friendship is built upon an honest lie; when I make a come-on to Jen about fucking them in my car parked around the corner, or tease an ex about maybe taking my pants off when we both know I won’t, we are engaging in a beautiful lie. 

The lie is the fun, the art is the point. Will life imitate it? I don’t know, I haven’t actually had sex or gotten naked with any of my erotic friendships. And the handful of times I’ve had, the reality is disappointing. We don’t work in bed, we don’t fuck well together, we’re not good romantic partners. We create a beautiful work of art, a gorgeous lie – this idea of consummating all the pent-up desire and flirting. But we’re just good in our minds, in our imaginations, in our anticipations, and in our lies. 

And so now I ask: who wants to lie with me?

xoxo,

femcel

Recap & Summary (can skip if you’re gay)

To recap – for the non-chronically online, the heterosexual, the employed (although aren’t these all kind of the same thing by now?) – Charli XCX wrote a song “Sympathy is a Knife” in her now-famous, now-summer-season-defining, vernacular-creating album BRAT.

The song is semi-clearly (semi is important here) about Taylor Swift. In it, Charli reflects on the experience of being an opener for Taylor Swift and always coming in second (or maybe third or fourth) – basically, not getting enough praise as Miss American Barbie, but getting a lot of sympathy for it. Charli hates the sympathy but needs it.

From there, she writes about the experience of her and Taylor both dating men in the same band, The 1975. Taylor Swift dated Matty Healy (guitar), and Charli XCX is now married to George Daniel (drums). Since they were both dating men in the same band, they would often be backstage together at their shows. Charli writes of this experience (or at least, many assume):

“I don’t wanna share the space
I don’t wanna force a smile
This one girl taps my insecurities
Don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling
One voice tells me that they laugh
George says, ‘I’m just paranoid’
Says he just don’t see it, he’s so naive
I’m embarrassed to have it, but need the sympathy
…
Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show
Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick
‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried
I’m opposite, I’m on the other side
I feel all these feelings I can’t control
Oh no, don’t know why
All this sympathy is just a knife
Why I can’t even grit my teeth and lie?
I feel all these feelings I can’t control (oh no)”

Taylor makes her feel paranoid and insecure. She’s risen to the top of Billboard charts numerous times, and has by all metrics achieved mainstream fame. Charli XCX, by contrast, has to ask in her biggest album “I used to never think about Billboard / But now I’ve started thinkin’ again / Wonderin’ ‘bout whether I think I deserve commercial success” (Rewind, 22-24). But Charli can’t be Taylor – not even if she tried.

Taylor is blonde, blue-eyed, American, a generic tabula rasa onto which millions of fans can project their fantasies, traumas, yearnings, affects. Charli has wild, dark, curly hair; her mother is of Gujarati-Indian descent and her father is British; she grew up in Essex, which “has long been denigrated, its people viewed with condescension”; in England, the “Essex girl” is a caricature-meme, who “came to represent sexually promiscuous and somewhat dim women from the south of the county” (Burrows).

The real knife came when Brat was supposed to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard UK charts on a Thursday. That very evening, Taylor Nation (Swift’s PR arm) released six new deluxe variants of The Tortured Poets Department out of the blue. And here’s the knife’s edge: these variants were exclusive to the UK and “available only in the UK until 11:59pm that evening – the end of the tracking week for the album charts” (D’Souza). This kicked Charli off the No. 1 spot, ensuring Taylor’s album held it for yet another week. Swift has often deployed reissues of her old work to maintain her top standing on charts.

Taylor is not the only artist who uses reissues to regain popularity or standing. But she has done it so much, it’s become egregious. That was in 2024.

Today, Taylor just came out with her Showgirl album, which includes the song “Actually Romantic,” which is a transparent diss track to Charli’s “Sympathy.”

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Introduction

This whole situation is catnip for a bitch like me, and apparently – like some of these music girls. Don’t worry, I’m not actually calling Taylor and Charli bitches, I’m using it in the way we like – to capture a certain cattiness and bite, not a degradation of women.

As an English PhD student in the very nostalgic period of her first week, I have a certain (pretentious?) urge to usher in some more interesting theory and analysis – certainly, at the very least, better written stuff than the AI-simulacrum-written lyrics of Swift.

I want to wander and write something a little fun, a little theoretical, a little clever, a little bitchy. Let’s have fun, shall we?

Poetry versus Kitsch

“Sympathy is a knife” is a perfect metaphor, as far as metaphors go. The oxymoron instantaneously captures an exacting feeling, one as sharp as the object in question. This feeling we commonly associate with warmth, compassion, and goodness has been turned paradoxically on its head; sympathy is rendered cruel, violent, weaponized.

There’s a lot of critical theory work that’s been done on the politics of sympathy. Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, distinguishes sympathy from solidarity. Lauren Berlant, wrote about how “compassion” is a conservative emotional impulse. After 9/11, George W. Bush articulated the idea of “compassionate conservatism.” This idea advocated for helping those suffering through a combination of the free market, private charities, and faith-based organizations.

The policies of compassion “relocate the template of justice from the collective condition of specific populations to that of the individual” (Berlant 2). We feel compassion for the sick child, the impoverished mother, the war-torn land – and so instead of collectivizing, or perhaps simply not invading country after country, we are encouraged to volunteer at church, donate $10 per month, work hard so as to let our salaries trickle down to those at the bottom.

Berlant asks: “What if it turns out that compassion and coldness are not opposite at all but are two sides of a bargain that the subjects of modernity have struck with structural inequality?” (10). Previously, it was a public, collective, and governmental responsibility to protect those in precarious positions.

But this politics of compassion/sympathy, of “aaww, we feel bad for you, let’s have some compassion” transfers the responsibility of social welfare from the state to the individual. This is not to say that all compassion is bad, or that we as individuals cannot or should not do anything in our power to improve the world. It’s simply that Bush weaponized compassion in service of austerity, war, individualism, and the free market.

Ahmed writes that sympathy is a conditional feeling, and one quite removed: “To be moved by the suffering of some others (the ‘deserving’ poor, the innocent child, the injured hero), is also to be elevated into a place that remains untouched by other others (whose suffering cannot be converted into my sympathy or admiration)” (192).

Sympathy is framed as a gift, as “saving” or “helping” others, such that “the other remains indebted to us” and so “to transform bad feeling into good feeling (hatred into love, indifference into sympathy, shame into pride, despair into hope) is not necessarily to repair the costs of injustice” (192).

This is all to say that Charli’s analysis of sympathy, a commodity which the struggling person needs but also feels is a dagger, is apt.

pre-order my book (releasing dec 10): femcel erotica. a collection of erotic, humor, and literary essays, most of which are not available on substack. 20% of proceeds will go to immigrant justice organizations —

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Can Taylor Talk Back?

So far, a lot of the discourse has stipulated that Taylor had no business in the first place writing a diss track.

But let’s be so for real here: Sympathy is a Knife was – despite also being a universally poetic and introspective song – a diss track. It doesn’t take that much digging to realize that the girl she’s wishing a break up – is Taylor. While Taylor could have taken the high road to hearing that someone wished her boyfriend would dump her, she didn’t and that makes sense.

So the debate cannot be: “Taylor didn’t deserve to write this diss track because Charli never dissed her.” Just because her hope for the demise of Taylor’s relationship was mired in personal insecurity and envy does not change the undertones of the song.

The reality is that this was a battle of wits, and the debate actually comes down to: Who won?

I think we all know who the victor is here.

The power of Charli’s writing is evident in the mass outcry that she was “hardly” dissing Taylor. The best, most erudite criticism comes without you even realizing you’ve gotten it. The slap is delivered so intelligently and cleverly, your cheek is stung and you don’t even know why. Perhaps that’s why it took Taylor a year and a half to respond, and terribly so.

A lot like the line “fingers crossed behind my back I hope they break up” – this song was done behind the back. Of course not literally; Charli performed it on Saturday Night Live. What I mean is what the comments say – “Sympathy is a Knife” is simply less explicit than Actually Romantic. It’s done artfully.

As many have pointed out, it was more about Charli’s insecurity, envy, the devastating realization that you cannot be anything and everything you want, no matter how hard you try. And sure, this earns you sympathy, but who the fuck wants that? Charli’s diss to Taylor is subtle, if there is one at all. She hopes Healy dumps her, and later on, he does.

Here is where I think we can see some cultural difference at play. Charli is British and Taylor is American. Brits are a bit more subtle, and possess more of a Jane Austenian, quiet sort of bitchiness, something a little more clever.

Taylor is American, so she will just walk right up and say it to your face. And it’s crass, it’s bombastic, also a little dumbed down and boring.

Taylor Swift is a human AI bot. The conventional fear with AI is that there will be an AI which we cannot tell apart from a human being. But Taylor Swift is a human being we cannot tell apart from an AI. She represents the total breakdown of humanity, technology, artifice, reality, capitalism, speech, structure.

Poetry vs Kitsch part 2

“Actually Romantic” is kitsch. It’s a poor attempt to participate in the sort of biting, bratty, cool mean girl ethos of Brat. But isn’t imitation the best form of flattery – especially when that imitation is executed so, so poorly?

The best line in the whole song, “Boring Barbie” (alliteration, cultural reference, dig at her basic blonde looks in contrast to the curly, brunette speaker) — was actually said by Charli. The insult “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse” reads like something from a Disney writer’s room in 2008, as Gen Xers attempted to write parodic “mean girl” characters on the likes of That’s So Raven and Hannah Montana.

Taylor lauds some serious hurls Charli’s way, asking her “How many times has your boyfriend said / ‘Why are we always talking ‘bout her?’” and condescending to Charli “It’s actually sweet / All the time you’ve spent on me / It’s honestly wild / All the effort you’ve put in.”

With these serious insults, Taylor falls all over herself. Charli writes from a place of deep, self-effacing vulnerability about the way her boyfriend tells her that she’s just being paranoid. We’ve all been there, a sensitive woman with a man who doesn’t see or get it.

Instead of rising to that vulnerability, Taylor punches down. Honestly, the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. Taylor is a mega billionaire who was hardly dissed by Charli, and is now rubbing salt in a wound she herself picked. Yeah, maybe those around Charli feel she’s being paranoid and insecure — but Charli admits to that with sensitivity and authentic lyrics. Taylor uses this vulnerable divulging for…cannon fodder.

Compare this to Lorde. Charli wrote a song about their struggles as two women in the music industry. There were some lines it that could have been taken as a diss. But Lorde responded with some of the best writing on the remix album, about the experience of being insecure and avoiding another woman whose life feels too shiny and in the spotlight, and the avoidance inadvertently coming off as pretentious or cold. The women work it out on the remix.

Charli gently threw a bone to these women. They can take the bite, they can walk away, or they can do what Taylor did: bare her fangs.

Now let’s get into the weirdest part of the song. Taylor builds up all these insults about Charli’s obsession with her to saying that it’s “actually romantic” and “It’s kind of making me wet” and admitting (right after she just got engaged?!?!?!?): “No man has ever loved me like you do.”

If I were her fiancee I’d be like – guys, is this a diss track about me? Just kidding, we all know he can’t read. Ah, ignorance is truly bliss.

But anyway. There’s a few ways to view the psychosexual descent of the Taylor song.

The most obvious is to imagine Taylor sitting in the studio, assistant no. 12 bringing her a perfectly chilled La Croix, assistant no. 4 chanting that her Botox DOES NOT LOOK BOTCHED, assistant no. 9 making sure the Google news alert is turned on for any spike in success for Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX, while Taylor wonders aloud, “How can I edge up this song?...I know! I’ll say Charli turns me on and makes me wet. That’ll also bump Sabrina off #1 for horny pop music, right?”

Others have written about this better than I can, but Taylor isn’t a sex symbol. I don’t really wanna hear about my Millennial English teacher from Tennessee getting wet.

Most importantly, it’s just simply unbelievable. Unlike “Sympathy is a Knife,” which came from a place of true honesty, vulnerability, Taylor’s “Actually Romantic” comes from a place of gimmick, mimicry, kitsch. Charli’s song is the masterful sublimation of terrifying feelings of inadequacy, existential limitations, anguish, the desire for the unattainable into a universal poem that’s also a banger. I suppose I can’t say I know the inner workings of Taylor’s sexuality, but the idea that she’s found some enlightened eroticism in a woman wishing the demise of her relationship, and feeling painfully insecure in her presence, seems like a trumped up pretense.

Charli’s song is superior poetry for the way it universalizes a particular experience. As per this Reddit thread, “is sympathy is a knife about taylor swift?” – people cannot tell exactly if it’s really about Taylor, or if it is, exactly which parts.

Like the work of many great poets, Charli’s song is relatable to the most oblivious of heterosexuals, and to the priviest of gays.

The point is – a great poem is particular and universal. You can read a sonnet by Sir Wyatt Thomas, Petrarch, or a poem by Lord Byron, and still enjoy it even without being an English major who knows it’s about Anne Boleyn or Mary Chaworth.

That being said, there is something to being turned on by a diss or cruelty. I have a few lesbian friends who actively define their type as “the kind of girl who would have bullied me for being gay in high school.” Chappell Roan admits to having a crush on Regina George in “Naked in Manhattan.” Taylor had a chance to titillate us, and instead she wrote a tacky simulation to a 2010s-era strum.

I’m gonna stream Sympathy is a Knife a lot this weekend. Meet me in the bathroom if you’re bumping that.

Xoxo,

Femcel

CW: guns

This joke is both too obvious and too good so let’s get it out of the way right now: some lesbians in LA are taking “being strapped” to a whole other level.

When I used to think “she’s strapped,” I meant: there is a silicon phallus hanging from a nylon apparatus on her hips. But now, I might think the same thing people in (gasp!) Kansas and Alabama think: this bitch has a glock in her sock drawer.

Two years ago, I began dating a woman in her 50s. I was 23. It’s possible I lied a little about my age. What? I like dating older people and I also like hearing constantly about how I “look so young for 32.” I said 32 because I felt like it was less of a lie if I just genuinely flipped the numbers of my actual age. Oops! It was a clerical error. I mean, one I made verbally and fully sober and conscientiously and…

What? I was 23! I’m 25 now, which means I don’t lie about my age to older lovers anymore. Instead, my seduction skills are so good that I don’t need to. It’s kind of like how you need to lie on your resume to get your first job, but after that you always have your tongue on the clit, or foot in the door – sorry, whatever the saying is.

Anyway, I was hanging out at this woman’s house in Pasadena. She is one of these older, kind of wealthy career lesbians in LA. I know everyone is really jealous of me for locking into this world and finding these women. My only advice is just to get out of your house and Gen-Z/M*llennial social circle and find some hobbies that middle-aged gay women might be into, which apparently might include meet ups at the local range.

Like I said, I’m hanging out at this woman’s house, which she owns, I think outright(!), and we’re talking about how long she’s lived there, what it’s like, and all that. I ask if she ever feels spooky from living alone.

“I can’t even see the trailer for a horror film without needing to fall asleep with someone,” I say.

“Well you can always call me over to check under the bed for monsters for you,” she says, pinching my cheeks. We have a little banter like that because of the age gap. Yikes, if only she really knew.

“I have the security cameras, they’re all motion-detected so I get a notification if someone is inside the house and I have locks on all the doors, especially for my room.

I also have a gun,” she says.

I balk.

“Where is it?” I ask.

“Ah, the gun safety course said to never let children know the location of the weapon,” she says.

“I’m 32!” I shout, with enough conviction that I wonder, for the first time in my (actual) 23 years of being born and raised within 25 minutes of Hollywood, if I should become an actress. I’m really selling this whole “32-year-old” thing. I think if I try hard enough, I can remember 9/11, voting for Obama, having a MySpace…

“You’re a kid to me,” she says through her voice that sounds like a four-wheeler fucking the shit out of some very sun-baked gravel.

“Can I get a hint?”

“No.”

I grab a blueberry off the plate of fruit I had made for us. I smile and laugh lightly, and she laughs back. We wink in tandem at each other.

When she fucks me that night, it feels like a threat. I totally know it isn’t, but I’m kinda turned on by that sort of thing

(I’m sick and if you’re not a little sick, this blog isn’t for you).

I’m just like, wow I’m alone and vulnerable and naked in this older woman’s house AND she has a gun somewhere. There’s a thin line between cruelty and arousal. It’s the reason why a strap has two meanings, why there’s two things in her sock drawer that look oddly similar and why the word phallic – often applied to swords, batons, daggers – is so well-known but the word yonic is still underlined in fuzzy red by my word processor, so unrecognizable is the concept that something could bear a passing resemblance to a vulva in a powerful way.

Obviously I’m also turned on because rationally I know she won’t ever actually hold me at gunpoint, but as with all great gifts, it’s the thought that counts. I imagine myself as a captive, unable to leave, held hostage, and the only way I get to leave is to serve her sexually. I let her do whatever she wants to me. I am desperate, both to stay and to go. I lay down completely still and passively, like a captive who has given in to her fate.

She asks if I want more fingers and I say I do and she asks how many. I beg for two more. I feel fully loaded. I ride her three fingers with hip gyrations that could set off a trigger. She tugs and tugs on the inside of my clitoris’s lever.

Heat builds, that tender sensation spreads from central to outward, to my calves and stomach. She starts licking my lower torso; I swirl my fingers through her hair like leaves swept around in the November wind. Her curly black hair ensconces my fingers like a soft towel wrapped around my shoulders after swimming at the beach; my middle and pointer already salty and brine-y like the nearby Pacific.

Now she is staring down the barrel between my legs; the hole wants a silver bullet to rip through it, again and again. She aims perfectly and directs the projectile. The blows ricochet through my spine; I’m pushed back and thrown against the pillow. But then I wonder: is her tongue the bullet, or is it actually my clitoris? If you look at a bullet, tell me what it looks like…

There’s fires and misfires, a modern-day Western shoot out happening under her 100% cotton sheets. I grab her by the shoulders. The safety’s off and I wanna grind and feel my fingers inside her. I disarm her with a single stroke and press my thumb simultaneously in a light tap against her clit. I flick ever so lightly.

More recently, I was with yet another woman who owns a gun. She’s an attorney with her life together. She’s young, smart, and really really sweet. She also told me she has a gun for protection, and I’m like woah, maybe it’s more prevalent than I think. She says she doesn’t think her dog could actually protect her in the event of an intruder, she’s from Tennessee and so it’s more normalized, and having it is more of a psychological thing anyway. Oh, it’s definitely psychological, I think.

I ask her where it is, and like the last one, she won’t tell me! I wonder – is this the litmus test of a serious relationship? Not exclusivity or “I love you,” but getting to know where the gun is? I tell her I’ll search for it and find it. She says “good luck” and that if I do find it, she’ll have to punish me. I’m like hey, don’t threaten me with a good time. So I go searching but then stop.

I realize I’m actually really scared to find this gun. Maybe it’s the emotional commitment I feel it would imbue; knowing where her gun is feels so intimate, even that phrase feels like a euphemism for some deep intimacy. I don’t want someone to know where my gun is!

(I don’t actually have one, now I am just running free with this new euphemism).

I keep imagining myself pulling stuff out of a drawer and then being face-to-face with a glock. It’s way too fucking scary, like searching for a dead body or a repressed memory. I don’t want to look at that. I sit down in the kitchen and tell her I’m going to read instead.

Last month I was going out with another woman, but now I am 25 and she is 37. She’s honestly kind of boring, like almost in an offensive stereotype kind of way.

She’s an accountant and her house looks like if Buzzfeed developed an AI and was instructed to decorate a home for a “30-something, well-adjusted lesbian.” It’s pristine, almost too pristine. There’s L Word TV posters and framed Melissa Etheridge album covers and Tegan and Sara concert merch-decor. Everything she owns is from some baby-adult brand that sells everything at a 200% mark up because they hired a graphic designer who invented a font that screams “just two guys with a crazy idea for a new pillow company.”

Her two pitbulls add a needed flair to the monotony of her life, but she’s somehow managed to turn the canid eroticism of a lesbian with two pitbulls into a flaccid Millennial performance of “quirkiness” by naming the dogs Chewbarka and Bark Twain. She tells me that she calls them the “Bark Brothers” and I already start mentally preparing to find out that she’s also a Disney adult and unironically calls herself a “yapper.”

Okay yeah and spoiler – she ALSO OWNS A GUN. I guess that makes sense because honestly I wouldn’t have the ability to say “Bark Twain, sic, Chewbarka sic! sic!” if an intruder was in my home. I’d literally need to bust out the pistol to save face from the fact that I named my dogs puns. This is animal abuse. I thought California doesn’t give guns to the mentally incompetent/ill, and so I don’t care that she can file a corporate tax return, she named her dog CHEW FUCKING BARKA. You shouldn’t even be allowed to own a dog, let alone A FUCKING REVOLVER.

“Do you own a gun now?” I had asked her, in the middle of yet another conversation about what it’s like to live alone. She’s from Missouri, and we had spoken about how growing up, her and her family would open carry, and she’d often practice shooting with her aunt and uncle in the acres surrounding their tract home.

“What? No! I don’t have a gun.”

“I mean it’s fine if you do.”

“Okay, fine, yes I have one.”

“What?!” I say, grinning wide.

While we fuck, I ask her to keep reminding me that she has a gun. At first she kind of laughs and thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. I think she’s actually embarrassed she told me, or embarrassed to have one but I feel the way about her admission the way I feel about going to the Eiffel Tower in Paris: we’re already here, so fuck it, may as well.

“Tell me it’s in the house right now,” I ask.

“My gun is somewhere inside the house, yes,” she says as I kiss her neck, on top of her. I lick her ear and whisper-ask if she would use it.

“If someone was being really bad, then yes,” she answers. She pushes me off her and onto my back. “I know exactly where it is right now and you don’t.”

I would like to end by saying that I am ultimately staunchly anti-gun politically. Personally, I can understand why a woman living alone would want one. I can understand why a marginalized person would want one. I do also tend to think that the fewer guns there are, the less we need them, and so then there are fewer and fewer guns, and so we all need them less and less, and we should start that process soon.

Just not with these women, please, cause erotically I really do like it.

xoxo,

Femcel

PS just wanna add that a recent Insta photo collection of Ethel Cain holding her various guns made me pull the trigger (haha) on this post. But anyway she really is hot and the photos are hot if you’re into that, the combination of violence and hotness:

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=39d1a7f4746557b0&sxsrf=AE3TifNIwDOF-zb5xl1AqPpTDBkxwDbbyw:1757119221622&udm=2&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeiAkWG4OlBE2zyCTMjPbGmMU8EWskMk2JSE__efdUJ3x-dd8PyEzi5Y9BtPQcYyUv-qqGBKcZRAt6t3qPZ3-iSZ6GtBRrUomyC2rUgS4TDygQfIaiWCtBi0gw2eDDygE9ZsO235rUXAUX4XMOSF0AZ0oNb07blcuzshZNivp14ZK7ZppxA&q=ethel+cain+guns&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiMsqGY88KPAxVaJ0QIHXlXKtgQtKgLegQIGxAB&biw=1405&bih=728&dpr=2

“When you eventually get married and have kids, I can give you all my silverware and bedding.”

“If you get married, we can help you move in together.”

These are common promises I hear from the women – particularly my mother and grandmothers – in my family. Their generosity does not go unrecognized. Plenty of people do not have families who want to help – or can help – with expenses at all, children/marriage or not.

However, until I find a spouse and pop out a baby, that tap is running awfully dry.

I’ve joked before about finding a fake husband and having a sham wedding just to get the money. He can get 10% for his services.

I’m 25. I start my PhD in three weeks, for which I’ll move into my first ever adult apartment. I had to scrounge together $2,176 to pay for the first month’s rent and security deposit, $1,088 each.

I also have to buy a mattress, a bed frame, silverware, cookware, a nightstand, a chair, a desk, a bookcase, a rug, and so on and so forth. I believe I can do all of that on my own for under $1,100, but a part of me wonders – should I have to?

If I were, in the words of my family, “finally getting married” right now, I’d be rolling in it.

And then it hit me: quite literally, if I were even just getting married in a few months, I would be getting silverware, cookware, checks, gift cards, and other practical items at a bridal shower. All for the remarkably unremarkable task of finding a husband.

But because I am pregnant with a burgeoning dissertation and not a baby, because I plan to tie the knot with my university’s academic requirements and not someone named Trevor, I am on my own.

Women get not only celebrated, but actual cold hard cash and expensive, necessary items all the time for getting married and having kids. But what about getting a doctorate? What about starting a medical residency? What about passing the bar and beginning work as a public defender? What about being pregnant with a deal for a book that comes out in October?

Not to mention the fact that after medical school or law school, a person is now saddled with unbelievable amounts of debt and a low salary; so doesn’t it make more sense to give them a free air fryer than the person who’s now getting to split everything – from rent to groceries – with another person?

I don’t say this to denigrate the value and joy of marriage and parenthood – but rather to recognize something impressively practical and important about bridal and baby showers; these gift-giving and money-pooling events occur at a time in a woman’s life when she really needs these items. Moving out and in with someone is expensive. Especially if we are operating under the assumption that the woman has heretofore been living under her parent’s roof and is now moving out for the first time – to live with her husband – and therefore has no blenders or knives of her own, the move will be particularly expensive.

Given that most women today live independently for several years in between their father’s roof and their husband’s roof, the bridal shower seems a little silly, at least the gift-giving aspect of it.

Gifts and money at a baby shower make a lot more sense to me than gifts and money at a bridal shower. The latter is a reward for the unimpressive task of finding a husband, whereas the former is a collective pooling of resources to support the genuinely costly task of raising new members of society. But still, it is possible that a woman might be living on her own for the first time when moving in with her husband, and it is also nice to celebrate a milestone (I hesitate to use the word “achievement” in reference to marriage).

All that to say – I really love this tradition of supporting people, pooling resources, and contributing gifts when they are about to undergo a big life change, particularly one which is significant for the person and, not to mention, expensive.

My issue is: why does this only happen when a woman legally attaches herself to a man or pops out a baby with said man? (I of course recognize that there are lesbian bridal showers and baby showers and that’s terrific but you get my point – don’t be pedantic).

Women get showers of gifts and money and familial support for marriage and pregnancy, but not for other things which might equally warrant the celebration of a costly, weighty milestone.

A family member had initially offered to help me buy the mattress, but then rescinded the offer when she found some of my writing on lesbian sex online. How ironic that my punishment for writing about mattress activities has landed me, potentially, sleeping on a cold concrete floor!

So my question remains: should I have a doctoral shower? What if I promise not to have a bridal shower for when I get married, or at least a gift-free one? I’d still have the blenders and knives and mugs from my doctoral shower!

Let me know what you think, and if you would like to support me in my move, feel free to pre-order a copy of my book.

Pre-order my book femcel erotica here; 20% of proceeds go to immigrant justice organizations

pre-order

** Part 2 **

***

Jo comes over again. We take turns fingering each other for hours. Our bodies fit perfectly together. I love their strong build, their tough body. I can tell they have natural muscle tone, and that it’s been built up for years on the job as a bartender.

They brought their toy and we put it in between us as we grind against each other. At its best, lesbian sex is just Jiu Jitsu with a vibrator.

They let me go down on them, a rarity. They feel fantastic. I’m intoxicated by their smell and the brush of their pubic hair against my cheeks. Going down on someone always feels either a little devotional or degrading to me. I think of myself as being low, down, literally “going down” on this person, being beneath them, in their pussy and their sweat and taking the grinding motion to my face, suffocating.

I’m playing that stuff in my head, and before I know it I’m so turned on that I’m touching myself, rubbing my clit against the middle finger pressed against my mattress.

I love seeing this strong, confident person writhe around and moan through a series of gasps and high-pitched sighs. That’s right, you’re under me now, and you like being there.

In the morning, we fuck again. I notice scratch and bite marks on their back, and they clarify that I’m “not that strong,” they just scar easily. So I mark them, etching “Femcel” into their back, red lines which last another few hours.

***

Jo comes over this week, again late at night. They finished another 12-hour shift at the bar they work at. I ordered their favorite fast food, and we feast on my floor, over a tablecloth of a shower towel, with vodka we pour into frozen lemonade slushies.

I have never actually truly scissored – although I am generally experienced in the fine art of dry-humping. I tell Jo I want to try it. They’re game. I say that we should start in the traditional position – essentially facing each other in a knees-up, criss-cross, seated position. They said that’s not the traditional pose.

“I’m supposed to be on top with my pubic bone pressed against yours and then I put one leg under yours and grind. That’s the typical pose.”

I say that makes no sense. We playfully argue about sapphic yoga positions.

I finally push them onto my floor, then pull up their chest by yanking on the front of their shirt. I hold onto them by the straps of their tank top. I slam my crotch against theirs, and now we’re in the position I mentioned. They laugh and pull me in toward them. Through my cotton shorts and their boxers, we start grinding. We pull in tighter to a makeout, and I remember what a fantastic kisser Jo is. My tongue dances on the floor of theirs, and then they lick the back of my teeth, tickling the roof of my mouth.

Meanwhile, I can feel a Florida day in August building between us. Below our waists, our wetness pours like a tropical rain, warms like muggy Manhattan in autumn. The heat fills the room. Condensation or steam or both coats our clothes. The humid smell of our bodies infiltrates my nose like a huff of a very strong drug. Their tongue is still dancing on mine. Jo’s thighs are pulsating as they push, grind, and buck against my clit.

Suddenly, they push themselves on top of me. They use their hands pressed against my upper chest to hold me down, before sliding each palm over my biceps to my wrists. Pinned down, I can feel them get into the position they had argued was the true “classic” scissoring position.

They use one of their legs to stimulate my pelvic region, while their legs, split like the spears of a scissor, embrace one of my thighs, as they furiously grind on it, like a set of shears tearing through wrapping paper.

We both reach down at the same time to rip off our clothes. I cannot take my eyes off them as they roll their shirt off their muscular shoulders, then take their shorts off, one leg at a time, so they keep me under them. We get back to their intended position. The boiling surfaces of our skin sizzle against one another. It’s June in LA, and it’s hotter in the valley, and it’s even hotter on my carpet floor.

Together, we’re fevered. Only the lukewarm chill of their saliva, which they leave pools of as they now lick the sides of my neck and breasts, relieves the fierce burn. I pull them up, toward me, from the back of their hair, and hold them in place, their face right above mine.

I yank them to the side so I can take a deep inhale of the sweat on the side of their neck, before I turn them over and start licking their whole body up and down. I lick their armpits. The hair is slick and rough, a rainforest whose flowers emit pheromones and mirth. I suck and bite on their nipples. Mild bumps on their areolas, the rising and falling tide of their stomach, the riptide of their thighs writhing beneath me.

I work my way down to their feet, which I lick on the soles and rub on the toes. I work my way up their body, then approach to sit on their face. Their tongue is out of their mouth before I’m even all the way down. My clit meets their tongue, like a bead of honey’s slow fall onto the aqueous surface of tea. More and more collects on the plate of their mouth, a pool of amber melting. I rub against their upper lip bone.

They fuck me with their tongue, the warm, soft yet strong head. Each jut rolls through my body, like the tongue is moving in my stomach, flickering tickles across my ribcage, before making swirls which erupt woozily through my throat and mouth. The line from their mouth to mine is one billow: hazy, groan-filled, electric. They suck incredibly hard on my clitoris and add to the suction by pulling me onto their face by my ass and thighs. It feels like the world’s largest mosquito has decided my blood tastes the best. You know how a mosquito bite hurts but there’s that moment where it actually feels electrifyingly good? Or like how when someone else scratches your bite, it lights up the whole leg? Like that.

I hop off, and then as safely as I can, slam my mouth onto their clit. I spread their legs apart, one hand on each inner thigh. I bury my face between them. A sensory comfort overcomes me, like putting on a well-worn favorite sweatshirt. The folds and ins and outs know my body, and mine theirs. Jo’s scent is now familiar too. Warm and hazy. If an afternoon nap in the sun had a scent, if the patter of autumn’s first rain could fill my nostrils.

***

After all this back to back fucking, my room garners a distinct smell: pussy. I know some people recoil here, but I don’t really understand why. I always love when I’m having so much sex in my room, when the scent of ejaculate and juice and hormones and sweat ferments. Because I know the scent that’s in my room, it’s fish.

It takes me back to Sicily. I stayed in Catania for a week last summer, and one day went to the fish market to pick something up for lunch.

I felt, at first, maybe a little disgusted by the smell and sight. That’s what I was taught to do anyway; to be politely grossed out by a fish market. To pinch my nose, squint my eyes, quickly ask in broken Italian for anchovies, then dash off.

But the line between disgust and arousal is like the fin of a fish – thin, skinnable. My revulsion snapped, and what overcame me was instead a complete intoxication with the scent, sensation, sight of the fish market. I wouldn’t say I was necessarily sexually turned on by La Pescheria, but aroused in a certain sensory way. Feeling overwhelmed by sensation is like a drug, you need to ride the wave rather than push it away. I let myself get high, as I walked around the fish market in a trance. The scent became addicting, and my inhales became deeper and more forceful. The shiny scales and wet tails transfixed my eyes. The strong women chopping slab after slab of swordfish and tuna, the tables beneath them quaking like the earth, the water in their buckets sloshing like the world before the flood in Noah’s Ark.

The glistening skin of the fish, the brine-y smell of the ocean, salt, seafoam, the feeling that at any moment the spray of a wave could kiss my face, and I understood then, with perfect clarity, why women are fish. Moreover, I understand why now straight men say “ew, it smells like fish,” – because they’re not able to appreciate the brine. The fact that this is 70 percent of the Earth. This is the scent of something real, that cannot be manufactured. It’s the smell of sex. Here are some photos I took in Catania.

***

subscribe for parts 3-4 and my PhD diaries

Is this statement about:

1. War

2. A car accident

3. Childbirth

4. A PhD in Cultural Anthropology

Based on my recent conversations, D would actually be the correct answer. I keep hearing from people in their PhD or those who have completed one that it was “the worst experience” of their life, that it was harder than any other job, that it was unbelievably stressful and non-stop anxiety for 4-6 years, and so on and so forth.

I am confused. Maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on because I have not started my PhD. But as far as my English PhD goes, I will be: fully funded, in a union which guarantees a salary increase every year for 5 years among other benefits which should be federally legally mandatory without a union but alas, receiving guaranteed subsidized housing, as well as affordable health insurance1.

Not only that, I get all of this money and security for the task of attending enriching classes, getting to read and write all day, teaching young scholars, getting to think and converse with my super cool advisor - ABOUT LITERATURE (!), and generally be in a community of fellow thinkers, writers, and readers.

My brain will grow, and I will get to spend the remaining 5 years of my 20s pursuing something that feels meaningful and worthwhile, all the while with a balanced work schedule and freedom over my time outside of TA hours.

I say all of this to current/past PhD students and they hit me with a line like this:

“No, you cannot possibly fathom how awful it is, there are TOXIC CO-WORKERS and CONSTANT TIGHT DEADLINES!”

Bitch, what the fuck did you do before the PhD? Were you a monk? A yoga instructor in Thailand?

Like, yeah, I have had a job before. I have worked in, almost exclusively, toxic work environments. Is there some other kind I should know about?

I have had boomer men mansplain things to me you could not imagine an adult would ever think of explaining to another adult. I have been the recipient of gossiping and shit-talking I should not have been the recipient of. I have wanted to tell someone something or speak up about something but not do so out of fear of being accused of “going over ABC’s head,” even though ABC is an idiot not worthy of even having a head, let alone one being used to manage others.

My first ever job was working the hostess stand at a bougie restaurant in LA with a bunch of aspiring models and actresses, where I was once brutally screamed at by a coked-up chef for not putting a note about a celebrity who had arrived in the right area of the kitchen. I KNOW A TOXIC WORK ENVIRONMENT!

AND TRUST ME, BEING UNDER PRESSURE TO WRITE MY THOUGHTS ON EVE SEDGWICK BY THURSDAY AT 11:59 PM IS A LOT BETTER THAN BEING ON MY FEET FOR NINE HOURS WHILE TRYING TO KEEP MY MANAGER FROM REALIZING THE 6”1 BLONDE NEXT TO ME DID COKE WITH THE LINE COOKS AND THEN WITH A GROUP OF FINANCE BROS WHO GOT A PATIO TABLE FROM HER WITHOUT A RESERVATION, IN JULY!

My biggest fear is becoming one of these condescending, belittling, holier-than-thou graduate students who talk about GETTING PAID, HEALTH INSURANCE, AND SUBSIDIZED HOUSING for five years to GO TO CLASS AND DISCUSS AND READ AND WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT as if it is SURVIVING DISPLACEMENT or FIGHTING ON THE FRONTLINES WITHOUT ARMOR.

I hear a lot about how the classmates are often the worst. Pedantic, condescending, superior, snobby. I am not confrontational enough to say this, but oftentimes the person complaining to me about these traits…HONEY, THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! You are condescending and pedantic. In fact, it is some of the most anti-PhD who most typify being oblivious, rude, supercilious, and arrogant.

Like, maybe if you all decided to embrace some gratitude and stop talking about getting your PhD like it’s some herculean task of torturous physical labor you would all be happier and collectively create a less “traumatizing environment.”

I recently FaceTimed with my roommate, who is getting a PhD in History. Don’t get me wrong, she is super cool and I am excited mostly to live with her. But she’s been in her program for a year and already talks about getting her PhD and grad school as if she's being drafted. I would like to let everyone getting a PhD know that no one is forcing you to do this.

But anyway, she made various complaints about small grievances the union has, issues with the History faculty, and so on. She corrected everything I said, a constant barrage of “well, actually…” and usually found some unserious way of putting down my excitement for the program. I finally said something along the lines of, “Yeah, but how many jobs even allow for a union? Or good health insurance? Or the ability to work on something you really care about?”

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Like no offense, but a lot of the people I meet doing a PhD are too maladjusted for any normal job. Myself included. We all should be really grateful that this academic extension of adolescence/undergrad is available. And I say this as someone who is mostly pro-academia, very pro-union, and pro-PhD. But let’s be real – in contrast to the shit hole wasteland of the job market right now, getting a secure paycheck every month, alongside health insurance and housing, all for the small task of doing research you care about, is heavenly.

It is possible that so many people find the PhD difficult because they simply do not like reading/writing enough to do a Humanities PhD. I was in a friend group in undergrad that took advantage of the many scholarships and fellowships offered for undergraduate research at our college.

I was one of two who came out unscathed. Everyone else began parroting the same weirdly self-aggrandizing, self-mythologizing, heavily pessimistic attitude about their academic research. “Omg, that was the worst thing ever, I’m never doing that again, I am so glad I did that so I realized I do not want to go to graduate school.”

Maybe this just goes to show the skill diversity of human beings, but most of these friends took bullshit 9-5 email jobs that would actually spiritually traumatize me. Not only am I incapable of doing meaningless work, but I am even more incapable of maintaining any facade that it is meaningful or matters. This spiritual pain is described and analyzed in Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Maybe it’s just that I genuinely enjoy reading and writing, or that I am very good at it. I am not good at a lot of things, but it is very easy for me to look at a blank document, and like an alchemist, turn it into a 5-10 page paper with a defensible thesis, well-cited sources, nuanced analysis, and a clear worldview in about two hours. I did a lot of research in undergrad with people who burned out from it, people who got on the PhD track and then hopped off. They said it was too taxing, too demanding, too hard – and then took 9-5 jobs that I would get fired from on week one.

So anyway, to counteract all the bad vibes from all these loser debbie downer wankers (I’m not British, I feel like I need to clarify that), here is a list of things I am doing in advance of my PhD, for which I am very excited!

1. Starting a PhD diaries series! I will make longer posts on the subjects below too ~~

2. Maybe having a doctoral shower with a registry.

3. Giving myself a pre-PhD summer syllabus!

4. Just generally being excited and grateful that I got into a fully-funded Humanities PhD program. I usually do a gratitude list at the beginning or end of my day, and I think this accomplishment has come up every single day for the last few months. It almost doesn’t feel real, so I need to keep reminding myself and pinching myself.

5. Looking up classes in all the other departments, graduate and undergraduate, to see generally what’s offered and if there’s anything I might want to take in future semesters or audit this semester.

6. Reading books by the professors in my first-semester classes. I am taking a class in the European Studies department with a professor who has written on French modernism and German violence, and a class in the English department on archival research with a professor who wrote about an early Chilean-American author whose life documents and journals provide for a rich archive.

7. Post more about my research, what I wrote about in my application, and what I am thinking and learning about in my classes <3

Looking forward to September!

xoxo,

femcel

So today, in 2025, I’m updating the question: “Can a queer woman have sex like a gay man?”

This is to say: instantaneous, casual, purely physical sex with the hope and expectation of nothing more than an orgasm and the potential brush with antibiotic resistant gonorrhea.

Unlike Bradshaw, I did not start my quest at swanky nightclubs in the West Village. I live in LA, and besides, I’ve found that TikTok is the ultimate digital play place for my generation. Some say The Internet is a city unto itself; if that is the case, then Grindr is where all the gay boys reside, and TikTok is the lesbian neighborhood.

***

I actually used Grindr 3 years ago, when I was 22, and my sex drive was at yet another peak. Preparing for a stand-up show, I asked my gay friend Fernando*, “Should I say I have the sex drive of an adult male gorilla or a teenage boy? Which is punchier?” I have since gone with the gorilla line. Right after I asked, Fernando recommended I go on Grindr. He was partly serious, partly joking, and I think partly sick of hearing me complain about how I could never find sexual partners.

At the time, I kept encountering a really twisted strain of straight men, those who wanted a relationship, and a really common variety of queer women, those who were too nervous to have sex before the third date or crying together, whichever came first. I found myself, a libidinous bisexual with dismissive avoidant attachment and no impulse control, caught between two incompatible worlds.

“I just want to find someone hot, banter for like 15 minutes to get the vibe going and make sure they’re a little normal and also a little abnormal, and then have a really nasty hook up,” I vented.

“You belong on Grindr,” Fernando deadpanned, not taking his eyes off his phone, his gaze fixated on the Sniffies homepage.

And so I went. Yes, I was a cis woman on Grindr, but I was on there to peg some twinks, or maybe some twunks. I don’t know. I was really just in search of hole, into which I wanted to insert the eight inches of medical grade silicone collecting dust in my sock drawer.

I created an account with the name “Peggy” and a photo of myself flexing my biceps, revealing my jungle of armpit hair, and showing off the uninfectious phallus hanging from my torso.

My app blew the fuck up. You know when you’re walking outside in the summer and you’re looking at Google Maps for directions, on a speaker call with a friend, then take a photo and suddenly your phone’s internal temperature is threatening to leave third degree burns on your hand? Yeah, my phone got hot like that from all the Grindr notifications.

“Please, im bisexual and its my dream to be pegged by a woman”

“are you into crossdressers too?”

“ive never been pegged before but i really want to try it”

“where can we meet? i love being pegged but so hard to find. do u like sissies?”

And so it went. I pegged a handful guys, two of whom wore some sort of schoolgirl outfit. I had to stop because some of them got sooo clingy and desperate. You might think women are crazy, but you don’t know batshit until you encounter a guy with a forced feminization fetish. If they find a woman who knows how to lay pipe, they go feral.

One of them even asked if we could date for real. So I couldn’t even get Grindr sex on Grindr. Great.

Still, I got a lot of it out of my system, on Grindr and then on the kink app Feeld and sometimes through the random luck I’d find meeting queer women through book clubs or lesbian parties in LA. I then moved abroad on a fellowship.

I moved back last year, and found myself once again craving a Grindr-style hook up but instead encountering people who said shit like, “Can we not just have crazy sex, can we also have loving sex?” What is the fucking point of being alive and gay if we’re just gonna have missionary while I gently push your hair behind your ears while you tell me how pretty I am?

Here is where the shame parade of politically correct NPCs is going to attack me: being queer is not about casual, filthy sex, it’s not about risky romantic behavior, it’s not about STI scares and sex toys and body counts in the realm of this country’s national debt. Well, what if it is for me, at least partially? In addition, of course, to all the important political and cultural stuff?

What if I am a stereotypical greedy bisexual? What if my precocious erotic self-awareness and anthropoid sex drive is a key part of who I am? Would it make you feel better to know that I also Read Queer Theory and Volunteer In My Community and Am A Part Of Three Queer Book Clubs?

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***

So, can a queer woman have sex like a gay man?

The quest to answering this question in earnest, all began with a TikTok video I posted earlier this year. I put out my generation’s version of a personal ad in the paper.

I stated: “If I don’t get laid this week, I’m gonna do something. This-is-not-a-threat-it’s-a-threat. KTLA5, I’m warning you, get your breaking news journalists ready…nothing is breaking yet, but we’re in the pre-break stage.”

I was extra horny because an older woman had just rejected me for “being too young,” after we gave each other topless massages for an hour and she bought me dinner.

Would a gay guy do that? Some rich white 75-year-old in Palm Springs will fuck a twink on his prom night and no one bats an eye, but when a 25-year-old like myself wants to sleep with a 62-year-old woman, it’s a no.

At the end of the video, I made my final plea for the sapphics of LA County to “save the city” and blow up my phone. And so they did. And so it was.

I got 50 DMs, but in true lesbian fashion, half of them weren’t even in LA. It’s a lesbian stereotype to have a long-distance girlfriend, or to frequently drive several hours to meet someone. I am not doing that.

Like I said — Grindr sex. I want immediacy, instantaneousness, ease, convenience.

But of the 50 DMs, about ten were normal and nearby enough to go out with, and I was able to hook up with four of them.

The first was Elena, a computer programmer who told me she was moving soon and “wanted to go out with a bang.” We met up at a bar in Silver Lake.

Since we met from a video where I said I need to get laid, the conversation immediately went there. There’s a cool, almost calm certainty to the fact that we’re going to hook up.

Her roommates suck, she says, and I don’t want to drive back to the valley before 8 PM. I look at the bathroom like I’m challenging an opponent to a game of chess. She moves her bishop toward my queen, and gets up from the booth and slowly paces toward the restroom. I scramble behind.

There are two genderless, single user bathrooms. We dash into one and slam it behind us like petulant teenagers. Is this why Republicans are scared of all gender restrooms?

She goes in right ahead of me, so she’s also the first one slammed up against the wall. I let one hand slowly slide against the cool white tile while the other perambulates from her collar bone down to her ribcage.

Elena is a phenomenal kisser. She has a strong jaw, a stronger tongue, persuasive lips. She’s fucking my mouth with her mouth and our clothes are still on. I imagine our tongues as two human bodies, the curvatures of their wet, dark pink bodies dancing under the bathroom ballroom lights.

Our fucking feels functional but in a good way, like the roar of a car’s ignition after getting the dead battery fixed. “It’s working!” I want to shout; I lean against the sink’s cabinet for support while I get down on my knees; I fuck her with two fingers while holding her clit in between my lips like a straw I want to suck on until it makes that hissing sound.

We hook up one more time, on a day when her two roommates are gone. She moves a week later and I am not beside her in the U-Haul she drives to Oregon.

***

Four days later, I have a first date with a woman who I’ve already sexted twice and exchanged nudes with. I have never done this with a woman, at least not with one I haven’t met up with yet.

I wrote more in-depth about our first hook up here, but essentially we bring a blanket to watch Babygirl so we can make out and feel each other up during the movie. Over the clothes — in case any feds are reading this.

We’re then cockblocked by failed attempts at finding a place to fuck in her Subaru (of course). There’s a cop car in one parking lot and a packed children’s park adjacent to the other (at 9:30 PM!). Leave it to pigs and breeders to get in the way of tribadism. We barrel down the highway to Long Beach, where a dark, quiet street presents itself to us like a free hotel room. We start making out furiously in the passenger seat. Heyyyyy Chappel Roan.

The sex is so good that we meet again two days later, then another time a day later, and a fourth time in the same week two days after that. Each time the sex gets better and better, my domination of her becoming more precise and her ability to bring me not only to my knees but to my back, my stomach, on my side, stretched straight like a dog that just woke up from a nap, becoming more intense, more instant.

But something bad is happening. After the second time we sleep together, she tells me that her friends really liked me (we partied with them all night after banging in her car). She then texts me that she’s “having a hard time keeping her feelings in check, when normally I can.” I text back “That’s sweet :)” and hope she takes the hint.

The issue is, she is perfect for Grindr sex, but she seems to not be aware of that. I really wanna just keep doing what we’ve been doing: meet up, fuck, maybe eat and smoke, then cuddle and then maybe fuck again.

She wants to talk. And talk and talk and talk. Every time I say something, she interrupts me four words into my sentence and then starts monolog-ing about some inane topic. I tune out.

I make sure to puncture her verbosity with a “Cool” “That’s amazing” “Wow, no way” every minute or so, because it seems like that’s all she wants. She never asks me questions about my life or even lets me finish my responses to her. I don’t really mind that our conversations are so lackluster and one-sided, because I figure we’re both just here for sex. Maybe she’s just talking to be polite even though it’s totally unnecessary and nonsensical, like a dental hygienist.

During our 4th and last hook up, after we’ve both came and I am excited to just give each other back scratches and play Adrianne Lenker, she goes on yet another monologue. This time, she wants to give me a university lecture-length talk on the entire lore of Dance Moms.

On minute five, I literally fall asleep. I only wake up because she takes a pause from talking, and the silence alerts me to wake the fuck up and hit her with a “No way, that’s crazy” so she feels listened to, I guess.

Look — it’s not that I am against listening to others. I am a great listener. I ask a lot of questions about others in conversations. I remember details. I just simply do not care about anything this person has to say. She is really boring (okay, she is really boring to me) and I’m pretty sure has not read a book since high school.

Anyway, a little later she offers to give me a massage. I had given her one earlier. I’m happy for her to return the favor, especially since usually massages are a no-talking activity.

She slathers a thick layer of massage oil on my back. Then she moves a foot away from me on my bed and says, “Okay, I really just feel like you’re ignoring me. Like you just want me to come over here and do all this physical stuff but you don’t like, I don’t know, you’re just blowing me off after.”

So now I have to have this argument, and my back is sticky. I have to deal with someone confronting me, with a sticky back. I am fighting for my life sensorily when I say, finally, “I just feel like our conversations aren’t really so fulfilling, I thought maybe you felt the same way but felt like you had to keep it up to be polite for me, but you don’t!”

Apparently, that is not how she felt.

“Well,” I answer, “and this is fine, since I really don’t care because I like having sex with you, but I just feel like every single time I talk — you cut me off and then ramble about something unrelated and don’t really seem to care to listen to me. I mean sometimes I’m literally trying to ask another question about you, and even my question gets interrupted.”

She apologizes, explains she has ADD. She knows she has a bad interrupting habit but that I should “tell her to shut up, like her friends do.” Except I don’t want to do that. I really don’t care. I just wanna fuck and be fucked. I mean, maybe telling her to shut up would be hot, but not in the context of a real conversation. I wonder: can we use a ballgag, non-sexually?

We talk for another exhausting hour. She forces a pain-staking conversation where I can tell she’s literally biting her tongue to prevent herself from interrupting when I speak, then lets a pause hang in the air before speaking to make sure I was able to fully finish my sentence. She responds carefully in a way that is directly to what I have said, and asks questions. The lack of interruptions and curiosity about me doesn’t feel good when I know it’s forced.

We say “we’re all good” at the end of the hook up and that I’ll text her to meet up next week, but neither of us do. I don’t have feelings for her, not even social ones, and it would be unkind to keep stringing someone along who likes me.

Plus, I am so sorry, but I cannot bring home a woman from OC. I don’t know if my supremely LA but also weirdly homophobic family would be more upset about the girlfriend, or about the girlfriend being from OC.

“Don’t add insult to injury,” my mom would probably say.

Though we don’t develop into a consistent, regular hook up, we do the gay thing where we have an incredibly intense, transformative but very short time together. A quick, hot thing you learn something from. That’s a good affair.

***

Last but not least, I have a date with a very sexy woman from LA this time. She is so hot that I offer to go all out.

“Let me pick you up and take you out,” I offer. She seems woo’d just at the offer.

As I mentioned before, my video stated that my only requirement for my partners is that they be above 5”4. I’m 5”8 and I simply can’t be with someone who comes up to my shoulder. A woman is allowed to have a preference.

Anyway, a minute before pulling up to her apartment, she DMs me, “by the way, I’m 5”2 hope you don’t mind too much.”

I literally balk. I’m already here and things are moving too quickly for me to turn around. We get drinks, which I pay for, and then we actually do have sex. She is just hot and cool enough and coming onto me so strongly that I am able to briefly suppress my height issue. I even tell her, likely under the spell of my drink, “If you hadn’t told me you’re 5”2 I wouldn’t have known. You have 5”5 energy.”

We have sex but it’s mediocre. As it turns out, she might have 5”5 energy, but not the actual inches. As I move my hand down from her ribcage to her hip, there’s barely a blip of a torso. I finish while rubbing my clit, with her eerily small fingers inside me.

The original video hit a 700,000 view count and then stopped going up. In April, my DMs dried up like the grass outside in LA, yellowing and browning under the blooming sun.

***

A day later, a sapphic they/them slides into my DMs. Is this sapphic karma? Their username is “Glass Velvet” and bio reads “they-dyke bartender in DTLA.”

They’ve gone viral for posting videos like “most homophobic drink orders” and bangers like “gayest tequila brands.”

Unlike with Amara, things with the non-binary dyke go sexual a lot faster. Here is a transcription of our texts, after I sent them my post entitled “The Lost Art of Dry Humping.”

Velvet: hey femcel.
Your substack is making me laugh.
Also kinda turning me on at work.

Me: I love both of these.
My TikTok bio used to read -- girl who wants to make you laugh or cum or both. Excited to hear more of your thoughts.
U still free Thursday?

Velvet: Ya Thurs is cool. I work until 10 PM.
And wow just finished reading your piece.
Really inspiring.

Me: I aim to inspire. You'll have enough energy after 10?

Velvet: I have good endurance if aptly inspired.

Me: Oh is that so.
Well let's see how inspiring I am. Address is: [REDACTED]

Velvet: ahahaha
Got me smiling all mischievous.

Me: ;) smile all week

[3 days later]

Velvet: hey my shift just ended, I'll be over by 10:30.

Me: just performed stand-up with my ex's fiancee. i need to unwindddd.

To me, this is the platonic ideal of a hook up. They have read my erotica, so they know my vibe. We haven’t texted much aside from a little banter and the details of actually linking IRFL (in real fucking life). We’re meeting up at night, at my house; no pretense, no apple tartine, no sushi, no aperol. It’s as transparent as my phone screen what we’re going to do. This is Grindr sex.

Fortunately and unfortunately, they are even more devastatingly handsome than they are online, posing beside glass of bourbon (part of a video entitled “Drinks that taste like p*ssy”). I let them into my room, and I make mention of how drunk I am a few times. After performing alongside my ex’s fiance, I downed five white claws.

Velvet says they need to get on my level, so I make them a poor woman’s mimosa (Costco orange juice – courtesy of my grandma, who I live with – sparkling water, and vodka) and I make us a joint. I think we figured that if we’re both fucked up, the issues of consent cancel each other out. That’s gay math.

Even before we lock tongues, the sexual tension is immediate. I feel the spark the second I close the door on us at 10:35 PM, like the fire of the BIC they use to set aflame a sativa pre-roll.

The blaze that bursts from the flick of their thumb is a preview for later.

After a few puff puff passes, a couple stolen sips of their mimosa, our eyes quickly lock. Our foreheads inch toward each other and our lips lean in at a slightly slower pace, like the minute hand of a clock following the second. No words needed. I finally get to put my hands in their hair, something I’ve been craving since they got out of their car.

Our immediate dynamic is my ideal: a fight. I want to top someone who’s trying to top me. I live for the struggle. I pull the back of their hair while brushing my tongue against their neck. The moan that escapes them feels like the moment you submerge in a hot tub: warmth, perfection, perfect warmth all the way down.

They grab the excess cloth of my t-shirt and pull it back, into a sort of leash, in their fist, then yank me onto my bed with it. With my own t-shirt. Now I’m sitting on the bed facing them, they’re between my legs, but this lets me grab their waist and roughly, desperately kiss their torso.

“You can go harder,” they moan.

I bite every inch I can reach. Then I’m on top of them but we’re trib-fucking each other. I’m rubbing my upper thigh against them while I ride their thigh. We look like two wicks of wood about to start a fire. I lick the side of their neck and get an instant high from the smell of their sweat and pheromones. I know I have real physical chemistry when someone when, quite literally, the chemicals of their body appeal to mine.

They moan more and more as I suck and flick their ear lobe, then start cupping their breasts in my hand. The ribbed texture of their tank top chafes against my palm, and they grab my ass from under me. Instinctively, I pin that hand behind them and ask, “Did I give you permission to do that?”

With their other hand they grab the other side of my ass, delivering a hard pinch that makes my thighs tremble. In my attempt to pin that arm down too, they overpower me and throw me to the other side of the bed, then pin me down and continuously tease me by leaning in for a kiss then pulling back. The weight of their body bears down harder and harder.

The rest of the hook up is a continuous full-bodied arm wrestle for power, legs locking and bodies grinding for pleasure and for domination, a stream of fingers and tongues, the moans that become desperate as they reach a certain precipice. I blow out the candles and for once, oddly, I fall asleep easily. Normally with partners, I give into the 4 hours of terrible sleep I’ll get. But that night I sleep maybe better than I would have alone.

When we awake, Velvet is basking in the light of my room. The sun of the San Fernando Valley shines on their freckled skin, the curves of their chest and muscles of their stomach glow powerfully and I can’t believe I get to see it all. We talk to wake up.

“I live with my partner,” they say.

“Your what?”

“Sorry, I thought I mentioned, I’m married but we’re polyamorous.”

Today, it’s a rite of passage in big cities to hook up with someone, only to find out afterward that they’re poly-married. Being “open” used to be just for gay men, but now it’s for everyone, and unfortunately, largely for straggot hipsters in Silver Lake. But it’s also for hot lesbians like Velvet.

I don’t mind that they’re married, I just do think they need to tell people that before hooking up with them. Look, I’m a queer dating in a big city. I don’t go around assuming everyone I’m sleeping with is totally single. I usually have 2-3 people on my rotation at any given moment. But I do think that if you are seriously partnered, cohabitating, and legally fucking married, you need to let people know before going down on them. That is the law, according to femcel.

Meeting adjourned.

Part 2 here.

***

I’d hate to waste paper or ink on gender wars discourse. Fortunately, this is a digital forum, so the only thing wasted here might be a few brain cells if you keep reading.

But honestly, I do think my observations of today at synagogue provide for an interesting analysis into not only the contemporary male loneliness epidemic and inceldom, but more eternal questions: What makes a person charismatic and likable? What turns a conversation from small talk to flirtation? What gets some people all the suitors and friends in the world, and what leaves others alone and confused?

I live with my 91-year-old grandmother for free on the condition I drive her to and from synagogue most Saturday mornings per month.

I go to an Orthodox synagogue. So yes, whatever you are picturing is correct: bearded men in black hats, New York accents despite almost everyone being from LA, women in tent-like dresses and hair wraps and wigs. Children galore. Rugelach and cholent and slivovitz and a rabbi who is followed by his many sons and students like the wisest in a pack of crows.

Since turning 25 in April, the question of my status as unmarried has become less of a question and more of a crisis. In the Orthodox world, I am pretty old for being unmarried.

Everytime I leave my house, my grandma asks if the party I’m going to has “any fellows?” The octogenarian and up crowd at her weekly mahjong games asks about me – if I’m seeing anyone, if they can set me up with one of their grandsons/cousins/physical therapists/neighbors/family friends/orthopedists. If Jane Austen had written a Jewish sitcom, I would be the protagonist.

On this particular morning in shul (the real word for “synagogue”) I see mothers and grandmothers eyeing me like freshly-baked black and white cookies.

One woman approaches me as I sit and sip on a slushie meant for the kids (what? I’m unmarried and live at home, I still qualify for the kid drinks). The woman says she used to know me when I was “this little” and flattens her palm against the air beside her knees. She asks what I’m up to these days, to which I respond that I am starting a fully-funded PhD in English in the fall. She smiles and tells me that’s wonderful. Then she motions to a young man who had been hovering around my grandma and I for the last few minutes. He comes over to stand next to me.

“This is my son Yitzy,” the mom says. “I don’t know if you’ve met, but he might be studying abroad in the Fall. Yitzy, she’s in an English PhD program. Isn’t that interesting?”

Yitzy mutters a “Hi, nice to meet you” and I ask what he’s studying. Before I finish the sentence, the mom has flown off like a soldier who has just dropped a bomb that will go off in 60 seconds.

I am sitting outside in the shul’s courtyard beside my grandma. I have a minor strain in my back and so I don’t want to get up or twist in my chair. I sit facing forward, but this guy continues to talk to me standing right beside me.

To make eye contact, I would have to twist my body toward him, all the way to the side, and strain my neck and back. I do this once, slightly, then turn back to sitting straight to show that I will not be contorting myself. He stays standing right next to my seated frame.

I continue to look straight, and he continues to talk at the side of my head – when he could easily walk 1.5 steps to face me directly. I could say something along the lines of, “Hey, would you mind standing in front of me so I don’t have to strain to make eye contact with you, and so you’re not staring at the side of my head?”

But the second I do that kind of thought work for someone, it’s going to be like that forever; me constantly coming up with ways to consider myself and consider the other person, while they take on none of the mental-emotional load.

Yitzy is wearing a plaid, green and red polo shirt and dark brown cargo pants with dusty navy sneakers. He studies “chemical engineering”; he says it like he just won the presidential election. I ask what he’s up to this summer. An internship at ExxonMobil. I ask what he does there.

“Quality assurance,” he says. “Basically deciding who gets in trouble if there’s a mistake.”

I think this is supposed to be funny but I can barely force a laugh. I want to make a joke about how the whole company is a mistake, but I know it won’t land, so I just keep asking him questions: How do you assure quality in petrochemical production? Who oversees his work? Can he really do that as an intern? Does he want to work with oil after graduating?

He answers. He answers. He answers. He answers.

Finally, he catches onto the unbalanced rhythm of the conversation and asks me a question. But it feels like he’s doing it out of force. He gropes the air with his hand to come up with some curiosity. As he shoves his hands into his cargo pants pockets and stares at the side of my leg, I see his mom out the corner of my eye.

She is spying on us through the crowd of shulgoers attacking a fresh platter of herring. She looks on at us conversing with a smug grin, a self-assured smile. She nods to herself and walks away. It’s the look of a mother who feels she’s put training wheels on her son, maybe gotten him a date or a wife or at least conversational practice with a woman.

Once again, I ask: Jane Austen novel or Larry David-produced sitcom?

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Yitzy asks me what I’m focusing on in my PhD.

“I’m focused on the collapse of the Victorian Era and Gilded Age. What happens culturally and literarily during a collapse of a strict, stable structure? So I’m also looking at early-”

“The Great Gatsby, that’s Victorian right?” he asks.

“Not quite — it’s 1920s and American,” I say flatly, biting into a piece of rugelach that has somehow spoiled.

I really can’t imagine a worse way to try and impress an English PhD with faulty knowledge of one of the most well-read novels of all time. But the issue isn’t that he’s poorly-versed in fiction (okay, maybe a little). The issue is that he interrupted me; instead of listening and responding with a question out of genuine curiosity, or responding with a thought related to some book or history he’s read, he interrupted with some comment that was – I don’t know? – supposed to show off, or show his intelligence or fluency in the topic of my research.

We talk for a little longer, but we get nowhere. Then I see a different young man lock eyes with my grandma, smile a big smile and walk over to her as he shouts to my bubbe “Rivka!” My grandma looks confused, but the other young man persists.

“It’s Shlomo Bergman! Shabbat Shalom,” he smiles at my grandma Rivka. “How are you?”

My grandma’s eyes crinkle in a knowing smile.

“Oh,” she sings. “I know your older brothers. How are they doing?”

I realize this is Shlomo Bergman, who I know because he used to be best friends with my younger brother when we lived in this neighborhood. I turn and ask if he remembers me.

“Oh yeah of course! Jordan’s sister, of course. How are you?”

Shlomo’s energy is upbeat, positive, confident. I rise to speak to him, to meet him. I notice my grandma is getting up to go, so I tell her that I’ll meet her at the car in 10 minutes so I can stay and chat.

Maybe I’m projecting, but I sensed an immediate sort of letdown realization from Yitzy. First of all, when I stood up, it became clear that I’m 5”8 and Shlomo is about 5”10, while Yitzy is about 5”5. While talking to Shlomo, I had a much cheerier disposition. It seemed that Yitzy felt the better man won, because the better man was taller and in better shape and in better clothes. But that’s honestly not really it. There’s the tale of the princess and the pea, the hare and the tortoise, and now the tale of the incel and the chad. Yitzy says “Good Shabbos,” and walks off with his mom.

Maybe my brain is rotted by internetspeak, but at this moment I perceived a distinct socio-digital dichotomy playing out in real time. There was the “incel,” the nerdy guy who can’t get any girls and can’t understand why, and likely chalks it up to his height, his looks, his profession. Then there was the “chad,” who gets an instant response from women, due to his height, his looks, possibly his profession, and also his charm and charisma.

I don’t want to give real dignity to these overexaggerated stereotypes, which as we all know by now are rooted in misogyny. But because of their simultaneously problematic and popular nature, I think it’s important to contend with them and ultimately deconstruct them. I understand why, on the surface, many people have been drawn to these stereotypes. But I argue that what happened at synagogue today does say something about the falsehood and disservice of this dichotomy.

I ask Shlomo how he’s doing. He just passed his real estate broker exam and is doing commercial real estate.

“How is that? Dealing with landlords and business owners?” I ask.

“It’s good, it’s good,” he smiles. “I’m not that smart but you know everyday I just go to the office and I make enough calls and I eventually close.”

“I’m sure you’re smart,” I say. “I couldn’t do what you do.”

“What’s your brother up to?” Shlomo asks. “You remember how we were best friends when you lived here?”

“Yeah, it was really cute,” I say. “He’s a professional sports better and crypto arbitrage better now. He was also making money on card counting at black jack for awhile and NFTs, like he knew about NFTs before anyone else. In 2018 he came into the living room and told my mom and I that he just sold a video of a gorilla for $2,200. He also made money on that whole GameStop thing. Right now he makes more money than my parents combined even though he dropped out of college after a semester.”

“Wait, that’s crazy,” Shlomo says. “Tell me everything, how did he get into all this stuff? What does he do everyday?

And then I did tell him everything: how my brother won chess tournaments, how he started online investing, how he moved states depending on the best business laws for sports betting and weird finance stuff. Shlomo listened intently. He looked me in the eyes. He nodded.

“So can I ask, is your brother okay with being a degenerate?” he asks.

I laugh. The hardest I’ve ever laughed in shul, I think.

“That’s hilarious,” I reply. “That’s exactly what my parents tell him everyday: ‘Why didn’t you go to college? Why are you a degenerate?’ But he just tells them off because he makes more money than them without a degree.”

“Wow, so his brain just works like that?” Shlomo asks.

“Yeah, he’s always been really good at logic and math. He’s really smart. I mean I am too – kind of – but not in a way that makes money. Like I’m getting a PhD but it’s in English. I do SAT tutor in Math though.”

“No yeah, that’s really tough, SAT math,” he says. “So you’re both really smart.”

I laugh. “I guess, my math knowledge ends at the SAT though.”

He laughs, and the pace of our walking slows.

“Math was never my thing,” he said.

“Yeah, but you have really good people skills,” I said. “If it makes you feel better, my brother can’t sustain eye contact. If you talk to him it’s like this,” and then I mimic my brother in conversations: pacing around you, looking at the floor, walking away from you while speaking then walking back toward you. Shlomo laughs.

“No way,” he says. He reminisces about how he and my brother were inseparable during childhood, how we’d come over every Shabbat afternoon to Shlomo’s house and the two would “play in the backyard until sundown.” I recall my own memories from that time, asking if the dark green swing set and slide are still there.

He walks me to my grandma, who is waiting by the car. He wishes us both a Good Shabbos again and walks off with a wave goodbye.

On the drive home, in the type of good mood which can only be aroused by a spontaneously good conversation, I wondered: what was it that made me warm up to Shlomo so much more than Yitzy? Was it, as many incel forums would insist, the fact that Shlomo has five inches on Yitzy and two inches on me? Was it that he was dressed better? Was it that he had a better haircut, more conventional good looks?

I really don’t think so. At least for me; I have had two long-term relationships with men, both who were shorter than me, chubby, and not necessarily conventionally attractive. They won me over with their kindness, their listening skills, their sense of humor, confidence, and charisma. All of those qualities for which there is no numerical preference on Tinder.

Shlomo listened to me. He made me laugh. He laughed at my jokes. He complimented me, made me feel smart. He asked me questions, and then let me finish my sentences.

I worried then: was I just a frivolous woman who wanted a good-looking man to listen to her and nod, to make her laugh? Did I just want to be entertained? Was I one of these impractical, desultory women that Henry James and Jane Austen and Edith Wharton wrote about? Was I like Lily Bart from House of Mirth, aged 29 and unmarried and jobless, frequently losing good marital prospects due to her penchance for spontaneity, fun, joy, entertainment, and travel?

Maybe, but I think this is the most cynical and judgmental way to view my feelings toward Shlomo. You could say that I just want someone who will make me feel seen, who will laugh at my jokes and entertain me too, who will make me feel listened to, someone who is a good audience. But I think what I really want is someone with whom the conversation feels natural. Someone who, yes, listens to me and is a good audience, but someone who also says things which make sense to me, which make me feel like there’s been some true social intimacy exchanged. My conversation with Yitzy never got into that realm of the unknown. Every sentence he said to me was one he and others had said before (“I’m interning at…” “I study…” “I want to go into ___ field because…”) aside from maybe the one about The Great Gatsby being Victorian.

What Shlomo said to me, what I said to him, what we laughed and asked and talked about was truly new, truly in the moment, truly social and truly intimate. I suppose I’ll never really know if I liked Shlomo or if I just liked the way he made me feel. As with all things in love, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The secret to chemistry and having “something in common” with someone new isn’t sharing the same bank of information and experiences. If you’re a good conversationalist with social skills and a flirtatious manner, you can get along with just about anyone.

To be clear, I do not claim to possess these qualities, which is why you are reading this piece from the nom de plume of “femcel.” That being said, I am highly observant and neurotic; so I can say on good authority that I think the key difference between Yitzy and Shlomo are these traits.

It’s not that Yitzy is shorter or wearing a plaid polo or works in STEM instead of finance/business. It’s that he interrupted me. It’s that the conversation between us didn’t flow. It’s that his jokes and comments were pre-fabricated and random. It’s that he stood next to me instead of standing in front of me, so we never made eye contact. It’s that his mom introduced him. It’s that his energy felt canned and disinterested, like he was surveying an oil refinery instead of talking to a woman. It’s other little things I haven’t quite worked out.

But I do know this: Shlomo seemed genuinely interested in my life, he complimented me, he listened to what I had to say, he told me about his work and life in a way which felt natural, he made fresh jokes which landed and were highly relevant to the moment, he met me in the moment and not only that – he made me feel that there was even a moment to be met.

I’m not the first person to say this but I do think it is a point worth making again and again. It is really not that hard to woo a woman, or at least get a second date. Just don’t interrupt. Ask genuine questions from a place of real curiosity – if not about her, then about life. Shlomo asked me more about my brother than about me, but I got a real emotion from him. There was excitement and curiosity. You won’t always succeed. If I was less Jewish and more humorless, I probably wouldn’t have laughed at Shlomo’s joke about my brother being a degenerate. But it’s better to swing and miss, than tell pre-packaged jokes about your corporate quality assurance gig.

To be fair, appearance goes a long way. I do wonder: are men like Shlomo more charismatic internally because their external appearance has gained them friendlier and more sociable treatment? Or is it that because he has decided to put more effort into his appearance, he is met with better treatment? Either way, it would be ignorant to ignore his appearance as a factor. But so much of Shlomo’s appearance is accomplishable by Yitzy. Shlomo was wearing a stylish outfit; he approached my grandma and I first without the aid of a hovering mother; he smiled; he stood up and followed my pace and directional needs as I went to the parking lot. You can’t grow five inches, but you can choose not to wear sneakers to synagogue.

I used to wonder about this sort of thing in middle school a lot. I noticed social groups started forming along lines of facial symmetry, shiny hair, and epidermal clarity. Were the popular kids actually bonded by something deep and internal — or did their good looks create the charisma that made them magnetic?

Today, forget middle school. But remember its lessons. You can now choose to behave like the easily sociable, confident, charismatic people of the world. You can choose to stand in front of someone or walk beside them in a way which makes eye contact possible, which is considerate of their physical comfort and actual physical positioning. You can smile and wave and shake hands and ask questions and crack a real joke. You can develop wit. You can fake good looks with a nice outfit and good shoes. Even if you can’t, you can always listen to others and be a little self-deprecating.

Candace Bushnell recently wrote in New York Magazine, after almost four decades of sex and dating writing, this graf about first dates with men:

“Even if the stranger isn’t your cup of tea, you do your best. You make an effort. You smile. You attempt to find common threads to discuss. Or you do the journalist thing and let the subject talk. Luckily, most men love being ‘the subject,’ and they will talk, pretty much only about themselves, sometimes for the entire length of the dinner, and notoriously not ask you one question about you or your life. Because for a lot of men, you don’t really exist. This is a fact about them that probably hasn’t changed since the beginning of time.”

I will leave you all on that.

xoxo,

femcel

Then we wondered/realized, did people even have this feeling in the 60s? Could they really just: work 30-50 minutes straight with ten minute walk breaks here and there?

I decided to write a list of healthy things to do instead of going on social media, when you want to take a 5-10 minute break from your work task(s).

Also I KNOW THIS IS NOT MY USUAL CONTENT! SORRY! Something more on brand is coming out this week.

Additive/Healthy thing to do instead of social media when you get fidgety/distracted/bored every 10 minutes at work

1. Write letters to friends. Recently I realized I have the very fortunate problem of having too many friends who live in different states and countries. I can’t keep up with all of them via text, mostly because I hate texting; it’s just so draining and I also inevitably forget to respond to someone, or text them in the first place to check in. So I decided to start a letter exchange this year and it’s been AMAZING. Cannot recommend enough.

   I get to sit and enjoy reading a few (paper! handwritten!) pages from a friend in Idaho or Croatia or Argentina. And while I work, if I need a 10 minute break and want to do something with my hands, analog, tactile – I write out a page or two back. By the end of the day I’ll usually have two letters done, and putting them in the mailbox feels like a nice hit of dopamine as a reward for finishing the work day.

2. Write words you’re trying to learn in another language, over and over and over. Idk how pedagogically sound this is but idgaf, it’s worked for me and I half-speak four languages besides my semi-native english. I will write a word over and over again while saying it and connecting the meaning of the word in my head to the visual of the letters. When I need to recall the word, I can see and feel the shape of the letters and the sensation of writing them in my head. I experience the muscle memory, curves, and shape of the word. I like writing full sentences eventually, especially with words which are more context-dependent.

3. Work on something else. This is classic advice, but oftentimes I have like 5 google docs tabs open and 2 tabs of invoices open and 3 gmail accounts open and I’m slowly making my way through all of the tasks but in perforated 10 minute chunks. Is this bad? Like for my attention span? Idk. Ideally overtime I’ll be monogamous with my tabs, but for now I’m a tab whore (u can read that in the addison slay “im a dance whore” voice from her song “new york”). It would probably be best to work back and forth between just two things in 20-30 minute increments. So I will hypocritically recommend that to you.

4. Gratitude list! Easy to do, unless you’re an army wife in Arkansas, and will give your brain healthy dopamine and all that, which will help you keep working, feel better during and after work, etc.

5. Pace but on a ten minute timer – I’m adding the timer because I have a walking stim and I can walk for 1-3 hours daily if I don’t hold back. Honestly I think you’re supposed to walk for 10 mins every 50 mins of seated work anyway, so this isn’t even a low-attention-span-everyone-has-ADHD-now thing, this is just like a general health advisory…looking @ u in particular my fellow americans.

6. 10 minute work out – if you do a 10 minute butt workout, 10 minute ab routine, 10 minute arm workout – you’re doing a half hour workout everyday! Physical activity helps you focus, increases energy levels, counteracts back pain from sitting and driving most of the day, yadda yadda yadda.

7. Dance to a song! I also stim from dancing so this can get out of control for me, but like 2-3 songs is good to get out energy, refocus, all that.

8. Draw an illustration. Remember when you were bored in 6th grade math class and you would draw a very detailed eyeball? Ya, you’re probably not an engineer now, but I think pre-social media you at least had found an effective way to deal with distraction and tedium and boredom that let your brain unwind and then return to your task. Draw a little doodle.

9. Read, but in at least 10 page intervals. Don't train your brain to get used to only reading one page at a time. But 10 pages every 30-60 minutes of working can get you through books and re-focus and calm you. Reading is v calming for the brain.

10. Meditate. Spotify has good guided ones, some that are as short as 2 mins, but I like to do 7-10 mins

11. Collage.

12. Re-organize.

13. Fuck it. Take a selfie. Take a nude. Send it to a lover. (With consent). Then leave your phone on dnd, and let yourself check their reaction as a treat if you finish ur task, hoe.

14. Rage page! I think this is good if maybe big feelings are getting in the way of your work or life. I was really angry at some people in my life a few years ago and didn’t know what to do with the anger aside from r&r: ruminate and repress. I told my therapist I was scared about what would happen if I let the monster out of the cage. She asked “and what do you think happens when you keep the monster caged inside?” Damn she really gagged me, so guess what? I let the monster out and you know what happened? I felt so much fucking better.

That bitch needed some fresh air and she was way less psycho. So if you’re going on social media because work is tedious and boring, so it’s letting your mind wander to someone or something pissing you off, so you go on social media to numb yourself – don't! Let the monster out! Be angry. Write the nastiest, meanest, horrible awful shit. It’ll feel illegal at first, like a hit and run. But no one dies, and you will actually have a better relationship with that person, or at least with yourself and with the present moment. The only thing we have is the present moment, and if you’re thinking about the past or future you are not truly conscious. Idk someone told me that one time and it sounded legit.

15. Pray. idk I recently hooked up with a christian who was really big on prayer and it kinda got to me. I do believe you will get what you want if you pray for it hard enuf.

Some unhealthy ones! Here are some unhealthy things you can do when you get bored at work, which are still not just social media.

1. Do drugs or have a drink. Bonus if this sends you on a bender which completely ends your work day, or week!

2. Pick at your blackheads and whiteheads in the bathroom mirror; create a massive zit where there was once a small black hole no one could see but you because you pressed your face up to the mirror at a distance only a person would get if they're making out with u, in which case their eyes are (hopefully) closed so it doesn’t matter that you have a little little black head. Except now you have a massive zit that will definitely leave a scar that takes 8 months to go away. Yay!

3. Text your ex. Bonus points if this results in you abandoning all of your work for the day because you go to their house to fuck and cry and fuck again.

4. Analyze your face shape. (Charli XCX voice activated). Bonus points for noticing a new flaw or insecurity.

5. Re-organize but don't finish the job so now there's a new pile of clothes or books or clutter on your floor that had previously at least been folded away, if imperfectly.

6. Online shopping! Bonus points for purchasing through a really shitty company like SHEIN or TEMU.

7. Create new anonymous accounts to stalk your enemies, exes, exes’ new partners. Bonus points if you leave hate comments on their posts that get you banned for bullying, such that the next time you get bored or fidgety from working, you get to create new accounts for bullying ur ex online.

8. Go on TikTok

9. Go on Instagram

10. Go on Reddit

11. Go on X

12. Go on 4chan

13. Go on Substack

14. Watch porn

15. Jack off.

16. Jack off while switching back and forth between numerous porn and social media sites. This is really good for your brain, I promise.

17. Ruminate about anything embarrassing you have said, anytime you have felt offended or slighted by friends or family in the last 15 years or so, any bad or harrowing or irritating moment, bonus points if you send a long ass text or voice note to the person who caused your irritation about the thing that was from 4 years ago. Replay the memory in your head and get pissed or smack yourself or whatever.

18. Look up social media accounts of people who are more successful than you in your same field and compare yourself to them. Studies show this is actually really good for motivation and totally not a cause for low self esteem, warped perception of reality and money, and ultimately depression.’

Let me know in the comments which of these are your current faves and which you wanna try this week!

xoxo,

femcel

1) Find your state senator or assembly member and demand action using this link:

https://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov

You can use this script; try calling in the morning earlier in the week to get someone on the phone:

"Hi, my name is [Your Name], and I’m a resident of [Your City or ZIP Code].
I’m calling because I’m extremely upset about the recent ICE raids in Los Angeles. They appear to be racially motivated and are causing fear in our communities.

I’m asking [Senator/Assemblymember] [Last Name] to consider introducing or supporting legislation that would ban all ICE enforcement actions on public property without a judicial warrant. That includes places like sidewalks, schools, hospitals, and transit areas.

We need stronger protections for Californians. Please let [Senator/Assemblymember] [Last Name] know this matters to me, and I’ll be following what action they take.
Thank you.”

2) This article includes numerous things you can do. You can donate items so that undocumented people can avoid spending more time in public to run errands to get toothpaste/food/etc. Likewise, if you know undocumented people in an area impacted by ICE raids, you can offer to do grocery runs and other things like that.

3) You can donate to different mutual aid and legal support organizations here.

******

for all my valley divas

I am a real valley girl. I was born in 2000, the y2k-est of years to be born. I was then raised until the age of six in Valley Village – literally – perhaps the valley-est of neighborhood names.

Threatening a divorce if we did not move, my mom took us (that is, me, my younger brother, my newborn sister, and my reluctant father) to the westside, where she was raised. Until I was 15, I lived in Venice.

I rode every weekend on the bike path; I watched skater boys smoke weed and fly on the concrete bowl of the Venice Skate park; I swung into what felt like the heavens on the Santa Monica Exercise Park swings; every June I looked forward to the Hare Krishna parade; I boogie-boarded; starting at the age of 13, I attended “Free the Nipple” protests; I would lay awake at night living in fear of a tsunami if the waves were crashing particularly loud; at 14 I met Arnold Schwarzeger at the Venice Gold’s Gym, where my monthly membership was $20 in 2015; at 16 I started working as a hostess at The Rose Cafe.

Venice changed in 2013. It was once a grungy, drug-addled beachtown full of hippies and people living in RVs, cheap pizza places, dimly-lit cafes open until 11 PM or even later, locally-owned sandwich shops, used bookstores, kooky old people who could be relied upon for comic relief during a depressive walk, local characters. It was a lot of families and people who had been there a couple generations. There were local gangs too. You never knew what was a firework or a gunshot.

I recall one woman who was actually living in an expensive Santa Monica apartment but wandered around as a homeless person, asking specifically for “fifty cents” only; we called her “fifty cent lady.” There was another guy my mom was friends with, who lived with his mother at 50. He scavenged for dinner on Main Street, picking at uneaten fries and chicken tenders left on terrace tabletops. If he needed to buy food, he would only shop at the (now shuttered) 99-cent store on Lincoln and Rose.

Then in 2011, Google opened an office space near the Gold’s Gym, The Rose Cafe, and the CVS Ballerina Clown.

Millennial hipsters poured into Venice in the following years. They started to reproduce. A store which sold strollers that cost more than rent popped up. Affordable mainstays at the Venice-Santa Monica border like Wildflower Pizza, The Omelette Parlor, and Amelia’s shuttered and got replaced by restaurants I don’t know the names of right now. They’re too hard to spell or pronounce or affordably eat at.

But I was always a valley girl at heart. I moved back at 17. My father is a valley boy, raised on the knowledge of the 101 and the 405 and the canyons and the Sepulveda basin, on boulevards – not Hollywood or Olympic, but Burbank and Victory. His parents moved here from Poland and Mexico in their 20s. My grandma worked as a translator at a bank in Boyle Heights, and my grandfather worked as a janitor until he learned English, at which point he became a door-to-door vacuum salesman until he got his real estate agent’s license.

To be a valley dweller is to constantly reinvent. It’s to know that the past doesn’t matter, because there is no past. The valley was the frontier of Los Angeles. It was an endless beacon of hope: of new houses, new neighborhoods, bigger backyards, more public schools, wider streets as far as the eye could see.

When the future looks so big, the past recedes in the mind’s eye. It doesn’t matter what came before, because it’s all about what’s next. The valley has no real history (I mean this in the abstract and aesthetic sense, of course everywhere has a history and the San Fernando Valley’s history is wrapped up in original ownership by Mexico, a rich farming history, terrible suburban planning, Harry Chandler, and railroads). But it’s not like New York or Boston in that way, or even like Fairfax or Downtown LA for that matter. In those neighborhoods, you can see and feel a sense of what came before you. In the valley, there is only ever what’s ahead.

In the valley, the mountains overcome you from wherever you are; the looming hills follow you like a shadow; during the day you hide from a scorching heat; and at night you feel the temperature drop as you hear the coyotes howl. This is a perennial reminder that you are not permanent. You are in a wilderness of sorts. A wilderness with taco restaurants and malls and community colleges, but a wilderness nevertheless. The mountains are there to remind you that there is something always on the horizon. Whatever is happening now or has happened before is infinitesimal in contrast to the San Gabriel Mountains.

To be a valley girl, first and foremost, is to endure the heat. Heat gathers in a valley like a pearl in an oyster. If LA is a living body, the valley is the space between your thighs on a cold night; reliably warmer than everywhere surrounding it.

Nothing brings me back to my early childhood more than burning my legs on the hot leather seat of a car that’s been parked outside for an hour. Or knowing to be careful with the burning metal tooth of the seatbelt. Or the scalding walk through a parking lot, only to enter the tundra of a Costco or a Westfield.

And so to be a valley girl, is really just to endure. Not just the heat, but everything. Because enduring that heat teaches you everything else you will need to know. It’s knowing which teeth to avoid, how to sit through the burn of your skin, how to grit your teeth until the air conditioning kicks in.

Oddly, the term “valley girl” is usually associated with a wealthy blonde girl. In reality, this is far from the case. The valley is a haven for more affordable homes than the ones in most parts of the city of Los Angeles. Moreover, the valley is incredibly diverse, resolutely not blonde.

Pacoima, Arleta, Van Nuys, Reseda, and Sun Valley host a huge Latino population, one of the cornerstone populations of LA. In Valley Village, Sherman Oaks, Encino, Tarzana, and Reseda there is a strong Jewish, Moroccan, and Persian community. Glendale, North Hollywood, and other neighborhoods are known for their Armenian, Russian, and Ukrainian populations. Burbank is a key location for the entertainment industry, for which LA is known. CSUN is a hub for the performing arts, entertainment, education, and other key industries. Woodland Hills & Granada Hills might be boring. I’ll give you that. (Except the Topanga Mall is nearby, and that’s pretty bitchin’). Tons of writers and others who work in Hollywood live in Studio City, and some of the most important dance studios which train the people you see on stage or in music videos, are in North Hollywood.

Recently, I asked an aspiring famous person (she simply aspires to fame) if she would act in something I am producing. I said we would shoot in the valley. She responded, from her home in Mar Vista, “I won’t go further than Sherman Oaks.” I had planned to film in Woodland Hills, which is less dense, and quieter, and therefore makes filming easier.

I typed out then deleted the following reply: “Listen to me you grody fucking transplant, I hate people like you. So much of the north valley is where big latino LA culture is, George Lopez went to high school in Pacoima, CSUN is a huge part of LA culture, entertainment, artistic, and academic life. And you’re in your stupid ass condo in Mar Vista acting like you know what’s up in this city. Meanwhile there are actual cool people in Echo Park who wouldn’t come near your side of town, mind you. And you say you’re ‘from Chicago’ when you’re actually from a suburb an hour outside of the real city. You’re not a city girl. You’re a wannabe. There are people in actual Chicago who wouldn’t go to the boring dry ass suburb you grew up in even if Madonna herself was performing there for free. Get fucked.”

“The valley” is derided in Los Angeles: “Ugh, the valley?” “Oh, it’s all the way in the valley?”

The distance from the city to the valley is cultural, not geographic. Without traffic, the drive from Culver City or Brentwood to Encino or Sherman Oaks can be less than half an hour on the 405. People have no trouble with going somewhere in the city that’s 30 minutes from them – but not to the valley.

In LA, there is a certain time & space warp that happens going to the valley, one that my city mom would proclaim and lament. Something about crossing the 405 or the canyons, something about traversing all that barren land and mountain.

Maybe there’s something evolutionary in our minds that makes 25 minutes on the 405 feel like an hour and a half of driving in the city. At least in the city, you are surrounded by homes, people, restaurants, busy streets, and pedestrians as you drive. You feel a sense of time or distance passing. But on the empty stretches of freeway to the valley, it must be like trying to maintain a circadian rhythm when you never go outside – without any change in scenery, how can you know the time?

Once, I dated the son of a surgeon who lived in the Pacific Palisades. Without traffic, our houses were never more than 30 minutes apart. I usually drove to him. One time, he drove to me and he complained endlessly about how long it took to get to me.

I finally snapped: “And how long do you think it takes me to get to you?”

He replied: “Well at least when you drive to me it gets prettier and you’re on Sunset. When I drive to you it just gets uglier and all the houses are hideous.”

So part of the issue with coming to the valley is the time, but it’s really a cultural and socioeconomic temporality issue. The change in scenery changes how we perceive time.

Indeed, it does seem like the deeper you go in the valley, the further back in time you go. My sister spent her entire life in the city, and after attending the Bat Mitzvah of a cousin in Chatsworth, my sister told my mom and I that all the girls there were still talking about things that stopped being cool or trendy 2-3 years ago.

“It was like being in a time warp,” she said.

So maybe time moves slower as you approach the valley, slowing as you get deeper. But still.

I think people who scrunch their nose and scowl at the valley are generally tasteless, classist, boring losers. These are people who think anything that’s more than 20 minutes away is “too far,” a marker of a certain kind of privilege.

This is a person who does not know what it is like to have to commute, whose parents were able to afford to live near the law firm, the business center, the private schools. I think every city has this split in the population. It’s the difference between people who had to commute from Queens or the Bronx to a school in Manhattan, and then the kids in Manhattan who cannot fathom getting on a subway for more than 30 minutes.

These are people who have been driven around their whole lives in air conditioned vehicles, who have never been troubled by waiting for a bus.

More importantly, these are people who do not know how to make a trek worth it, who do not see the possibility in a long ride, and for what’s on the other side of it. They would rather just stay home, or stay in their immediate vicinity. These are people who lack curiosity, the ability to see the magic in the everyday.

I think of friends from Century City, Beverlywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Westwood who make jokes about how the valley “isn’t LA,” or hear things like “Sylmar” or “Pacoima” and throw off mocking glances before cattily asking, “What’s that?” Oh – nothing, just the place where many people live when they’re not cleaning your house or gardening your lawn. More importantly, it’s where huge percentage of attorneys, nurses, teachers, accountants, artists, landscapers, social workers, and many others live. It’s as much a part of LA as — if not more than — places further west.

The same people who deride the valley are usually the people who think East LA starts and ends in Silver Lake, the same people who go somewhere like Italy or Japan or Morocco and spend the entire time in a White Lotus-style resort.

This is to say that these are people who are deeply uncurious about the world around them, coddled people, people who cannot handle a long walk or talking to a local while abroad or an awkward interaction, even if those things might edify them. These people do not seek out edification.

They seek out comfort. These are people who will not try to do something different, to learn, to value a culture or way of life or a place that is slightly different or slightly far from theirs – either culturally or geographically. These are people who could never dream of taking the bus in their own city, let alone abroad. These people are sheltered, unadventurous, boring, and self-absorbed. Going to the valley and being there requires a sense of adventure, an appreciation for the journey and the destination, a sense of wonder in the mundane.

These are people who are annoyed when people outside of the U.S. don’t speak English, don’t want to cater to their every want and whim. These are people who don’t like being in a new environment, who cannot see the thrill and excitement and opportunity in a long bus ride. They don’t see the worth in leaving their zip code.

I recall taking 45 minute bus rides with friends just to go somewhere for 2 hours. We would turn the bus ride into its own hangout: we would smoke weed, people watch, talk to each other, enjoy looking out the window.

The people who say “ugh, the valley, too far” are the people who never learn the pleasure of looking out the window. They are accustomed to the ease of being within 10 minutes of everything.

These are people who do not see the magical glow in the dirt, the grime, the scrap, the graffiti, the bus ride, the metro pass, the long walk, the pavement. These are people who want to leave their car at a valet service eight minutes from their house, spend the night in a perfectly clean, air-conditioned room full of people just like them, never interact once with the city itself or anyone outside, never see something different – and then retreat home.

To be a valley girl is a constant process of self-made reinvention. It’s being scrappy. No, we do not live near the Beverly Hills sign, or the beach, or the right malls or the coolest streets or the new house that everyone says Kendall Jenner is now living in, or that Heidi Montag was once seen stumbling out of. If I wanted to get drunk with friends in the city, I had to learn how to take advantage of the bus and metro system so I wouldn’t have to pay for two $60 Ubers. My friends in Melrose don’t know the fucking struggle!

To be a valley girl is to be a kind of chic that borders on the ethos of Charli XCX’s album BRAT. It’s wearing a thrifted designer dress with shoes from Payless. It’s getting your jewelry at the swap meet, wearing hand-me-downs from a great aunt, “borrowing” shoes from your mom.

I start my PhD in English this fall. My summer gig is tutoring summer school students. I recently knocked on the door of a 16-year-old in Studio City repeating Pre-Calculus. She opened the door in a bikini, at which point her mom yelled at her to “put on some clothes.”

She rolled her eyes and said to me, “Sorry, I was tanning. Do you think I got any color?” Then she extended her arm out to me. Before I could say anything, she ran to get her pink Macbook Air.

As she waited for it to charge, she sent texts and Snapchats to friends at a speed that could only be compared to light. She began picking at her hair and asked me to feel it.

“Is something wrong with it? It’s so crispy. I put some lemon in it to get highlights in the sun but I can’t tell if it worked and now it feels so fried.”

I reluctantly tapped a lock of hair she handed to me. I smiled with a certain nostalgia.

“No, you’re fine. I used to do that too. The lemon juice will wash out and you’ll have lighter hair soon.”

We finally moved onto logarithms and then asymptotic graph formulas, but not until she ranted to me about her English teacher being “such a bitch,” then asked if she should dump her boyfriend because she thinks he might be cheating on her, and then watching her mom take her phone away when she took a call from a “loser ex-boyfriend.” After the mom told her off, this time in Russian, we returned to the subject of factoring long equations.

At the end of our lesson, she announced that she now had a lesson with her “bitch driving instructor” who says she will fail the DMV test if she blows past the stop signs.

“Like literally I paused. It’s called a California stop. Obviously on the actual test I’ll stop, like you know I will because I fucking paused.”

I told my friend about this tutoring session as a funny story.

She replied, “But wow, that’s a real valley girl.”

“Just become an electrician and laugh all the way to the bank.”

“Become an HVAC technician and you’ll never worry about money.”

For every broke, unemployed, indebted 20-something is a boomer or elder Gen X person who throws off one of these increasingly common talking points.

But —

BECOMING A PLUMBER IS NOT A SOLUTION TO THE IMPENDING ECONOMIC COLLAPSE! YOU PEOPLE ARE UNDER SPELLS!

I am writing this post for A) The people who have the audacity to tell a suffering un-employee that all their problems will be solved by a trade profession and for B) The young and young-ish people who have either graduated into or been laid off into this job market, and need a clearcut, biting, throws-no-punches article to send to anyone who says “Just become an HVAC technician.”

I got a lot of comments telling me to go into some sort of trade work on my first post about the job market, “WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS?”

To be clear, and I am putting this up at the top, I do think knowing practical skills — whether that’s construction, auto mechanic work, growing food, raising animals, fishing, weaving, plumbing, sewing, HVAC — is extremely important and we have made a mistake in modern civilization by not teaching these things.

I do think it is important that everyone know at least one practical skill really well. In the past year, I have started growing some of my own fruits/vegetables and going to local library classes + local farms to learn how to grow my own food. I would like to learn how to fix car stuff but I am intimidated by car mechanic places.

However, the issue of people proclaiming that every job besides being a plumber is “bullshit” and telling every out-of-work Biology and History major to “just go into the trades” is a bigger issue. It asks of us: what kind of society do we want to be in? Not only is it a numbers issue (which I’ll get into) but a social one.

Do you really hear from all the 20-somethings about how horrible the job market is and care so little — as to then deride their academic field and tell them to go fix roofs? Do you not have any concern that it might be a bad thing that there are dwindling jobs for people who teach, make textbooks, research cancer cures, illustrate, write, perform, and architect?

Do you not delight in the wonder of a good novel, in laughing in a packed theater, in the joy of a beautiful book cover, the exhilaration of crying at the end of a play or getting lost in time at an art exhibition? Do you not enjoy the calm of a picnic in a beautiful park, the awe of a magnificent building or bumping music? Are your only pleasures in life simply: sitting in an air-conditioned house and peeing in a working toilet?

Of course, I don’t want to detract from those latter pleasures; they are immense privileges and are not to be under-appreciated. However, and maybe this is controversial to say: I think there is more to life than making money and having a toilet.

The world does not need more HR administrators, AI tech charlatans, or university bureaucrats, to be clear. But maybe we need something else entirely, actually, a new system.

The “just go into the trades” mantra doesn’t help people within our current system, but even if it briefly could provide people with some economic stability, why are we accepting a system wherein people are forced to go back to school every 10 years, change professions and skills, meticulously track the next hottest profession at the age of 18 — not to be incredibly successful, but just to live? In many U.S. cities, families with six-figure incomes are struggling, so what’s your next suggestion when we’re all $120,000-a-year plumbers and still struggling to raise a family?

We’re in a definitionally psychotic system, wherein people are forced to go to work to pay for childcare and old age homes, such that they hardly spend any time with their children or aging parents, all so they can go to work so they can pay for the care so they can go to work so they can pay for the care.

This is all to pay for rent and food which could otherwise be distributed, grown, or obtained in ways other than everyone having to invent the next Uber to survive. I would like to demand a better world, and particularly, more time for it.

I was recently interviewed in a Slate Magazine article about the broken job market. The journalist Nitish Pahwa wrote that, “Across industries, the number of private sector jobs added last month was the lowest we’ve seen in a year. Overall hiring rates are at their lowest level since the pre-COVID era.” He finished on this note:

None of this is sustainable in a time when the cost of living remains high, and when safety-net benefits are in danger from federal budget cuts. It also puts another lie to the image of America as land of opportunity. After the fallout from the Great Recession, when interest rates were low and companies began hiring rabidly, a typical line of advice was offered to America’s youth: Study a buzzy field in college, get early career experience while there, refine your credentials, and earn that degree—then, you’ll be guaranteed a comfortable, well-paying job with employers who feel lucky to have you. 

Or at least you’ll be able to pay for the basics and have a family in exchange for hard work. That promise has been, once again, deflating, even if it hasn’t fully collapsed … yet. The erratic economic policy from this administration has left countless employers petrified, unsure whether they should slash more spending now or hold expenses flat; no one’s currently betting that things will look better anytime soon. We’re stuck in anticipatory pre-recession mode, and what’s coming next may not be so flush for any of us. 

But what if it could be flush? What if we build something better, more beautiful? What if we stop trying to make quick fix solutions, like going into the trades, going into tech, going into medical sales, going into consulting, and acknowledge that our system of the last 200-400 years was a bad experiment, call it quits, and do something new?

The individualistic response to every downturn in the economy is to get into the hot new sector: business, law, tech, and now — trades. But what if we question this late-stage capitalist mantra of “creating new jobs”; if the job has not already been created, do we really need it?

I’m not denying labor shortages in key industries, but I am questioning the idea of creating a job or working a job simply for the sake of it, when it might not be sensical or necessary—especially when one is required to work so extremely to live so minimally.

I am questioning the idea that people can “just” go into some new field and be fine, when the last couple of decades have shown that the goalposts endlessly change, and the cost of living ceaselessly increases.

So, An Open Letter To Idiots:

1. You do not understand the concept of over-saturation, societal balance, or basic numbers.

I went to high school in the mid-2010s, which was the era of “just major in computer science and you’ll never worry about a job or money.”

And how did that turn out? Predictably, everyone and their mother majored in computer science & software engineering.

And apparently, the world does not actually need that many software engineers. There are only so many online shopping platforms and digital ride share services to code.

More broadly, the current tech situation means that THERE IS NO MIRACLE CURE PROFESSION/FIELD FOR UNEMPLOYMENT. This idea that if you just study the practical thing and work in something boring, you’ll be okay forever, no longer applies to the American economy.

Moreover, from a basic fucking numbers point of view, the world did not need millions of software engineers, and so too, the world does not need the millions of unemployed Americans to become plumbers. If electricians are currently paid well, it’s because there is a perfect balance of electricians and people who need electricians. Telling every jobless Biology and History major to become an electrician will upset that balance, over-flooding the supply of electrical workers and once again creating a burst bubble.

You’ve probably heard about the tech layoffs. But it’s not just layoffs of previously employed people, it’s also a sudden dearth of jobs for recent graduates, who at least used to be able to take the jobs of older employees that companies didn’t want to pay high salaries to anymore.

James O’Brien, a UC Berkeley computer science professor, recently wrote on his LinkedIn,

“Previously, a Berkeley [computer science] graduate, even if not a top student, would receive multiple appealing job offers in terms of work type, location, salary, and employer. However, outstanding students, like those with a 4.0 in-major GPA, are now contacting me worried because they have zero offers. I suspect this trend is irreversible and likely part of the broader trend impacting almost every employment sector.

I hate to say this, but a person starting their degree today may find themself graduating four years from now into a world with very limited employment options. Add to that the growing number of people losing their employment and it should be crystal clear that a serious problem is on the horizon.”

He linked an article in WSJ detailing the vanishing of tech jobs.

So yes, of course we could all go into consulting or start an HVAC company or become pool contractors and maybe make bank for awhile, that is until millions of other people start their own HVAC service companies or consulting firms or pool contracting businesses, and then we’re forced to go into whatever the next grift career trajectory is.

You losers are playing economic whack-a-mole. For a long time, the solid job-oriented major was Business. Then there were too many business majors, so everyone said “go to law school.” Then there were too many lawyers. Then they said “major in computer science.”

Simply put, the answer is not just having every unemployed or struggling person go into some mystical fix-it-all field. There’s too many of us, and telling everyone to “just major in/work in ________” creates an over-saturation.

Approximately 2 million people graduate college every year in the U.S., flooding the job market.

CNN Business recently reported that the U.S. unemployment rate jumped from 4.1% to 4.2% in March, just because of new graduates (Wallace).

I bring this up to say that — you can’t tell the millions of already-unemployed people and all the new unemployed graduates that come out in March every year to “just go into the trades.” If all these people become plumbers and electricians, we’ll face the exact same problem again: low wages, no jobs, a trades bubble, and or under-employment.

And a report came out last year that college graduates are more under-employed than ever, and need more time to find a job than ever. I tend to think that all these numbers are much higher, but I don’t want to get called a conspiracy theorist, so I’ll just cite reputable new and government site sources.

Anyway, just to reiterate — YOU CANNOT HAVE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE JUMP INTO A PROFESSION AND EXPECT IT TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

THIS IS ECONOMIC WHACK-A-MOLE! YOU CANNOT TELL PEOPLE WHO ARE POOR OR UNEMPLOYED TO “JUST MAKE MORE MONEY” OR “JUST GET A JOB IN THIS BETTER FIELD.” IF THEY FUCKING COULD THEY WOULD AND ALSO, THEY CAN’T, BECAUSE THERE JUST AREN’T ENOUGH HIGH-PAYING JOBS FOR EVERY UNEMPLOYED PERSON. AND EVEN IF THERE WERE, AND EVERYONE FLED TO THOSE JOBS, THOSE SALARIES WOULD DEFLATE BECAUSE THERE’S TOO MANY PEOPLE WORKING THE JOB.

DOES THAT FUCKING MAKE SENSE??????

2. What kind of society do you live in and what kind of society do you want to live in?

TV and movies suck now. Museums and libraries have less programming. Literacy and numeracy rates are down. The SAT even changed to accommodate the lower attention spans of adolescents. We have a housing and homelessness crisis. But by all fucking means, yes, let me go to a trade school to specialize in mechanics repair for luxury vehicles. I am not taking a dig at auto mechanics; you guys save my life every 6 months when I need an oil change. Auto mechanics are an integral part of society. Building houses, repairing water systems, maintaining electricity are so important that I don’t even need to explain why they’re important.

But so are teachers. So are writers. So are actors. So are museum curators. So are public health workers. So are school nurses. So are therapists. So are novelists. So are playwrights. So are event organizers. So are artists and librarians and professors and researchers and academics and poets and product designers and architects and public transportation administrators and social workers.

Maybe not project managers, though. Sorry guys. Also, private insurance company employees who deny claims. You guys are definitely not integral. Also anyone who works in defense contracting or for Raytheon.

I am by no means defending bullshit jobs. I explain REAL JOB VS BS JOB, PEOPLE SEEM TO THROW THE BABY OUT W THE BATH WAter.

But really. Do you people have no problem hearing that all the Humanities and Social Sciences and now even Science majors can’t find a job? Your only reaction to all of this is to smugly tell someone to “go to trade school”? Without thinking of the societal repercussions of poorly paid teachers, less funding for the arts and writing, uglier buildings and worse public transport systems?

Moreover, if everyone becomes a plumber or electrician, the need for them ceases to exist. If me and all my under-employed friends became licensed in different trades, we would just exchange services amongst each other instead of paying anyone; this would mean we need less money to pay for services and would therefore work even less.

Well, maybe that would actually be kind of idyllic. Maybe the boomers are onto something…

But also maybe they aren’t!

Maybe there is also nothing wrong with wanting to go into a different career, and being upset that these job openings have frozen up, and that your only option may be something you’d be terrible at and is actually quite difficult to break into and in reality doesn’t even pay that much and is incredibly harsh on the body.

Also,

3. THESE MANTRAS ARE DISRESPECTFUL AF TO PLUMBERS AND ELECTRICIANS!

People say “just” go into the trades as if it’s working at a clothing store. These are actually really difficult, skilled jobs more akin to being a surgeon. Would you tell some struggling Gender Studies major to “just become a surgeon”?

I get these comments all the time: “Just become an electrician and laugh all the way to the bank.”

BITCH, I’m gonna be laughing all the way to the fucking emergency room if I become an electrician. That is a hard and dangerous fucking job! My great grandfather died while fixing a lightbulb in Prague, and it left my grandfather fatherless and emotionally stunted, which left my mom messed up, which has left me paying for therapy until the end of my days.

Learning how to fix the piping or insulation of a house, how to do framing and installation for windows, how to solve a leak and put in new drywall, deal with the electricity grid, and so on and so forth are highly skilled, complicated jobs. They are equivalent to going to school for engineering or ER nursing. Telling people to go do them when they might not be equipped or smart enough (at least in this technical way) does not make sense, and it’s disrespectful to the intelligence and skill of the people who do this work.

You guys think this shit is all fun and games but fail to realize that these are hard, dangerous, skilled jobs and should not be gone into lightly, which brings me to my next point.

4. People should work jobs that they want to work and where they have some degree of natural ability or interest, because this ensures they do a good job, and that they are able to mitigate the risks involved with the job.

You might tell me: well, no one has a natural inkling or talent for HR or recruiting, to which I would say there are in fact some people who are naturally good at that stuff. But more to my point, it doesn’t really matter if someone is bad at a bullshit job.

I am not saying that people should only go into fields that they are naturally perfect at or have an undying love/passion for. I am a writer in an English PhD program with the hope of working in academia, publishing, and entertainment. Sometimes I don’t want to write, and I fantasize about doing something far less cerebral. After a day of ghost writing or essay coaching, I love the sensation of gardening, or cleaning as a repose for the mind.

That being said, I still have a natural aptitude and enough passion for what I do to still be good at it, even through the most challenging parts of it. So when students pay tuition to take my classes, clients pay for my writing services, or people on Substack (so very kindly) pay to subscribe, they get something valuable out of it. I do not struggle at every step to teach a seminar on 19th-century German moral philosophy or a copywritng request for a wedding planner’s brochure.

I’m not saying people should only work if it’s their undying passion or calling in life, but they should not be forced to go into a job that is hard, dangerous, and highly skilled when they have no interest or aptitude for it. Pipes, wires, and vents are integral to society, and the people working on them should be good at it and want to be there, to some extent.

And what’s more is that not only am I good at writing and teaching, this is a skill society needs. Because SOCIETY NEEDS PEOPLE THRIVING IN ALL FIELDS, NOT JUST WORKING TO MAKE MONEY. We could all become consultants, plastic surgeons, and electricians, but I think this would make for a really boring, maladjusted, and imbalanced society.

Plus, if we all become trade technicians, the need for trade technicians will cease to exist, because if I’m a plumber and my friend is an auto mechanic and my siblings are electricians and HVAC mechanics, we’d all just help each other out instead of hiring other technicians. Okay, maybe that would be kind of a commune vibe and kind of cool. Sort of utopian and socialistic in a way I aspire to.

To any of my friends reading this: should we all just go to different trade schools and learn how to grow food and raise chickens and never pay for anything again and just trade services for each other? Were the boomers right?

5. Okay, but IT IS NOT SO FUCKING EASY and LUXE TO JUST BECOME A PLUMBER/ELECTRICIAN/HVAC/AUTO MECHANIC.

Most obviously, these fields are infamously difficult to break into if you’re a woman. How many women do you see on construction sites? How many electrician/plumbing/locksmith companies do you see hiring women?

Additionally, I would like to de-influence people for a second from this idea that while the college-graduated Slack users and emailers of the world are toiling away in their open-concept office spaces trying to hit $75,000 per year, the plumbers and electricians are all raking in $120,000 or more per year with just 4-6 hours of work per day.

According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median plumber salary in 2024 was $62,970. For electricians, it was $62,350. For HVAC repair, the median was $59,810.

I know there are people in these fields who make a lot more. I personally know some of them, like a contractor friend of mine who makes a million a year replacing roofs and other things for clientele in the Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills.

But those stories you hear in real life or online about people in trades who manage to make six or even seven figures are at the top of their field, just like how there are lawyers who make seven figures, and then there are lawyers who make $85,000. Moreover, the people who make that much usually own a business, which is a different thing than “just become an electrician.” And becoming the owner of a plumbing business takes a really long time.

Salaries in the $60K range also aren’t bad by any means. Making that much money at 25 is pretty good. The thing is, it should be possible for someone to also make that much money from working in publishing, social services, education, copy writing, public health, magazines, journalism, advertising, art, film, architecture, (good) tech etc.

Even so, the process to become a full-time, well-paid plumber who works for themselves or a company/union is not quick. It can take 4-5 years to complete an apprenticeship, and for other trade fields, it takes a few years to really learn the ropes and start making real money.

Getting into a good union can be a complicated bureaucratic process, as is getting an apprenticeship. From there, a person needs to learn how to work the system, accumulate their own clients, grow by word of mouth. All of that takes a long time. So telling someone to “just go to trade school” is not the quick, meaningful fix you people seem to think it is!

I think if someone wants to become a blue collar worker, that’s great. But if someone wants to contribute in some other way to society, and they have already paid and worked a lot for a college degree in that field, they should get to work in that too. And it’s not a good sign that there are so few jobs available in other fields, or that they’re paying so poorly.

AND STOP TELLING MECHANICALLY INCOMPETENT PEOPLE TO BECOME ELECTRICIANS! IF YOU REALLY THINK YOU WANT ME TO FIX THE WIRING IN YOUR HOUSE, YOU HAVE OTHER PROBLEMS THAT I CANNOT HELP YOU WITH. YOU NEED SOMEONE WHO MAJORED IN PSYCHOLOGY OR SOCIOLOGY.

OK bye! xoxo

femcel

I wait for her to finish her sentences. I don’t interrupt or bulldoze or make everything she is saying about me. I listen actively and presently the entire time. We discuss and analyze whatever it is she wants to talk about from every angle, for about 45-60 minutes.

Then, finally, I mention something from my life – a new job, a new person I’m dating, a weird or funny moment from my week, just anything I was really excited to talk about – and nothing. No question, no real response, no reaction. Just a nod, if that, and then my friend continues blathering on for another 40 minutes about her life.

Why is no one listening anymore? Responding even? Asking a question?

And it’s not just me. In group conversations, I notice an inability for anyone to let anyone else finish a story or sentence. Interruption is rampant.

A friend will be 25% into a story about how she met her long lost aunt for the first time at 22, and someone will just interrupt: “Omg when I was 22 I blacked out for the first time and called my cousin to pick me up even though he lives in Florida.”

And then everyone just goes around interrupting and talking over each other, sharing stories of the first time they blacked out. No one actually responds to each other, no one listens. It’s just a merry-go-round of people waiting for their turn to talk, getting their airtime, then retreating back into their own self-absorption or dissociation from the group.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to say, “Wait, I want to hear the end of Sarah’s story about her aunt,” or something along those lines.

During one-on-one conversations, I feel either constantly interrupted, un-listened to, or unheard.

Sometimes I can literally see it – the moment when my friend’s eyes glaze over, she zones out, dissociates. She’s not listening to me now, she’s just letting me talk, and waiting for her turn to say what she wants to say. I leave the hangout feeling like an unpaid therapy intern.

When I’ve called friends out on this, I get mixed responses. One friend is on particularly thin ice because when I’ve said, “Sorry, are you listening to me?” she’ll shift her eyes back to me and jokingly say, “What? What? Sorry haha no I wasn’t” with a grin, as if it’s hilarious that she can’t focus for more than two sentences on my life and yet I essentially Barbara Walters-interviewed her for 45 minutes on the minutiae of a first date she had.

And so it goes. With some of my friends, I have basically given up on expecting to feel heard or listened to. I show up to hang out, ask them a million questions, laugh at all their anecdotes, validate and give active responses to all their musings, thoughts, stories, and then go home and journal and blog into the void in order to feel heard or seen in the slightest.

Look. I understand that not every conversation can be a perfect 50-50. Sometimes, someone is going through a divorce or a big life change. It makes sense that they need to chat more, get more off their chest, and I can take a conversational backseat. But a lot of you bitches are calling me up to beat the same dead fucking horse for the 50th time, and don’t seem to give a shit about whatever thing is going on for me.

It’s not just about actually listening – it’s about responding in a way that suggests you’ve been listening. Maybe we’ve become so used to “listening” via a screen, wherein no response is required other than an expressionless, silent face, but sometimes even when friends do listen or at least don’t interrupt me mid-sentence, I get hit with a lifeless stare and silence after talking. It’s like I’m just another TV show or person on TikTok.

I’ll share a story about something funny that happened at work or something I read that made me think of something new to write about. And then there’s just dead air. It’s like talking to a fucking wall. I let the silence hang over the table, give up on getting any human feedback, and just ask my friend a question about her to keep the conversation going.

And then my friend will just talk about herself, and I’ll ask her a bunch of questions, respond with things like: “That reminds me of that thing that happened to you in high school” / “I think you handled that really well” / “Wait that’s so interesting that reminds me of something I read last week in ABC Magazine, it sounds like your point about XYZ.”

***

My whole life, people have told me that I have a “freakishly good memory.” If I met you once three years ago, I can feed back to you everything I learned about you, like where you went to college, where you’re from, what you do from work, some unique anecdote you shared.

But here’s the thing: I DO NOT HAVE A FREAKISHLY GOOD MEMORY. It’s just that, unlike the self-absorbed, dissociated, and TikTok-brain-melted people of my generation, I actually fucking listen. I honestly think that if you cannot remember a single thing about the people you meet and talk to, you’re probably not listening at all.

And I am genuinely curious: what are you doing when other people are talking? Are you totally tuning out? Are you playing a song that’s stuck in your head? Are you just rehearsing and thinking about the thing you want to say when it’s finally your “turn” to talk? Why would you ignore and disappear from the human being before you?

I have done some soul-searching to figure out why I am like this. I know that, ironically, this will come off as super self-absorbed, but I wanted to understand: why am I such a good listener? I have my intrapersonal flaws, but conversational presence+curiosity of others+responsiveness is not one of them.

I think it might go back to the fact that I was a really lonely kid. I didn’t have real friends until I was 15. I was frequently bullied and ostracized in school. This made me become extremely observant and socially aware in a way maybe others aren’t. I often felt like an anthropologist, observing and trying to understand what made it possible for my peers to befriend one another so easily.

Additionally, I was a student journalist in high school and college. A lot of my formative social, creative, and professional experiences centered around conversations that were just interviews. I would come up with follow-up after follow-up, honing my pre-existing curiosity, and listening intently so that I wouldn’t miss an important quote, new piece of info, or something juicy. Then I would ask even more questions.

As a result, it’s possible that I perpetuate this conversational pattern IRL, but I also think there’s some onus on my friends to at some point ask me a couple questions, or at the very least actually listen or stop interrupting or zoning out.

Recently, I’ve found myself doing something oddly dystopian. When I feel like I’ve been talking for too long (more than 25 seconds) and I feel like I’m “losing my audience” I do what I do for my TikTok videos or stand-up comedy routines. In both, the industry advice is to keep people constantly engaged by having a punchline at least every 15-30 seconds, using big hand gestures, dramatic or provocative language. I find myself thinking what I would say to keep a random TikTok user engaged — but I’m just talking to a friend. I literally TikTok-ify human interactions now, otherwise people will zone the f out.

People often tell me, “Wow, you ask really good questions. You’re such a good listener.” I think this is sad. It’s sad that so many people lack any fucking curiosity about other people at all, such that the task of asking a follow-up, genuinely wanting to know more, or even just clarifying a detail is so foreign to them. I don’t even expect curiosity or questions from people now in conversation. Instead, I wait irritatedly to find out how Person A is going to make Person B’s immensely singular and unique story all about Person A.

A year ago, I witnessed a guy mention that he had his first gay kiss with a fraternity brother at a party. I immediately had a million questions: What was the kiss like, do he and this brother still talk, why did he kiss that particular guy, did he come out after or stay closeted anyway, etc. etc.

Before I could launch into my questioning, another girl at the table jumped in: “Wait, you went to UC San Diego right? You said you were part of the same fraternity as Dave Glassik? I grew up with him, he’s so nice right?”

Gay frat guy: “Yeah, he was pretty nice.”

Girl with undiagnosed NPD: “Yeah I remember Dave and I used to bike around my neighborhood when we were little, that’s so funny that you guys went to the same frat. He’s so nice, that’s so funny I know him and you guys were in that frat together.”

This is a quintessential example of poor modern conversational skills. Someone will share something intense, personal, unique, and deserving of further focus. And someone will find a way to make it about them, even through the most trite and mundane connection, just so they can get their talk in. I almost wanted to scream at this girl: THIS GUY JUSY CONFESSED TO HAVING HIS FIRST GAY KISS WITH A FRAT BROTHER, WHY ARE YOU BLATHERING ON ABOUT YOUR STUPID CONNECTION TO THE FRAT AND BIKING AS A KID? YOU CAN’T SERIOUSLY NEED TO TRY THIS HARD AND THIS QUICKLY TO MAKE IT ABOUT YOU!

All the time, I witness people confess or say the most interesting, vulnerable, singular things and then watch the people around them make it immediately about anything else.

I would hate to complain without offering solutions, so here is my advice for anyone concerned that they may be a bad listener and a bad interlocutor:

1. If someone shares something, ask one question about it. Then, fine, make it about yourself.

2. If you do not have any questions, respond in a way that is conducive to letting the other person share more, or makes them feel heard/seen/understood.

Ex).

Person A: I was shocked at how well this date went. She had a really different vibe from her profile. On Hinge she seemed kind of pretentious but in real life she was actually genuinely really smart. We had a lot in common. She’s the only other person I’ve met who read the same niche book series I wrote about for my senior thesis in college.

Person B: That’s so great, like a reverse catfish. It sounds like you could have a second date soon.

3. Let people finish their sentences. If you feel the need to interrupt, take a note of what it is you wanted to say, and save it for the appropriate moment.

If you notice that doing these things are difficult for you, here is some other baseline advice:

A. Get off social media for 3 weeks. Seriously. If you are struggling to let people finish what they have to say, if you are unable to treat your friends as flesh-and-blood human beings and instead as TikTok videos which don’t require real listening, engagement, or a verbalized response, then you’re fried.

Movies, TikToks, and TV are easy to “listen to” because you actually don’t have to — you can zone out, dissociate, and in fact you are categorically unable to ask a question or respond to the speaker. That’s kind of the whole point.

In fact, streaming companies have leaned into the horrible listening and attention skills of our era by creating intentionally mediocre shows that are meant for watching while you do something else — laundry, dishes, scroll on TikTok. So even while you’re watching TV, a task which requires little effort for focus and no curiosity or responsiveness on your end, you’re even further decreasing your focus, attention, curiosity abilities.

But that’s the opposite point of an IRL hangout, wherein you should ask questions and respond. People are not behind a screen.

B. After consuming some sort of analog media, whether it’s a magazine article, book, painting – write down 3 questions you have about it. These could be questions about the piece itself like “What was the author/artist going through when they wrote this?” or question you would ask to another person: “What do you make of the decision to kill off the protagonist before the detectives found him?”

C. Journal. This seems counterintuitive, since it just makes you write and think more about yourself, but oftentimes I find that people interrupt and take up so much airtime in conversations because it’s their only outlet to mull over their week or life. Likewise, find some sort of creative outlet if you do not have one. This could be learning to play the piano, how to speak a foreign language, reviewing books on StoryGraph, photography, reviewing hikes on AllTrails – whatever. But just do something that helps you be more present, express yourself, and tune into the world around you, rather than just the world within you.

Good luck!

“If you marry someone else, I’ll send her death threats on Facebook.”

I once said this to my ex-boyfriend. In my defense, he refused to believe I really loved him.

“I don’t believe it, I can’t believe you actually want to date me.”

“Really? You really like me? I feel like I’m being pranked, or that this is a joke.”

Even when I initially asked to kiss him, bravely making the first move, he covered his face and murmured, “Really? Me? You want to kiss me?”

I felt that gutting fear of being left every time he said this stuff. Abandonment issues who? I was paranoid constantly that if I couldn’t sufficiently convince him of my feelings — he’d leave.

But his insecure sentiments became an emotionally manipulative psyop: what came off as sincere uncertainty of his loveability was actually a mechanism to ensure I was constantly overstating my undying love, affection, and desire for him. I was so worried I might lose him, that I overcompensated for how I really felt.

Before we began our five-month long relationship — the toxicity of which has surely killed off more turtles than any plastic bag heap — he had already dumped me once before. It was out of the blue, and for another woman.

After break up #1, I was at Denny’s on December 30th with my friend Daniel after a night of clubbing. We both made 4 am-almost-new-years-wishes.

My wish on this fateful December evening, in 2021?

“I wish that he would come back to me,” I said, cradling my mug of black coffee for extra warmth. We were seated underneath the air conditioning vent which was oddly powered up in the dead of night (or is it very early morning? 4 AM is sort of non-binary timewise) in December.

“Really?” Daniel balked. “You get one wish and that’s what your’e asking for? You’re wasting your wish.”

To this day, I do not know if Daniel meant that I was wasting the wish because it would never come true, or because it was a stupid fucking thing to wish for — even if it did come true.

Either way, it did come true. Very true. In May of 2022, my ex dumped the girl he had dumped me for. We got back together. Before that — between December of 2021 and May of 2022 — we did not speak at all, despite the fact that as he was breaking up with me he had said, “I always want you to be in my life. You’ve taught me so much and I want to be friends.”

I texted him two weeks post-break #1 up to go on a hike, and he said “now isn’t a good time.” As he would explain to me six months later, he felt that there was no way he could be in the same space as me without “something happening.” So instead of telling me that he just blew me off. And posted a TikTok with his new girlfriend at the exact same hiking trail I had invited him to trek together. Cool.

I spent that winter break my junior year at UCLA wrying (walk-crying) to the furthest dispensary I could manage to get to on foot, just to distract myself from the break up. I watched my daily mileage go up everyday, from six miles to ten to twelve. Once my legs began to give out, I’d buy my pre-rolls, smoke on my way home; there, I would collapse into bed, letting pained sleep overtake me to the lullabies of Adrianne Lanker’s Songs and Instrumentals, like a child suffering her first fever.

In the ensuing months, I stayed obsessed with him. I didn’t know about no contact, or self-respect for that matter apparently, because I continued to watch his every move on social media. Jay Gatsby may have had a green light, but I had a blue light. I yearned into my screen. I masturbated to old photos and videos of him online. Sometimes I became so overwhelmed with the grief of having lost this ideal person who I thought was my once-in-a-lifetime-soulmate. I would cry, then become turned on by my own misery, by the passionate drama of it. I would masturbate again.

My feelings about him were clearly, clearly unhealthy. Not only is this a textbook version of the worst way to handle a break up, but he and I had gone out for approximately a month before committing to something official, which lasted all of two days before he bait-and-switched to another woman.

How well could I have known someone after a month of casual dating? Why was I so attached to someone who dumped me after just two days? Why did I project the idea of soulmate-ship and marriage onto someone who was ignoring me?

The longer I stared at the blue light, the brighter it grew, and the darker the rest of my room seemed in comparison to the glowing ongoings of his digital life. His avatar’s world became a bright dot of failed hope, against which the rest of my life darkened.

When we met up for the first time post-break up in May 2022, I was feral. I used an old hooker’s trick: I rubbed my vaginal fluid onto the sides of my neck like perfume. The pheromones are powerful attracters. I know my squeamish readers are horrified right now. But I was desperate to hook, line, and sink this man. If he was king salmon, I would have worn a choker of minnows.

At first, we didn’t speak of the break up. We were just hanging out “as friends.” Then at one point he half-playfully, half-seriously asked if he had “traumatized” me with the sudden break up and ghost. I don’t recall much of this afternoon; it feels so long ago. I do remember being confronted again at his house, this time more seriously, to which I began to stutter out some of the pain I felt in December, the sorrowful longing that lingered until the dawn-break of Spring. I think at one point I said I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

Because he then “playfully” sprayed my legs with some Febreeze, to get me to divulge. In my manic hypochondriac anxiety about whether or not this would give me chemical burns, I told him through crazed laughter and declamatory tones of the pain he had indeed put me through.

Somehow, we ended up in his bed jacking off together to “Sunset” by Caroline Polachek. Within two weeks we were official, and in less than a month after this encounter, we said I love you and I lost my heterosexual virginity at 22 to him.

The rest of our relationship was a similar clusterfuck of tears, anger, mania, resentment, anxiety, attachment style glitching that would give any TikTok therapist at least a year’s worth of content.

That was 2022. From 2023 until now, we’ve been no-contact. I don’t harbor any ill will toward him. I was truly insane in the relationship; he put up with an amount of crying and emotional outbursts that I think even a preschool teacher would quit over.

To be fair to myself, I was rightfully constantly paranoid that he would leave me again for the same woman as before — or worse — a different woman, such that the entire world was now a threat.

It did not help that he constantly played with my lizard brain need for him by refusing to believe I really liked him. Sometimes, this would come in the form of saying things like “I don’t believe you really love/like me.”

He tricked me into begging for something so much that I didn’t have time to think if I even really wanted it in the first place.

Basic reverse psychology. I know, I’m an idiot. But we were all 22 once, right?

Other times, I would say something like, “If we move in together…” to which he would reply with puppy eyes and a frown, egging me on to say “Okay, okay — when we move in together,” which satisfied him. I think just a week or two after one such conversation he dumped me — saying he couldn’t picture himself getting married or staying in a relationship for longer than eight months or so.

So yeah, I told him that if he married someone else, I would send her death threats on Facebook. I was terrified he’d leave again. If the gap between keeping him or losing him was securing his belief in my undying affection for him, then I would bring dying into it for good measure. (In case any psych ward people are reading this, to be clear again, I only made the threat to be melodramatic and prove a point and would never actually send someone death threats on Facebook. I’d do it on TikTok if anything cmon now).

A common woman’s lament: I was crazy, but it was because he made me crazy.

What I think about today is the kind of misplaced desire, the infatuation that bordered on obsession, violence, fear: that dangerous mythologization of a love interest. When a person becomes so fantastical, perfect, beatific in your mind that they become a mythological figure.

My ex recently got engaged to a mutual acquaintance. I haven’t thought about our break up since 2023; we failed at an attempt to become friends after break up #2; I graduated university; and then I moved to Southern Europe for a year and a half on a fellowship. Instantly, the largeness of the world inverted the largesse of him in my mind, the way a big rat is revealed to actually be a very small rodent when placed upon the back of a Great Dane.

The small light I once gazed upon in the darkness of my room now looked like a lit candle on a sunny day. That light of who he was to me became unnoticeable among the grandiosity of an aurora.

However, his engagement made me think back to this period of my life. I’m thinking about obsessive desire, limerence, or loving the idea of someone more than the person themselves. About the kind of dynamic which drives a person, even melodramatically and under duress, to make a promise of a death threat.

I see my experience in a popular internet pop-intellectual phenomena: the comparison between “Green Light” by Lorde, “party 4 u” by Charli XCX, and The Great Gatsby. There are a lot of memes about how these songs are pop musical renderings of the story of Jay Gatsby’s fixation on and obsession with Daisy Buchanan, to the point that he throws lavish parties to get her attention and stares longingly at a symbolic green light.

iN tHiS eSsAY i WilL — 1) talk about this internet phenomenon as a means of 2) unraveling this theme of violent desire, romantic objectification, 3) so as to write comparatively about these works of media in a meaningful way since they’re being compared already in the popular sphere, and 4) finally put to bed and understand exactly what the fuck happened between my ex and I.

Ultimately, I argue that these works are about the violent/desperate desire which arises from romantic objectification, wherein one partner gazes upon the other as a romantic idea rather than a real person, and how this comes from, I believe, a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of being seen for real.

In case you would like to skip around or are curious about the structure of this piece:

Section 1…..The Superficial Gaze in The Great Gatsby

Section 2….The Mythology of Feeling Seen

Section 3…Romantic Objectification and Chimeras: party 4 who?

Section 4…Superficial Longing and “Cruel Optimism”: Green Light and the green light

Section 1…The Superficial Gaze in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, party4u, and Green Light are not about true love.

They’re closer to what Romeo and Juliet was about — the kind of infatuation, obsession, misplaced desire, objectification of a love interest which can culminate in anger, martyrdom, or violence. Civil hands awash with civil blood.

I experienced this type of “love” with my ex. It was more of a superficial obsession, limerence, one might say. I romantically objectified my ex as My Person without really thinking about it or seeing what was really between us. It was all gaze, all image, all projection.

In The Great Gatsby, there is a double gaze of this kind. Nick Carraway watches Jay Gatsby watch Daisy Buchanan. Other academics have already written about the homoerotic nature of Nick’s writing of Gatsby, which begins with this description: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away” (2).

There’s layers of yearning and watching and obsession — after all, the narrator names his book for Gatsby, who is obsessed with Daisy. It is notable that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to narrate the book through someone else in the plot, rather than Gatsby’s first person or through a more omniscient narrator. He chose someone planted firmly in the world of West & East Egg. That’s because the kind of love that The Great Gatsby is about, is really a desire of gaze. It’s more about yearning for the ideal of a certain person rather than true love.

Nick’s gaze of Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, Daisy, as well as Jay Gatsby is profoundly intimate. He describes these characters, respectively:

“Not even the effeminate swank of [Tom’s] riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body…It was a body of enormous leverage—a cruel body” (7).

Of Daisy, he writes, “[she] began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again” (9).

Upon encountering Jordan Baker, he writes, “I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet” (11).

As for Gatsby, Nick writes an entire paragraph about his smile, beginning with: “It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life” (48).

However, this is the closest we can get to the other characters, since there is no narrator who can tell us what each person is actually thinking or feeling. They are objects of his experiential gaze. In choosing a narrator who is also a character, Fitzgerald forgoes the 19th-century literary practice of free indirect speech. Free indirect speech is when a third-person narrator relays the innermost thoughts of a character. The reader gets to go inside the mind of multiple characters.

The legibility of the characters is all external, which emphasizes how the desperation and passion felt by everyone in The Great Gatsby is a product of something superficial. We only get to know these people through seeing them, through the peering eyes of Nick. We gaze through his gazing. There is no knowledge of anyone’s interiority, just what we can observe from the outside.

This literary environment mirrors the real world, one wherein projection and objectification based on superficial perceptions create entire narratives and mythologies. Any high school English teacher will include something in the Gatsby unit about Nick being an unreliable narrator. For those who, like Nick, possess only a gaze of a situation, who fall under the spell of an image of a person, they may be their own unreliable narrators.

Section 2…The Mythology of Feeling Seen

When I wrote that mythology in my head about my ex and I, about every random detail early on in our relationship being some sort of forebear to a lasting marriage, I was my own Nick Carraway. I was the unreliable narrator of my own life, blinded by an exterior I could not see past or know beyond.

This superficiality is not just about wealth or status. Certainly, the criticism of that type of hedonism is part of what Fitzgerald set out to do. However, much of the superficial view of people in the novel is also based upon seemingly deep qualities — a person’s voice, smile, behaviors.

However, these are still highly external; they are a facade. A person can project a lot onto someone with a certain charisma or charm, as I did with my ex. In our particular case, I relate to Nick’s instant infatuation with Gatsby’s smile, as my ex’s presence, conversation, and company made you feel so eternally reassured, so seen, so perfectly perceived.

In what Nick saw in Gatsby, I saw in my ex. Despite all the bad things I can say about our relationship, — I will give him this: he made you feel so fucking seen. The Great Gatsby title makes sense because there is a certain sense of greatness people who are hugely charismatic, good at listening, and profoundly perceptive and warm have. Nick continues to write of Gatsby’s smile:

“It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey” (48).

When Nick wrote that Gatsby had a smile you’d only encounter four or five times in life, I know what he meant. After my ex and I broke up, I worried it would be years until I found another person who was as social-emotionally fulfilling as my ex.

In the 1970s, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick conducted the Still Face Experiment. Hundreds of mothers held their infants, speaking and playing with them as usual. Then, they were supposed to suddenly stop responding to the baby. No matter what the babies do, they are met with the same unaffected stare, with zero indication that their caretaker is seeing them. Quickly, the babies panic. Every single baby erupted into a tantrum over not being seen.

Oftentimes, the entire world feels like a mother whose expression has fallen flat in the face of my cries — whether they be of pain or joy. I feel so deeply unseen at times; all I really want from a romantic partner is someone who not only sees my smile or my tears, but smiles or cries in return. I crave, too, someone whose self-expression is as clear and answerable as the face of a child. Instead, dating oftentimes feels like I’m bawling or laughing maniacally to a disaffected stare. My ex had this uniquely powerful smile Fitzgerald described.

The problem is, it’s a facade. Like Nick, I projected a certain greatness and grandiosity onto this smile. I don’t know if it’s just charisma, charm, perhaps some form of emotional manipulation, a mask that can be taken off — but whatever it is, it is just as superficial as any other physical trait, like hair or shoes.

I fell really hard for the facade. And I would have done anything to get it. Put genital fluid on my neck, shower Febreeze off my legs, beg a person to believe me — and even yes, throw a party. In our interim period, when my ex and I were trying to be friends again for round #2, I had a birthday party. While I did not throw it for him, I threw it with him in mind.

I invited him, hoping he’d make it and see me with (cue Janis Ian voice) all my awesome friends at this awesome party and think to himself: “Wow, she’s actually a catch.”

According to Jordan Baker, Gatsby bought his house in West Egg, across from Daisy’s East Egg home, “so that Daisy would be just across the bay” (78). Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby “wants to know…if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over” (78).

Nick is the voice of reason, and writes in what I read in an incredulous tone, “He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could ‘come over’ some afternoon to a stranger’s garden” (78).

I dispensed weed and Doritos to Sociology majors for my 23rd birthday. In between taking photos and blowing out candles on picnic blankets, I continuously scanned my phone to see if my ex would come last minute. In the end, he did not come to my party.

Jordan adds that Gatsby only throws his parties because he “half expected [Daisy] to wander into one…but she never did” (79).

Which brings us to “party 4 u” by Charli XCX. This song has often been compared to The Great Gatsby as half-meme, half real lyrical analysis.

I think there is something there. The song has a certain manic-desperate tone that only comes from violent, obsessive desire or superficial, toxic longing. It’s a song about trying to get someone who doesn’t want you, through a lavish display of attention-seeking, likely because you’ve created a fantasy of who they are in your mind that isn’t real.

This kind of Gatsby-like behavior is all around us. Users post to Instagram in the hopes that their crush will see it, like the post enough to like them back.

“They liked my post!” becomes “They like me!”

Urban Dictionary literally calls this behavior “Gatsbying”: “Posting to social media and then waiting for that one specific person to check it out. The modern day equivalent of Gatsby throwing elaborate parties seeking Daisy’s attention.”

If you’re doing something like this, there’s a chance you’re already in the wrong. If they were really Your Person, you wouldn’t need to lure them in with a hot selfie or DJ booth. More importantly, if you’re putting on the soiree of the century to get someone, how can you know that what you’re doing isn’t rooted in some superficial obsession, some image you have of what this person is, all the while bulldozing past who they really are?

The Great Gatsby is timeless in its portrayal of people desperate for the wrong person, and the lengths we’ll go to get the object of our unhinged romantic desire.

Section 3…We talk a lot about sexual objectification, but not enough about romantic objectification; who is this party 4?

If someone is sexually objectified, this means that they are seen as an unanimated physical object solely for sexual use; their interiority becomes irrelevant, and their only worth becomes their fuckability.

A romantic object on the other hand, is when a person becomes an objectified project of what the other person wants romatically. Have you ever projected a grand romantic narrative onto someone? Have you ever imagined they have ideal qualities? Known someone less than a month but declared them your soulmate? Put someone in a box of The One after just a good first date? Concocted a fantasy in your head of what would happen next, only to find yourself disappointed when they didn’t fall in line?

This is all romantic objectification. When you imagine someone is something they are not, over inflate your shared reality, over-imagine who they are, and project an image of the type of relationship/life you want onto someone who does not want that. When you try to truncate who a person is or shoehorn them into some daydream you have. You ignore who they really are, and turn them into a Romantic Object.

More recently, I dated someone who romantically objectified me. She wanted the type of relationship where she was the caring homemaker and I a stoic, doting recipient of her martyr-like efforts. It was also clear she wanted some sort of Billie Eillish soft butch girlfriend, and so she was constantly discouraging any expression of femininity I had. I only existed within the context of her fantastical projections.

It felt like some script or fantasy was playing in the background of our interactions in her head, and when I didn’t say my line or step into my role, she became crestfallen. Rather than seeing me for who I really was and what I really wanted, she tried to force a type of relationship, onto a projection of me. I was a romantic object.

I did the same thing to my ex. It’s always the people who you project onto the hardest that create the biggest heartbreak. Perhaps because, not only did I lose him, I was losing the entire idea of he was and who we were I had in my head.

He once told me about his distrust and doubt of my feelings for him, amid a conversation about how many people he encounters who quickly fall in love with him and crave exclusivity about three dates in.

“I just feel like, how can people like me when they don’t even really know me?”

In a snap, I replied: “I do know you.”

How could I have been so hubristic? I don’t know. I was 22. I was in love for the first time, or so I thought. But I should have paused when my ex said that, because he was right. He was right to doubt people could actually like him when they didn’t even know him. I certainly didn’t; instead I projected an image of who I thought he was, what I thought I knew onto him. He wasn’t a random guy; to be sure, he was a close enough approximation to the image in my head.

Nevertheless, the person I thought I loved was a figment of my imagination. Anytime he stepped outside of the romantic box I had placed him in, for better or for worse, it would create discord in our relationship. I either ignored these traits of his or came into direct clash with them.

We’ve all been there — you’re only on date two or three with someone who suddenly gets very clingy, obsessive, starts to trauma dump, and delivers a pre-scripted speech about how they feel like “this is going somewhere,” when you two in fact barely know each other. This has happened to me a few times, and every time it’s acutely clear that this person is probably just lonely and wants a relationship but not a relationship with me. So, they find someone who is as close to the thing they want in their head, pair it with a mythology they’ve created about you, and try to make a relationship happen. To quote my ex, “How can people like me when they don’t even really know me?”

I’ll give an example that puts him in a more positive light. There is a part of me that’s bitchy, cold, judgmental, close off, guarded. He, for instance, told me that he wanted to go to all of my stand-up comedy shows and be a “really supportive partner.” I shuddered at the thought, and even though I didn’t perform for most of our relationship, if I had, I would have never invited him. The thought of potentially bombing in front of a romantic partner makes me want to move to Arkansas and change my name to Evelyn. It seems like he attends all the shows of his new partner.

He also “loved conflict” and fantasized about having a really serious, emotionally heavy, tear-filled disagreement or argument only to make up and then have really profound, close sex. The thought of having sex adjacent to any kind of conflict makes me want to buy colored contacts and move to Alaska.

I need someone who can hear me say “that baby looks busted” and not think of me as twisted. He could not do this. Instead, we talked endlessly about the toxic feedback loop wherein he judged me for being judgmental, turning him into the kind of judgmental person he hypocritically purports to dislike.

I didn’t see him for who he really was, and any time he existed outside of the framed image I had of him, I’d vigorously wipe it away with emotional Clorox.

But everyday, he was just close enough to this image. He possessed unique qualities I hadn’t found in anyone else — namely, that eternally reassuring smile and sense of being seen he offered. I ran with those. To my credit, he was also deeply manipulative and disingenuous, which made it harder to see the traits of his I maybe didn’t like.

He also liked to shroud his push-pull expressions of commitment and then avoidance by saying he’s a “people pleaser,” a form of therapy speak which allows people to sympathetically get away with duplicitous affection for the sake of personal validation or martyr-like behavior in order to obtain valorization.

The speaker in “party 4 u” reflects romantic objectification, whereby instead of really seeing someone, a person does a lot of stuff to win them over to get an image they have, like a romantic prize. She sings: “I only threw this party for you, for you / Birthday cake in august, but your birthday’s 19th of June.”

At a first glance, this detail seems positive. Birthday cake when it’s not your birthday seems like the most lavish, munificent thing a person can serve at the party for you. Only, it misses the mark. There’s a reason for that “but.” If the singer understood who their object of affection really is, they wouldn’t have a birthday cake for them on a random day in August.

The cake is really for the speaker to get attention, to get her romantic object. It’s equivalent to Gatsby throwing lavish parties, when really all Daisy probably wants is a husband who won’t cheat on her. Birthday cake in August for someone who’s birthday is months early misses the mark. It’s a desperate grab for winning affection. It’s over the top. It’s off.

The verse continues this way (0:48-1:15):

One thousand pink balloons
Dj with your favorite tunes
Birthday cake in August
But you were born nineteenth of June

Champagne pourin' in your mouth
Called your friends from out of town
Got the party bag with the purple pills
And I'm waiting for you by the window, yeah

Called your digits, but the phone kept ringin'
Wish I knew what you were thinking
Na-na, na, one thousand pink balloons
Dancin' on to your favorite tunes
Hope you walk in the party
'Cause I threw the party just for you, like oh

The wild opulence of the party described here is more of the same. It’s the singer saying, “Look at all of this stuff I did for you, why won’t you answer my calls?” This is the behavior of someone lusting after a chimera, an idea of a person, meanwhile ignoring the real interiority of the person they’ve made the party for. She even notes that she has the birthday wrong, but it doesn’t matter. It’s about the idea of this person coming to party with her, watch her party on them. It’s all gaze.

It’s important to note that in all these scenarios, no one asked for the party, the Instagram post, the big gift or show of affection.

The song’s titular line, “I only threw this party for you” becomes whiny, bitter, entitled. It comes across as “I did all of this for you, why won’t you date me now!?” rather than, “I love you so I did this for you.”

Listening to the verse, you can hear the longing now. But it’s not longing for a true love. It’s longing for someone the speaker feels entitled to. It’s longing for a romantic object. It’s Gatsby holding his arms out desperately to the green light, yearning for something that doesn’t exist. His image of Daisy was just that, a superficial figment of his imagination. Nick’s image of Gatsby too was a kind of chimera. (1:15-1:35)

I only threw this party for you
Only threw this party for you, for you, for you
I was hopin' you would come through
I was hopin' you would come through, it's true, it's true
Only threw this party for you
I only threw this party for you, for you, for you
I'm about to party on you
Watch me, watch me party on you, yeah

What is the “for” doing in “party for you”?

“For” has multiple prepositional meetings.

There is “for” as in “I made this sandwich for you.” Literally, the thing you do is for the other person or subject. This “for” is generous.

In theory, that’s the type of for the singer is using when she sings, “I only threw this party for you, for you. Only threw this party for you.”

“I trained hard for this medal.” Here, the “for” is transactional. The thing that someone has done something “for” is an object — a medal, a prize, a validation, a vindication.

The transactional “for” indicates a phenomenon in which people do things to get you without getting you. It’s to obtain you and to project a certain relationship onto you dynamic or to project an ideal onto you, then make that ideal a reality. If Fitzgerald’s novel is any indicator, the realization that this ideal one so madly seeks is only a chimera must be violent and or heartbreaking.

Which brings us to the verse which has become viral on TikTok. Prepositionally, “party for you” becomes “party on you” (1:35-2:00)

You could watch me pull up on your body
Like it's summer, take my clothes off in the water
Splash around and get you blessed like holy water

I don't know what you were waiting for
You know that I've been waiting for you
(I only threw this party for you)

Yeah, if you saw my tears, would you touch me?
Kiss me on the mouth, say you love me?
Leave a message, tell me you're sorry?
Hit me right back, hit me right back
Why you treating me like someone that you never loved?

In this section, which is mostly sung as one long, mesmerizing incantation, the speaker focuses mostly on herself. This passage is mostly about what her romantic object will see when they arrive to the party. It makes sense that right before this, party for you becomes “watch me watch me party on you.”

Fundamentally, it’s about her, not the person she loves. It’s about being seen, feeling seen, having this person “come through” and recognize their love for her. Phrases like “watch me” and “saw my tears” emphasize the nature of gaze here. This speaker does not truly love or see her romantic object; she has designated them as the person she wants to be seen by. Oddly, she throws a lavish party for them, but also requests an apology.

Her final line, “Why you treating me like someone that you never loved?” indicates that this person is over her, done. She does not care. But for someone who’s sunk their teeth into a romantic object, the other person’s feelings, interest, or interiority do not matter. What matters is that she wants to recreate whatever mythological magic she thought they had, thinks they still might have.

However, it’s gone. The second verse (2:48-3:23) that’s gone viral now is the one where, even the artist herself admits, the speaker realizes her romantic object is not coming. Others have chimed in, to the sound of 54,000 posts with the hashtag #party4u

In this verse, which repeats “party on you, party on you,” the full realization of the superficiality, the gaze, the obsession, the limerence comes into view. It’s the moment you realize not only that the person you want isn’t coming, that they never will, and that maybe they were never even real. It’s heartbreak at its most existential form.

The beat comes in slowly like a thunder of realization; it’s the sonic hammer of reality dropping on your idealization. The verse slowly descends into a calm madness, chillingly halcyon in its quiet amid a rowdy pop song. It’s the moment in a disaster movie when the family looks over the devastation of their fire-wrecked home, the last moment of eye contact a vanishing couple holds as one of them boards the plane goodbye, the moment you look drunkenly in the mirror and realize they were never who you thought they were, then go back out onto the dance floor like that pause of quiet never happened.

It’s the feeling of ascending rabid within a delusion, before a magnificent crash.

That happens in the last verse, where the speaker whines (4:04-4:17):

“Come to my partyyyyy…Come to my partyyyyyyy.” You can hear the anguished defeat, perhaps a burgeoning cacoethes in her voice. It’s a borderline violent desire that only comes from wanting someone who doesn’t want you. It’s a cry of heartbreak, you can hear the bawl in her voice.

This is her final, desperate plea to get the person she wants. Only the person doesn’t want her. The person might not even really exist. It might just be that she is dying for the project she has in her mind, to be finally seen, to win over a romantic object.

Notably, the song ends with a recording of a cheering crowd, even though the recording is not performed live, and is part of a famously covid quarantine era album all about being stuck at home. The song likely ends with this facade of being watched and having an audience, because that’s ultimately what the speaker wanted, and that’s what we all want. To feel seen, understand, watched. For someone to “watch me party on you.” For someone to look at us, and to be a better mirror than any piece of glass could ever be.

Section 4…Superficial Longing and “Cruel Optimism”: “Green Light” and the green light and the blue phone light

Recently, my ex got engaged. I watched videos of his engagement party on Instagram. This time, the gaze was inverted. I was not trying to capture his sight or perception. I was merely looking.

Now, he was throwing the lavish party. And it gave Gatsby himself a run for his nouveau riche money. My ex’s parents make about five million dollars per year (to this day, my major lament about failing to maintain my relationship with him is failing to secure the bag of all bags).

But he did not throw the party for me. There’s no one for him to sing “I only threw this party for you” to. Maybe his fiancee, at best. But really, had thrown the party for himself. He threw the party for his fiancee, for the engagement, for his relationship.

The closer that “for” gets to the thing the party is actually for, the closer you get to true love. As in, if you throw an engagement party that’s actually for your engagement, for yourself as a newly engaged person and for your fiancee, that’s real. If you throw a party for someone else who is not there, if you throw a party under the guise of a party but it’s really to impress/woo/seduce someone, you’ve gotten further from the point. At his party, there was no object to obtain, just the celebration of what I imagine and hope is true, healthy love.

All to say that: these written works portray a kind of love which is superficial. It’s limerent. There’s something wrong. For one, real love and soulmate-ship is reciprocal; if this person was really your person, they’d be at the fucking party with you. Secondly, obsessing over or wanting someone to the extent that they become a point of physical fixation: a light, prey to lure in with your epic party, it is clear that you are projecting something onto them.

Looking back, I had placed too much upon him. I didn’t really know him.

I recently had a sex dream about my ex’s fiancee, then about him. I saw a Jungian psychoanalyst to tell me what the latter dream meant. Yes, I live in LA.

My dream about my ex began after we just finished having sex. I recall feeling satisfied in the dream. The sex was satisfactory, not terrific, but good. I then began trying to sneak out of my ex’s house. I tip toed around trying to gather my socks, keys, dignity. As I did this, I heard him sobbing in the bed, asking for me to come back so we could “talk about everything.” I said “Yeah, sure,” then smirked as I slid out into the hallway with my things, knowing I would silently escape. This time I would leave him high and dry.

On my way out, I passed a mannequin wearing a fabulous skirt. I was enamored by this skirt. I tried silently to reach for my phone to snap a picture of it, so I could find it online or sew it myself. I wasn’t able to take a photo with all the stuff I was holding. I saw something that looked like the skirt’s tag, which had been cut off. I figured I would use the details on it so find the skirt online, so I stole the tag, figuring it had been meant to go in the trash anyway. When I got home, I realized the tag was actually a jewelry box with real gold and silver bracelets inside.

My Jungian psychoanalyst told me the following: “It’s interesting that the real energetic charge of the dream is the skirt, not the sex. As you’re speaking, it even sounds like what was most exciting for you in the dream was this clothing and jewelry, not him. These are superficial things adjacent to who he is and his presence in your life. I think this dream is telling you that there is something superficial about this relationship, and there is something superficial to your attachment to him. You also seem to think that you can have this little attachment, take one little thing with you, but it’s actually much bigger than you think. And it’s very superficial and doesn’t seem to have anything to actually do with talking with him or sleeping with him.”

She mentioned something about money, and I gasped, because I hadn’t even told her the backstory that my ex’s family is fabulously wealthy.

There’s a reason why the green light is green. Any high school English teacher will tell you this color partially symbolizes money/wealth. Sure, Jay Gatsby may actually love Daisy and Nick may actually love Gatsby for their unique charm, reassuring quality, and charisma; it might also simply be the way wealth makes a matte rock glimmer rainbow like a diamond in the sun.

Money imparts certain qualities that may not really be there, much like the dispersion of gemstones, wherein its white light is separated into white’s component colors. Shone under the right light, any jewel creates a spectral display known as “diamond fire.” In a dark room, a diamond goes back to a series of translucent cuts, ready to reflect onto the viewer whatever colors it wants to see.

Not only was it possible that I was simply enamored by his wealth, but perhaps enamored by the flush image I had of him and our relationship in my head. Independent of finances, I projected an idea onto him and a future onto our connection that wasn’t really there.

I was in love with something deeply superficial, a facade on multiple levels. He would pretend to be something he wasn’t at times, trick me into wanting him more than I really did, and I found myself anxiously obsessed with “getting him,” the Birkin of romantic objects. Like the Birkin bags torn apart on social media only to be revealed as cheap stitching and cardboard, there wasn’t much to be valued beneath the facade I had initially seen in us.

“Green Light” by Lorde is an ecstasy. Listeners have spent days pacing their room after hearing it. The build up to the chorus feels like the tremor before a manic episode, the moment before a kiss, the final spin of a plane’s wheels on the ground before it ascends into airspace. Hearing the song’s crescendo feels like accomplishing the impossible, like being able to hold light in your arms. It’s the feeling of wanting something so hard you feel like it’s really there; but as the chorus beckons (2:34):

“I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it.”

The song’s ecstasy is really just the mania a person feels from wanting and waiting. It’s limerence, the idea of a person, wanting someone you feel sees you, of feeling seen for the first time. None of these things are true love, necessarily, but they feel so good to want and to fantasize and so crushing when you realize you may never, ever get them.

She sings: “I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go.” This line shook me when writing this and thinking about my dream. You can try to collect your shit, grab your phone and your car keys and leave your lover’s house, but it doesn’t mean you fully let go. You never detached from the dream of this person. I never fully detached, not until I thought about all of this.

As I awoke to text messages from friends about the Instagram stories of my ex’s engagement, I returned again to my blue light, like moth to a flame, deer to a headlight.

I was inundated with screenshots of an account I had blocked years ago. My friends assumed that amid the protective fog I had ensconced myself in, I would want a flashing beam to see what I was missing at the far end of the dock.

The engagement party, owing to the immense wealth of my ex’s parents, honestly put whatever shindig Jay Gatsby had to shame. Baz Luhrmann wishes he could have gotten an invite for inspiration. I watched videos of my ex and his new fiancee stand, literally, on a third-story balcony, overlooking the guests in the backyard below, all looking up to the couple like new royalty. Large heaters, twinkly lights, and suited servers punctuated every photo.

My ex broke up with me saying that he could not imagine being in a relationship for longer and needed “a long time to be single,” but a friend saw him on Hinge two weeks after we broke up; a year later, a new friend revealed to me that he had met up with my ex from Grindr just a month after we broke up. As they jerked off together in the back of my ex’s white Mercedes, he said to my now-friend, “I want to take you on a real date and treat you right.”

He told me he wanted to stay friends, but every attempt I made at friendship was met with ghosting or cruel avoidance.

During our relationship, he confessed that he needed to have sex but didn’t feel secure enough to have casual sex. So, he would just get into a relationship to have someone to have sex with, get the girlfriend experience, but never intended on committing. He told me this to let me know that actually, he “wasn’t doing that with me” — I was special. I stayed with him for 3 more months.

He was a careless person, smashing up things and people everywhere he went. The Great Gatsby is a timeless portrayal of the desire for people who possess the charisma and beauty of Daisy Buchanan, or even Jay Gatsby himself, and the way this desire will eventually destroy you.

I know there’s a bit of irony in declaring that all my feelings for my ex were a case of limerence, obsession, projection, romantic objectification, and then writing probably the longest essay on this site about it. But I think as far as romantic experiences and human devastations go, limerent love and romantic objectification are perhaps the most powerful. There’s a reason why the most iconic “love story” in the western canon ends in death; why time and time again, stories about love turn violent. Desire, especially when it’s for a person who you’ve led yourself to believe can fulfill everything you want, see you, understand you, can turn violent and obsessive in an instant.

In Romeo and Juliet, people die over this kind of “love.” In The Great Gatsby and “party 4 u,” people throw immaculate parties. People die too, there. In the novel and “Green Light,” people wait and wait for a light that may be just that — an illumination of something you can never really have. A trick of the eye that can eclipse upon itself as quickly as it shone.

Well, I gave up the wedding so that I could be home at exactly 8:15 pm to drive my grandma to our family’s Seder. Though I was sad to miss the wedding, Passover is really important to my grandma.

She told me she has no one else to drive her; I knew it would feel good to be the one to take her.

So I stayed in our neighborhood during the day; I tutored; I worked out. But because my grandma is the most anxious human being on earth, when she saw that I was not home at 5 PM and then 6 PM, she figured I was not coming at all.

As I pulled up to the house at 7:45, a whole half hour early, I saw that she’s already outside.

“How did you know I was coming home right now? Also, we don’t leave yet.”

Then she gestures behind me and I see my grandma’s sister.

Because I wasn’t at home waiting to drive her 4 hours before the Seder even began, she called someone else to drive her. Mind you, every single day this week she would anxiously check in with me: “You are taking me at 8:15, right? I have no one else to take me.” I would reply, “Yes, at 8:15, I will be there.”

In the driveway, as I turn around and see my great aunt in her car, and realize this is the reason why my grandma is already outside, in her classical 30-minutes-early fashion, I literally pull at my hair.

“WHY DID YOU BEG ME TO DRIVE YOU WHEN THIS WHOLE TIME YOU COULD HAVE JUST ASKED YOUR SISTER?”

“You weren’t home, I didn’t think you were coming. I got nervous.”

“I MISSED A FRIEND’S WEDDING FOR YOU!” I shout.

“Who gets married on Passover?” she asks, unbothered and genuinely perplexed.

“FUCKING NON JEWS!!! YOU KNOW, THE OTHER 99.9% OF THE FUCKING POPULATION!!!” I shout in our driveway. It’s the most unhinged argument I’ve had in public, bar none, and the most I’ve ever felt like George Costanza.

In this moment, I instinctively reach for a pillow to scream into. But there is only the hard gravel beneath my feet. I think about all the other times my grandma has done this to me: made me rush home in traffic to take her to a doctor’s appointment or nail salon, only for her to call someone else because I ran 2 minutes late. Or the times when I change all my plans for her, and then she decides she doesn’t want to go to the super market after all.

It’s also just the way me and time work in my family; no one seems to care for or respect my time. Maybe it’s because no one quite understands what I do, because I don’t have an in-person 9-5, or because my family is traditional and I’m not married, but they seem to think I’m just always around all day and have no life.

I’ve had cousins with their little kids drop by my grandma’s place, or plan a whole party, without ever telling me in advance, then become upset and offended that I have to leave as they arrive because I have a friend’s birthday party, a work meeting, a date with my laptop and a book.

In regard to me and time, there is a gendered and generational component. My grandma has two sons who are completely useless; one of them has not seen her in 3 years even though he lives half an hour away from her, and the other hasn’t given her a ride or ran an errand for her in years. Oddly, his wife does — a lot more than he does. Sometimes my grandma’s sister drives her places or helps her with her taxes. But oftentimes, a lot of this stuff just falls on me.

I don’t even want to go to this Seder now. I am so angry realizing that I missed this once-in-a-lifetime experience with my beautiful friends. My grandma’s neuroticism got in the way of me even doing the thing that was going to make missing the wedding semi-worth it. My whole day was wasted. I can never get that time back.

Suddenly, the thought of going to this Seder repulsed me. I was too angry to look at the whole thing of it all that caused this.

But how could I miss the Seder? How could I think of doing anything else on this night?

It’s also worth it to mention here that this Saturday was my last day of being 24. As the clock would strike midnight, I would also be turning a quarter of a century; the age at which, people say, your prefrontal cortex finally develops and true adult life begins.

It dawns on me that I have constantly criticized friends for being incapable of cutting off the tightly-wound umbilical cords with their families, whether that means sacrificing meaningful social plans for a random family dinner, choosing a career path or marriage partner based on what their family will think, or worse of all — continuing to believe the same vaguely racist, homophobic, or misogynistic beliefs their family holds because “well, it’s just the way I was raised” as if people are forced to inherit their family’s hatred, and are not actually, rather, morally charged with unlearning those manacles for the sake of the next generation. It’s weak, self-victimizing baby behavior.

Also, obviously, I am not advocating that if you elderly great aunt calls you because she is in the emergency room and needs someone there you say: “Sorry, I have a BDSM dungeon party to go to tonight and I really can’t miss that, so I need to set a boundary here.”

What I am saying is — grow the fuck up and have a little discernment. There’s a big spectrum in between completely giving up any reasonable level of responsibility to your family, versus caving to their every whim and expectation. I figured 25 was the right age to find that middle ground.

I call my friend Lena, who told me she was going to party in West Hollywood after the wedding. I had declined her invite because I would be at the Seder, but now I just wanted to get really drunk and yes — eat bread.

The basic story of Passover/Pesach goes like this: The Jews were enslaved in Egypt, building the pyramids. It was terrible labor, so much so that at the Passover Seder, Jews dip green herbs in salt water to remember what it felt like for the Jewish slaves who cried so much that the taste of tears was always in their mouths. After a decree that all the Jewish baby boys must be killed — an attempt to completely wipe out the Jewish population — Moshe’s mother Yocheved puts him in a basket in the river, hoping someone finds and saves him. In a twist of biblical fate, Moshe ends up being raised by the evil Pharaoh’s daughter. G-d1 calls upon Moshe to demand that Pharaoh free the Jewish people. After a lot of arguing and ten plagues, the Jews finally pack to get the fuck out.

The Hebrews were in such a rush to leave Egypt that they did not even have time to let the dough leaven, leaving them instead with more of a cracker than fluffy bread. Today we eat that cracker — matzoh — to remember this moment.

And so for the 10 days of Passover, observant Jews do not eat anything leavened from wheat. So no bread, no cheerios, no muffins, no cake, etc. I usually get really skinny on this holiday because I just live off of whole foods like baked yams and avocados and slices of cheddar cheese. I’m still waiting for some celebrity to culturally appropriate this shit and call it “the Passover diet.”

It’s a really big fucking deal to eat bread on Passover if you’re a Jew. It’s like the third most sacrilegious thing you can do, after eating on Yom Kippur or eating pig at all, ever.

But I am going to rebel tonight. I’m turning 25 and I have had it with being treated like a little kid with no life. I am going to get drunk in West Hollywood and eat bread. I sit on the redline metro and read from my Kindle, which fits perfectly into my shoulder bag, ignoring the sounds of people blasting music and TikToks and arguments with the air on the LA transit system.

Fresh off the no. 4, I see Lena, who is with her lady of the night, Chelsea. Lena told me earlier that she is actually currently seeing two women; “they don’t know about each other yet but I think I can make a three-way happen.”

I welcome this fuckgirl behavior, as I can really only be friends with other equally horrible people. Lena is wearing her new butch haircut, a suit, a bolo tie, and a blonde who works in marketing on her arm.

“You look unhoused,” my bitch friend Lena says to me. It’s the most LA insult ever — politically correct enough to not tell me I look “homeless,” and yet the pEoPle witHoUT HoUsiNg gotta catch a stray if someone’s outfit doesn’t look right.

I freak out and immediately yank off my beanie, which I had only worn for warmth while walking from the metro to the bus, and start manically pulling my hair out of my low bun.

There’s a guy on the corner with a fancy digital camera doing that thing where he takes a photo of you without your consent then asks if you want to pay for your own digital violation. He flashes a photo, of me manically pulling my hair out of my bun, wincing at the pain of the hair tie pulling on a knot in my frizzy Jewish hair. He shows us the photo.

I literally scream and run away; Lena and Chelsea cackle.

My paranoia, guilt, and anxiety roll through me like a bad acid trip. Why did I give up my Seder for this? Will I regret not going my whole life? What if this is the last Passover I’ll have with my grandma? I thought about how confused and pissed everyone must be that I didn’t come, the discomfort I’ll feel the next time I see them, which is tomorrow, for the second night Seder. What the hell am I doing? Why couldn’t I just suck it up and go to my cousin’s house tonight?

“I told you! You looked horrible!” Lena chuckles.

“I’m already on the verge of psychosis, please don’t say that again,” I tell them both, and they laugh, cocking their heads back to me with their arms linked together.

I trail behind them like a flower girl, except instead of scattering flowers from a wicker basket, I have a small bottle of 40% Ukrainian vodka tucked in my pants. Talk about packing.

We start at hi tops, which I can always rely on for (in my opinion) the best music and no line.

Lena buys me two shots of tequila. I guess she isn’t so horrible.

We migrate to Beaches, which I haven’t been to yet, but Chelsea says there’s usually more women there, which is good for me because I’m definitely down to make out with someone, at the very least. We make our way to Fiesta Cantina, another great music spot. Our friend Miguel joins us there.

There’s a lot of straight women in Weho that night. I know people are going to give me the kneejerk reaction: “How do you know if they’re straight or just femme, or bisexual?”

My response is: You can spot a straight girl in a gay club the same way you can spot an American tourist in Paris.

There’s a certain “Woah, huh, wow” look in their eyes, like they’re sightseeing. Also, both groups never know how to dress right or fuck well. I’m definitely not above topping a straight girl who wants to experiment or is just horny, but at this point in the night, I was three shots of tequila and two large swigs of Ukrainian vodka deep, so I was not about to try to put the moves on someone who thinks they’re an ally because they know what poppers are.

Lena and Chelsea leave. Miguel and I dance until 1, at which point we decide to call it a night.

But first, my sacrilegious bread. West Hollywood, like a lot of Los Angeles nightlife hubs, is populated by Latino sellers of bacon-wrapped hot dogs. I decide I’ll have the bread, but I won’t eat pig. I’m pissed at my family and my religion, but not that pissed.

“Sin jamon,”2 I clarify to the woman standing over a portable grill with roasting peppers, onion, and meat.

I watch as she scrapes off the ribbon of bacon, wrapped around the hotdog like a fatty cock ring, with her greasy skewer. The pressure of the hot metal rod dissolves the pork bow clean off the sausage. It’s a lot of phallic imagery, even for West Hollywood.

I drunkenly devour the chometz3 in four bites. Miguel plays me a new song he just produced on his way to drop me off, before I fall asleep.

The next morning, Sunday, I wake up with a mild hangover, a harbinger of the fact that I’m crossing that age bridge, the one which does not let you drink and drink and wake up fresh and hangoverless.

Fuck, I’m 25, I think. Worse than the tequila-related crapulousness, is the emotional hangover of guilt. Fuck, I missed the Seder last night. Why did I do that? Why did I act so impulsively on my anger?

During a Passover Seder, a lot of questions and parables are read aloud and asked around the table. One of them asks: Why is this night different from all other nights? Ma Nishtana is the name of the song we sing, which asks the four questions about the difference of the Seder night. Translated literally into modern Hebrew, “Ma” means what, and “Nishtana” means “we will change.”

We answer:

1) On all nights we need not dip even once, on this night we do so twice.

2) On all nights we eat chametz or matzah, and on this night only matzah.

3) On all nights we eat any kind of vegetables, and on this night maror.

4) On all nights we eat sitting upright or reclining, and on this night we all recline.

For me, this night had been different because I chose to go out and party and eat chometz instead of doing what everyone wanted me to do. I felt surges of guilt, shame, anxiety, regret, turmoil, joy, freedom, euphoria.

I turned 25. I was a real adult now, more so than ever before, less so than ever before. I went to West Hollywood on a Saturday night with my gay friends. What ever could be so different about that? Did I change?

Hunched over my nauseous stomach, I leave the house in a rush to meet a friend for coffee. Not 30 minutes into it, I field two calls from my grandma asking where I am, that she’s nervous again, because she doesn’t know where I went last night or where I am.

If I had to psychoanalyze, I think my grandma’s nervousness about where everyone is all the time, and her object permanence deficiency, wherein she thinks if you’re not at home two hours before leaving for somewhere then you’re not driving her at all, probably stems from the fact that one day in Mexico City she went to her fifth grade class. When she came home, her mother and the police told her that someone had shot her father in his textile shop. He was gone.

No one knows exactly what happened, but I imagine that for a child, this experience must have instilled a sense of constant worry about where people are. If someone is not literally right in front of you, who knows if they are there, or alive at all.

And because therapy was not normalized until 3 generations later, this tragedy has resulted in a nervous tic of my grandma, who frequently calls everyone to ask where they are, and if you don’t call back or come to physically see her promptly, you’ll escalate to receiving an “emergency” call from her, and then texts and calls from your other family members saying that she urgently needs to get in contact with you.

I call her back three times over the course of two hours to let her know I am ten minutes away and will be home soon. When I get home, she says she needs to give me my birthday card. I make up a lie about why I didn’t meet her at the Seder, that I wasn’t feeling well.

She starts to cry. It’s not about me. It’s also about me. But it’s also about our whole dysfunctional family; my father hasn’t spoken to her in years despite living nearby, my mom migrates like a nomad across the South and East Coast, my brother never visits LA, and my sister doesn’t care about Judaism.

“Your father didn’t come last night, your sister didn’t, I have no idea where your mother is, you weren’t there,” she says through a broken voice. “I just wanted to have the family together once before I die.”

I break down and cry too. Seeing your grandmother cry is like nothing. There’s no simile, no metaphor. It’s seeing your grandmother cry. I feel so bad for not coming last night, for letting my resentment about missing the wedding get the better of me, for giving into an impulse, for not scheduling the whole day better in the first place and finding her a ride for the Seder, so that way I could go to the wedding and just come half an hour late to the Seder. I feel so sad for her, that she is maybe spending her last Passover crying, that my family couldn’t get it together for her for one night, that I couldn’t. That guilt from the night before surges through me like tequila coming back up the other way; why didn’t I go? What if this was my last chance to have a Seder with her? Was the rebellion really worth it?

“Do I deserve this?” she asks. I rush into telling her: no, no. I tell her she was with so much other family last night: her great granddaughters, her other grandchildren, other cousins and family friends and extended family. It’s not enough for her. She wants to see her son, she wanted to see me and my sister. I tell her that I’ll come tonight, I’ll drive us together. Her mood instantly clears up. We hug and shed our final tears. I apologize for not coming, for “not feeling well.” I say I’m sorry about my parents and my sister, but it’s what it is, but that tonight we’ll have an amazing second Seder and I’ll be there.

When I arrive, everything is actually fine. I was worried my Orthodox cousins would be pissed at me for missing last night, but they actually assumed that I was out partying and seemed more excited to find out what I did and where I went than disappointed I didn’t come. In fact, even my uncle says, “It’s okay if you went out with other people,” before handing me a bag with my birthday gift, a silver necklace with a Hebrew prayer on it.

The Seder starts and goes perfectly. My little cousins sing the songs they learned in school, and their mom lets them throw kosher-for-passover marshmallows around the table to act out the plague of hail, toy bugs for the plague of locusts.

We turn to the page entitled, L’dor Vador — meaning “from generation to generation.” I get excited and tell the table that this is my favorite part of the haggadah. My cousin asks me why, and says we can skip her so I can read it, only if I share why it’s my favorite, serve a dvar4.

This portion of the haggadah reads:

In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt, as it is stated (Exodus 13:8); "For the sake of this, did the Lord do [this] for me in my going out of Egypt." Not only our ancestors did the Holy One, blessed be He, redeem, but rather also us [together] with them did he redeem, as it is stated.

I say that I love this section because it one, commands us to feel empathy. During a Passover Seder, Jews retell and also eat and act out the whole experience of being enslaved to being freed, to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors. We pray for the freedom of those who are unfree today.

L’dor Vador also teaches us that every generation must teach the next generation: “I am only free because my ancestors were freed. In freeing my ancestors, G-d also freed me.” There is something so poetic about this idea and this line, to me. This idea that if your great great great great grandparents were freed, it means freeing a whole line of descendants too. I am only free because at some point, somewhere, someone before me was freed, or freed themselves.

Our freedoms, or our oppressions, are always intertwined, intergenerational. When you free one woman, you free her entire line of descendants.

On Monday morning, the last day of chag5, my grandma and I have breakfast together. We are supposed to pray for the third morning in a row this morning, but she does not feel well enough to go to temple. I can tell she is over-lamenting how weak she feels, over-explaining and compensating for why she isn’t going to synagogue today, because she feels guilty. She might be talking to me, but really she is saying this to G-d: “I am sorry not to go to synagogue today, but I just don’t feel well enough after two Seder nights.”

I decide that I can free her from this guilt.

“Do you feel bad for not going?” I ask.

“Yes, I feel very bad.”

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO FEEL BAD!” I say slowly and clearly into the connection line of her hearing aid. “IT’S OKAY, G-D WILL UNDERSTAND!”

“No, you have to go to shul6 on Pesach.”

So much for healing intergenerational guilt.

I also see that part of her sadness about missing synagogue isn’t guilt, but once again, her existential dread. I’m the only person in the family she feels close enough with to cry to and talk about her existential fears and anguish. I can read it on her: she knows this might be her last Passover, and she doesn’t want to spend it at home playing mahjongg on her iPad.

I understand that what feels like freedom to me, feels like imprisonment to her. I tell her that next Shabbat, the Shabbat that also falls on Pesach, I will go to synagogue with her. She seems happy about this.

My grandma looks around her kitchen — at all of her plates, silverware, decorative paintings hanging from the already-decorative floral 1960s wallpaper, and begins, “You know, when I die, there’s a lot of things…”

She does this periodically. This being, she tells me she has to give all of her plates, silverware, dining accoutrement to someone when she passes.

“I want all the plates and all the silverware,” I say.

“But they’re milchege7 and fleishike8 and pesachdik. Are you going to keep kosher?”

I tell her yes, even though I have fantasized multiple times about what it would be like to live in a kitchen where I could bring home Chinese takeout, cook with non-hekshered9 spices from an Indian bodega, make a sandwich with brie from the farmer’s market. I might turn my life into a quintessentially Jewish American joke: I’ll have my kosher meat dishes, my kosher dairy dishes, my kosher passover dishes, and my dishes for unkosher food.

She starts another sentence with, “When I die…” to which I cheerfully interject, “in 10 years!” This is not so delusional; her mother lived until 101. Jewish women are one of those ethnicities, like Asian women I think, who live forever. My grandma is 91 but in perfect mental condition (well, barring an undiagnosed anxiety disorder) and pretty good physical shape. It helps too that my grandma is a Mexican Jew, who lived in Mexico City until the age of 21. The combination of sun, avocado, and externalizing her religious guilt onto every single family member has made for a powerful youth elixir. Who needs retinoids when you have chilaquiles and guilt tripping?

But my grandma isn’t interested in my optimism. She swallows an anti-epileptic seizure pill then says, “No, I feel like I should go soon. Enough is enough.”

I understand that the question about her plates and silverware is a question of existential dread. She’s looking around at everything she has done, made, and bought, wondering if the silverware she got in Mexico for her wedding, if the decorative plates she got on trips to Guatemala, Japan, and Jordan, if the bowls she bought at Macy’s on her first shopping spree in America will all just end up in a trash heap or with a yellow $1 sticker on them at Goodwill.

I just turned 25, and a week before me, she turned 91. #AriesQueens. We’re not in the same life stage but I understand the fear. What will happen when I die? What’s next? Was this all for nothing? I understand that, at this point, it’s too late to buy new silverware, too late to change her ways. She just wants to know that her memory will live on and that her silverware and her ways were not for nothing.

I turn to her and say: “I promise I’ll use all your silverware and plates in my kitchen, and I’ll use them and all the cookware to cook for Shabbat and Pesach for Batya and Shira [her five and seven-year-old great granddaughters] and my children too, and I’ll tell them these dishes were passed onto me from you.”

She smiles.

There is the lost art of conversation. In the words of a fellow substacker, we are facing the lost art of fingering. In cinema, movies that aren’t about big men with USA flag emblems saving the planet or CGI gorillas running around in the sand do not get the green light. In “literature,” books that do not have eighth-grade wattpad-level enemies-to-lovers arcs about fairies and gnomes, like slop in the trough for consumers who — I suppose — development executives have reduced to the level of swine, do not get sales or even publishing opportunity.

The lost art of dry humping is another unfortunate sign of the times.

Dry humping is not just about crotch-to-crotch contact. It’s really the rubbing of genitals onto any body part — arms, abdomens, thigh/leg (lesbians know what I’m talking about). In lesbian world, this is called “tribbing.” When people talk about “scissoring,” this is really what they’re talking about, and it is done between women, just not at the angles done in porn.

So as someone who has been having sex with women a lot more again lately (I’m a bisexual who identifies heavily with riding what’s known as the “BIcycle” wherein sometimes my attraction to women is more up, while other times it’s up for men) losing dry humping as part of my regular repertoire has been a major loss!

But also, for anyone, dry humping should be a key part of sex.

It builds build-up. Sex is not a prefab tiny home, it’s a bespoke castle where every brick must be laid by hand, every stone placed methodically, patiently, slowly. Everyone is always talking about foreplay, and for good reason.

There’s nothing better than a long makeout session where someone presses their quadricep against my clothed vulva. Or stimulating someone’s clitoral region with my tightened thigh while I lick and bite the side of their neck.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that dry humping has become so near-extinct that Mormons have created their own term for it: durfing. That’s right, the phrase and practice of dry humping has become so out of fashion that Mormons have been led to believe they invented their own sexual ritual, and even felt entitled to uniquely label something that has existed for centuries. This is kind of like Columbus “discovering” the Americas, or tech bros inventing a “luxury rideshare shuttle service” that’s just the bus, but $35.

The loss of this art was brought to my attention, actually, by having sex with someone who seems to be a master of it. On our forth date, Tania and I reached the culmination of our mutual seduction. And she taught me about the lost art of dry humping. Call it a seducation. Tania is an older woman I have been hunting for sport, essentially, and I finally caught my prey.

Tania is older — 63 — and I am 25. I know some of you may be clutching your pearls, reflexively squeezing together your cobweb-ridden inner thighs, grasping at the “Reagan ’84” coffee mug you’re holding, and if that’s the case, then you really do not belong here. But best of luck with the rest of your evening, whether it be crocheting or painting picket signs to protest your nearest Planned Parenthood.

With that out of the way, let me just say that Tania’s instruction in the dark arts has something to do with her age.

We begin in her kitchen. She sits on a tall chair, overlooking the kitchen counter.

We kiss between sips and drags, feeding each other the last of the wine and the joint.

Tania takes a final drag of a joint she rolled for us, and puts it out in the last of the wine, resting in her glass like a burgundy pond.

She starts biting and sucking on my neck. I feel my whole body release, finally. I want to lick her neck back; feel the warm, smooth skin glide on my tongue while I inhale pheromones and sweat.

I grab her by the side of her face and move her so that I can get to her neck. She, a lifelong dominant top with 45+ years of experience, laughs in my face when I make this initial attempt at domination. I like being laughed at, at least by her. It’s the sincerest form of degradation and belittling I can get.

Writing and thinking about sex confronts me with the failures and limitations of the English language. Like the Inuit people have hundreds of words for different kinds of snow, I’m a sexual creature who longs for hundreds of words to describe the body; I want a word for the side of the neck, the back of it, the sensitive skin right between the breasts, the soft dips of skin above the collarbones and beneath the ribcage, the skin right behind the knee and elbow that when touched or licked, sends a thin rod of cool lightning through the whole body.

We keep going back and forth to our necks like this until I finally cave.

“Can we go to your room?” I ask.

I try to push her onto the bed, and am met again with another laugh, like I’m a child who has offered to complete her taxes. She gently sits me on the bed by holding me at my waist, then sits next to me. We start kissing again but this time she’s slowly rubbing just the center of her palm over my breasts, my ribcage, my back. I put my hands under her shirt and I feel the strong, taut, thick muscle of her abdomen and upper back. Even though I cannot see what her skin looks like her under button-down, I can feel the tan, the way her skin glows from decades of weightlifting and fucking and living.

We lie down in one fell, synchronized swoop, me on top of her. I try my hardest to impress her. She has 40 years of experience on me, and I want to be good. Really good. I want to be good so badly.

I’m also overcome with pleasure from feeling her lips on mine, and finally, from rubbing my thigh against the area between her legs. I’m getting some reaction, but I can also tell that she’s getting used to me, and me to her. It’s a delicate dance.

I also know that she wants to be the one to take the lead, and I’m actually not used to that with women.

So weirdly, in knowing what to do, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be passive and submissive with a woman, because when I’m with women, I’m certainly always the top when it comes to the strap-on, and dynamically, I’m usually the one initiating, leading, and aggressing.

But that’s not what Tania wants. I decide to give up and give in. It feels good to finally let go, to not think. I try not to think about not thinking. Suddenly I feel her hand pulling on the back of my hair and it’s like a current pulling away my thoughts, my ruminations, my anxieties. I feel light-headed and wanting.

Her style of domination is far less aggressive in the beginning than what I’m used to, too. It’s a very slow build.

Instead of pushing me off of her, she simply begins to roll to the side, so that I land gently on my back now, with her on top of me. She presses her thigh against my crotch hard, while kissing and licking my neck. I could be here forever. Like a body answering my prayers, Tania stays in this position for a long time, with her leg between mine and her mouth now all over my collarbone, my chest.

I’ve never been in this position long enough to really take advantage of it. So now I start fully humping and rubbing and grinding on her thigh. I buck my hips fast and wild, like a fist pounding desperately against a door.

Heat builds between us, friction begets more heat. Embers birth their own fires from the mother flame. I feel close and we’ve only barely just begun.

I’m trying not to think during sex, but it does occur to me that I haven’t done this in a long time; I haven’t gotten off purely on someone’s leg and kissing and touching with all of our clothes still on. That’s the next thing to go, naturally. We take each other’s shirts off and embrace.

Then, she pushes me gently onto my side. Holding me from the back, she starts kissing the back of my neck. This is probably one of the greatest sensations in the entire world. She starts pressing her body more and more into my body, until we’re one continuous panel of flesh.

I’m turned onto my stomach and she presses herself on top of me. She starts grinding herself against my ass and it’s one of the hottest, most unexpected things anyone has ever done to me during a hookup. She’s getting hotter and hotter against me; I love the feeling of being used for her pleasure. I’m more turned on now, just feeling the hardness of her body on top of mine and being held face down.

Next, I am on my back. Tania slowly moves down my body, her lips now on my nipples and I’m telling her she can suck and bite a lot harder. As she moves up and down my chest and torso, she cradles my thighs in her hand. She uses this hold to keep her chest and torso pressed against my inner thighs and the space between them.

As Tania leaves small bite marks on my stomach, she presses her arm against just the outside of my clit, gaining more precision than before as she presses into me down and back, left and right.

Then she reaches down with her hand. Finds my clit immediately. Her finger alternates between pressing up and down on it, or making small flicks from right to left, my preferred motion. Right when it starts to get too sensitive, she starts drawing soft circles around my clit, slowly drawing a smaller and smaller circle toward the center, like a hiker trekking up around a mountaintop.

When the mountain climber reaches the summit, she asks me, “Are you hard for me? Is that your erection?” I feel like a flock of a thousand birds swarms up from my stomach to my chest. She’s the only woman I’ve met besides myself who describes a hard clit that way. I literally always say I feel erect, and for someone to say that to me and be the reason for it is euphoric.

Then, she does something I’ve also never experienced before. She puts her thigh over her hand while she’s fingering me, so that now there’s a ton of pressure and weight on my clitoris and her hand. She then pulls her hand up with half of her fingers inside me now, and it feels like my body is bouncing outside of herself. When I ask her why she does this, she says, “It traps your clitoris in my hand, so even if you move, there’s nowhere for you to go.” I start grinding onto her again, and now the effect is tripled; her palm is pressing against the top of my vulva, her thigh is bearing weight on her palm, and half of her body is leaning onto me.

Afterwards, I feel restored and revived. We scratch each other’s backs and keep touching until we drift off to sleep. In the moments of silence I have to think, I think about how much dry humping (or really, tribbing, since I guess once the clothes come off the humping isn’t so dry anymore) went into the hook up: my thigh between her leg, hers between mine, her on my ass, my vulva against her bicep, then her whole body rubbing on mine.

Most young lesbians know about “the knee/leg thing,” which is when you’re on top of someone making out, and you put your thigh or knee between their legs so you can use the press of your quadriceps/knee to put pressure on their clitoris.

Real grinding should ensue, if we are to revive the lost art of dry-humping.

However, this “knee thing” is the main extent to which I’ve experienced tribbing as a queer woman who sleeps around quite a bit with other women. There should honestly be a lot more, and I want to utilize other positions and body parts in my future endeavors.

Hooking up with Tania makes me realize how little I trib, and how much dry humping has decreased in my body’s erotic vocabulary. She turned me onto my side and stomach and back to hump me, or to have me grind on her in so many positions and styles; I grasped the depths to which I’ve been lacking when it comes to foreplay.

I realize Tania is 63 and that’s why she’s so substantially skilled in the fine art of dry-humping.

There’s a sense of lesbian traditionalism that comes with this much dry humping — tribbing, when we do it anyway. I feel like I’m having sex in the 1970s or 1980s. There’s something very retro, very classic, vintage even about sex where the majority of acts are some body part rubbing against the crotch. There’s something teasing and primal about it too. Why does it feel vintage, though?

Because tribbing is a lost art because it’s foreplay. And we lost the art around the same time we lost all the others, around 2013, I think. Tinder launched in 2012 and was in common use a year later, and I think this is when culture ended. For the last year or so, we’ve also been tumbling into a recession which has killed any ability for people to slow down, relax, connect, be present.

Tania is a boomer. She experienced a pre-Reagan economy. Only people who lived through that rare window of American prosperity between 1970 and 2008 have the time to trib.

I think you could probably measure economic prosperity based on the amount of tribbing in sex.

There’s something deeply capitalistic about skipping a good dry hump. It’s getting straight to the bottom line, so to speak. Rushed, unsensual, cold, fast, results-driven sex.

Perhaps we have lost the art of dry humping along with others — the fine art of conversation, the art of seduction, the art of romance — because these things technically don’t “get” you anything. Foreplay in the long-term makes orgasm more achievable and certainly stronger, but you can get someone there without it. Doing things for the sake of doing them, for more casual pleasure, feels like “a waste of time.”

Everyone is in a rush now, and everything is optimized. We have become so used to trying to “expedite” “maximize” “facilitate” that we forget there are some realms where more time, more waste, more indulgence, more slowness is actually better.

Good sex is a road trip. One where you don’t care about “making good time.” Take the pit stops. pull over to enjoy the view. Bad sex is often the kind we have now; it’s a stressful commercial flight, it’s the sexual equivalent of pre-check, rushing past every step just to get to the destination on the cheap, rather than enjoy the journey.

I want to bring back this pre-2008 style of sex. Back when we weren’t all so stressed, frazzled, porn-ified, objectified in the economic and sexual sense, instead more sensual, less inhibited, more in touch with ourselves and others.

Tribaissance now!

The next week, I get a text from an insanely hot man I used to hook up with two years ago.

“Hey, been thinking about you lately. How are you?”

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you’ve been thinking about me. When we’re in his bed a few days later, he presses his thigh against my crotch. This time, I don’t brush past this so quickly. Instead of going quickly through the motions, I keep us there. I pretzel my legs around his so I can properly, roughly hump his leg. My cashmere shorts brush against my skin. He says, “It’s so hot when you rub yourself on my leg.” Hearing that is so hot to me, not only because I get off on verbal stuff like that, but also because of how degrading it is. I feel like a dog humping another animal in the park. Once again, I get close just from knocking my whole pelvis against a thumping quadricep.

In the coming months, I want to slow down and dry hump a lot more when I hook up. Sometimes it’s the best part.

xoxo,
femcel

I am the newest assistant for a video producer, of commercials (mostly for medicine) and celebrity wedding videos. Additionally, I sometimes assist her husband, a major Hollywood interior designer. If you’ve watched an Architectural Digest video, there’s a chance you’ve seen a home he perfected.

Holy fuck, these people are spoiled. Here are some secrets of the ultra-rich.

1. They do not refill their cars’ gas tanks. Instead, I drove a literal Lamborghini 12 minutes outside of this gated neighborhood to a gas station to refill it for my boss, Joann. I was terrified the entire time. If you see someone driving stupidly slow and carefully around LA in a luxury car, there’s a chance it’s because that car is not theirs!

2. They do not wrap their gifts. Joann’s husband hands me two Amazon packages and asks me to wrap them for his wife because her birthday is apparently coming up. May this love never find me! I am honestly sickened by the cold remove of their entire love life. If someone gets me a gift, I want it to be something they carefully picked and wrapped themselves. When I unwrap a gift, I want to touch the same shiny-soft wrapping paper they did, I want to pull apart a bow they selected and placed thinking of me. I don’t want to open some meaningless plastic from Amazon, hurriedly wrapped by the anonymous hands of an assistant.

   Subscribe below for my weekly column about my work and dating life in LA. I also paywall personal essays and erotica, so consider an annual subscription for $69 — $5.75 per month, just the cost of taking me out for coffee once a month! ;0 ;)

3. The ultra rich do not talk to the working class. In fact, they do everything in their power to create as much physical, social, and mental distance from anyone who makes less than $25,000 per month. I discover that sociologically, the function of an assistant for a certain type of wealthy person is to ensure they never have to shake hands or exchange pleasantries with blue collar workers.

   A lot of the time when I call an auto shop, HVAC technician, housekeeping agency, I say exactly what Joann tells me to say. When I let them into the house, I tell them to do exactly what she told me to say to tell them to do.

   It’s possible she is lingering 20 feet away from us, on her phone, half-watching them install some new lamp or begin cleaning some luxury rug in her home while I ask questions about the price estimate. She keeps her distance, and talks to the workers through me. Given that she knows exactly what she wants and needs, it seems that she could just do it herself. Instead, she tells me what to say, confirms it, then has me tell the workers while she sits and watches or listens in on the call. If there’s a follow up, she responds again through me.

   That’s really inefficient, right? I mean, it would take less time for her to just tell the luxury rug cleaners directly: “This is Tynn Silk Mohair so please use the right liquids to clean it,” rather than tell me: “Tell them this is Tynn Silk Mohair so they need to be careful with what they use on it,” have me write that down then read it back to her to make sure I heard her right because she talks in the mumble-whisper of a rich woman who finds it too exhausting to even properly articulate. She speaks like if Gwyneth Paltrow took an Adivan with her morning coffee. Or, took more Adivan with her morning coffee, maybe I should say. Then Joann sits and watch as I let them in. She supervises my supervising.

From 20 feet away sitting on a stool beside her kitchen island, she mutters something to me with the same laziness she uses to swipe through her Insta feed. I have to ask what she’s saying, then she says it to me, and then I say it to the rug cleaners/housekeeper/HVAC guys.

This is more expensive — both in terms of paying me and time-wise talking to me. But to not speak directly to “the help,” is worth it for her. She never has to make eye contact with the people who clean her toilets, wash her rugs, repair her car, pump air into her tires, water her backyard, print her business cards, fix her heating and AC.

This explains why she’s so hard to understand on a literal verbal level. Her vocal chords have probably atrophied from barely having to speak to anyone, and the people she does speak to live in fear of not getting her directions right, so they have to listen super carefully to what she says, so it doesn’t matter if “Tynn Silk Mohair” coming out of her juviderm-d mouth sounds like “Tee sik mlair.”

I learn that the major point of an assistant is to never lock eyes, touch or shake hands, or rub elbows with real people. This helps to explain, I think, the completely unbelievable and unhinged behavior of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They can’t empathize with teachers, nannies, electricians, housekeepers, pool cleaners, because they literally have not spoken to or maintained a second of eye contact with this class of workers in decades.

They remove themselves, use an assistant as a physical and social barrier. Based on Joann’s schedule for the month, I see that she only goes to restaurants which have + next to them, and so she’s only ever surrounded by other people of her class. She doesn’t just go to dinner spontaneously at a random burger joint; every meal she has had for the last thirty years has required a reservation, placed of course by an assistant.

4. Ultra rich people actually really don’t do much of anything. I had this idea in my head that if people live in a ten million dollar house, they at least really work for it and spend 12 hours per day screaming into a phone and pulling their hair out. I basically imagined Cher Horowitz’s dad from Cluelesss. I think that’s really more so the case for people living in houses (at least in LA) that are worth like 2-5 million. Those are your business owners, self-made entrepreneurs, orthodontists, real estate agents. Or, as is also typically the case in this city, people who bought a house here in the 80s or 90s for $50,000 as teachers or nurses and now accidentally own something worth two million dollars. Ah, to be born before 1985. Joann’s house is worth 10-11 million, and this kind of extreme wealth is often earned through very little work at all.

   As I drive around Joann’s neighborhood, I actually see two “Who is John Galt?” signs. For those who did not read Atlas Shrugged in eighth grade like I did, this question is a reference to a book whose thesis is essentially that there are a few people who hold up the world’s economy (like the Greek Titan Atlas who holds the world on his shoulders) while the rest of people are lazy, stupid, work ethic-less leeches. Individual achievement and work are king, and government intervention or efforts toward collectivism inhibit what people must do in the world.

   It’s a cute idea these people have, that they’re the ones with the work ethic, holding the world up on their shoulders while everyone sits around taking welfare checks, subsisting on social support programs funded by taxes paid by the “truly hard-working,” or lazing about in government office jobs. You can see this kind of mentality in the recent layoff of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, a decision made by the “Department of Government Efficiency,” headed by a man who likely thinks of himself as one of the Atlases of the world (El*n M*sk).

   The truth is that the Atlases of the world are the people who mow their lawns, build their cars in factories, clean their homes, repair their roofs, sort their mail, change the diapers of their children, teach their kids how to read, and so on and so forth. Tesla would be nowhere without the people making the car parts, answering customer service phone calls, selling the cars, cleaning Tesla car shops, wiping the shop bathroom toilets, and also managing the schedule and mansions of the owner of the company.

   Nurses, teachers, healthcare workers, gardeners — these are the atlases of the world who make sure the air is breathable, the infants and elderly are cared for, the children can read and count. I find it unbearably ironic that the people who merely lucked into inheriting a ton of property and money at a young age or patented one profitable medicine or website they invented at 26 so that they never have to work again think they are the ones holding the world on their shoulders, when in fact their world sits on the shoulders of housekeepers, assistants, childcare workers, gardeners, and blue collar workers who live paycheck to paycheck.

   Rant over!

5. They have intercoms in their bathrooms. Okay, maybe this is not all ultra rich people, but it is true for these ultra rich fucks. You know how in The Office, Pam has a phone with a hold and transfer button (as all receptionists do) to transfer calls to Michael Scott’s office?

   Well, in my office (in one of the three back houses on this estate) I have a phone with an intercom to not only the offices of my boss and her husband, but also their office bathrooms, the master bathroom in their house, and so on. Maybe I’m a little too squeamish, but I think it’s insane that while trying to track them down for something I need, one of the million rooms I try for the intercom is their literal bathroom. Like, you want me to ask you questions about confirming a doctor’s appointment while you’re trying to take a shit? I don’t care how rich I am, I don’t ever want to be bothered by someone while I’m going to the bathroom.

6. They get their asses into high gear for real celebrities who pull rank on them. On my second day there, Joann says that at 1 PM we’ll need to prepare a charcuterie board for John Doe. I cannot say who John Doe is because John Doe is a real celebrity and I signed a confidentiality waiver. By real celebrity, I mean someone who even your weird uncle knows the name of — like Jennifer Aniston or Beyonce. I can’t say why this person comes to the house, but just know that it is not for a good reason. It’s for a creepy Hollywood reason that I can’t say, sorry!

   Joann actually gets her ass into the kitchen and makes this charcuterie board for her husband’s business meeting with A-List John Doe. It is actually pretty amazing, that even amid her zenith of wealth and whiteness, she is still the wife, the woman in the relationship, and has to prepare snacks for her husband and his associates. Her kitchen is the size of the fucking Louvre, so when she gives me vague directions to find glasses “across from the coffee machine” and I don’t instantly find the exact glasses she wants, she shouts “THIS ISN’T HARD.” She’s right, it isn’t, but she makes every task exceedingly difficult by micromanaging it to be exactly the way she wants and by shouting at me. I grab nuts from the studio apartment-sized pantry, and they’re of course the wrong nuts. She mumbles something about a bigger bag. It goes on and on.

   I have a new theory about assistants, as someone who has been one before. They really work for people who don’t care how something is done, just that it is done well. The issue is that Joann wants you to do it exactly the way she would, with no information given. She wants specific small bowls for the hummus, and when I take out the wrong small bowls she growls. I almost want to say: it really seems like you know what you want, so maybe you should just do it! But of course, then she wouldn’t be training her assistant in using her kitchen, she’d just be cooking, and that’s not the point of all this.

7. The ultra rich are children. Some of these people are maybe one assistant away from fully putting on a diaper and having someone change them. I become increasingly disturbed throughout my time there with how infantilized these fully-grown adults are. One time, Joann’s husband has a call coming in at a time he knew the call would come in. I intercom every room and bathroom to try to transfer the call to him, and I feel like I’m chasing down a toddler. When I can’t get him on any of the 25 rooms on their estate, I tell the person on the other line that I will have to call them back. Later on, Joann’s husband tells me he was in the car when the call came in so “of course you couldn’t get me.” AAAAAH!!!

I increasingly feel a sense of mothering chaotic, infantile, underdeveloped adults. They often say that the job of an assistant is to “read the boss’s mind” and I think that’s so true because these rich people have no fucking clue what’s going on half the time, and just like a mother has to sense when her toddler is about to have a tantrum, or know if they need food or a nap or something else, you have to sense the emotional whims of these people, except they’re 40 years older than you.

At one point, Joann loses something important that she “swears” she left on my desk the day I started, and it’s no longer there. She makes me go through the nasty trash cans all around the room, convinced it must have fallen in there. When it’s not, she finds it miraculously five hours later in her studio.

8. This may not be a secret, but these people are cheap. When she loses this crucial item, I tell her that I don’t want to add an expense to her list, but that if push comes to shove, I found a replacement online for $42. She barks at me “It costs 87 dollars.” I calmly let her know there’s a cheaper version if she needs, and she storms out of the room. It’s fascinating how she’ll spend thousands of dollars on extravagant hotels and designer clothes, an extra luxury car, but it seems like anytime an expensive of under 100 dollars comes up, it’s as if I’ve asked a broke single mother to book an international cruise.

***

I expected a lot more of the job to have to do with helping with editing videos, helping on sets for commercials, bringing equipment to the weddings she makes videos for. I found out that she actually doesn’t do any of the creative stuff she says she does.

Joann “produces” commercials and “creates” celebrity wedding videos.

She does not.

As for the commercials, she has “a team” of a few directors, DPs, DITs, PAs. They make the commercial; she simply hires them. She puts it together and gets the sale from companies like Johnson & Johnson which need a new commercial because she’s well-connected.

To be fair, this is sort of what a producer is. But all this is to say she does virtually nothing besides have her assistant call or email a few people and tell them where to go and cut them a check. Most of the time, she has no idea what’s going on or where things are happening. The director mostly lines the ducks in a row, and she breathes down his neck to make sure it’s happening. He emails her a report of what he’s done at the end of the day.

For the wedding videos, it’s more of the same. She has a team of people who actually go to the weddings, shoot the footage, while she attends as a guest. She has a team of editors who put the video together, and maybe every 4 hours she’ll come into her in-house studio and peep over the shoulder, give some vague feedback, then go back to her room.

She says she’s a “creative visionary” but she’s really just a middleman with her husband’s money. All of the production management and producing work is offloaded to people who are on the ground, or me.

Joann just has resources and rolodex from her husband, and the people who do the actual work do not.

I realize that she is essentially using her husband’s money and connections to cosplay as Miranda Priestley — but she’s no Miranda Priestley. For one, Miss Priestley put out a real, influential magazine every month and had a real worldview about fashion, culture, art. She was also deeply “em-bubbled” as I call it, privileged in her privileged world, but she at least produced something real and worked.

Joann is constantly telling me she’s “going to work” in her studio but every time I walk past, she’s on Instagram.

On my second day, there’s a hiccup when I am trying to get past the security gate she (of course) lives behind. Even though I’m on the guest list and I’ve come in and out 12 times, this time the security guard has an issue and sends me out. I have to keep driving because there’s nowhere to park in these slim wealthy canyons.

I figure I’ll call Joann to let me in. When I call her, she begins interrogating me like a criminal: Who are you? Why won’t they let you in? What’s your story?

Trying to explain, I keep driving. She asks where I am now, and when I tell her, she shouts that it’s the opposite direction of where I live.

“I’m just trying to keep driving and find somewhere to park. I wasn’t planning on going home, it’s only 3.”

“YOUR STORY ISN’T ADDING UP!” she shouts. Finally, she agrees to pick me up and drive me back to her property. On the car ride, she interrogates further:

“Where do you live? And who do you live with? I thought you lived with your aunt? Oh, only in college, where did you go to college? And what did you study?”

The questions come rapid fire, and every time I answer “correctly” she leans back with a satisfied but skeptical smile, like a cop who’s decided she’ll let me off the hook just this time. I decided she’s completely insane, and I also realize I might not be able to afford to work this job.

People often forget that it costs money to have a job. You need to pay for the car to get to work on time because public transportation is often dysfunctional, you need to pay for the gas to get there and home, you need to pay for the apartment that’s close enough to where the jobs are, you need to pay for the clothes and health insurance and food you need to work. The issue is that the cost of not living, but just working, is so high that oftentimes the jobs don’t pay for themselves. It’s not that people can’t afford to live, but they can’t even afford to work to live.

She pays $4,000 per month but after state and federal taxes, that’s like $3,400. It took me an hour and twenty minutes to get through traffic to her house that day, and she also wants me to use my car to run all of her errands. So I’ll probably spend about $100 per week in gas. It doesn’t make sense to work this job nine hours per day plus 2 hours of commuting for $3,000 per month, an amount of money which hardly covers my phone bill, car insurance, car payments, groceries, co-pays for doctors and therapy.

There’s been a lot of talk about Gen Z’s warped sense of wealth, reality, and work ethic. A recent statistic sent some of the internet into a frenzy: Gen-Z says that “a salary of $587,797 and net worth of $9.47 million are needed when they envision ‘financial success,’” whereas all other generation cited much, much lower numbers.

Many wrote that Gen Z has such a high bar for wealth due to the conspicuous consumerism and flashy wealth of influencers. Gen Z is warped, they said.

I don’t think so. I think what’s happened is that the cost of living is so beyond inflated, even in smaller American cities, and even good jobs are so fickle and unpredictable (see: the mass layoffs of people with computer science degrees who were told this would propel them into a life of eternal economic security), that we feel we need so much money in order to feel a sense of real success.

Houses in middle class areas now cost one to two million dollars, and after that the cost of property taxes and upkeep and childcare and food and gas and health insurance is so high, it’s no wonder a person born in 2000 — like me — who doesn’t know of a pre-2008 world/economy, would need $587,797 per year to feel financially successful.

After the job’s first day, I go to my friend Giselle’s house because she is 70 and a therapist and she loves giving advice, and for once in my young life I actually want to solicit advice. She actually gives really good advice…maybe I should solicit more often:

“I’ve known you to be a very decisive person, so I think you should listen to the fact that you’re indecisive about this job. When you want to make a decision, you’ll know.”

This is great advice, because the next day, I do know.

I really want to quit already, but I need a sign.

I get an email, and I am not joking, it’s an official offer letter from a fully funded PhD program (meaning, they pay me to attend graduate classes, write, and TA). I applied to ten schools in the fall as a backup in case I couldn’t find a thriving career by now. I cannot say which PhD for anonymity purposes, but it’s one I really, really wanted. I figure if I have secure employment for five years starting in August, I don’t really need to be verbally abused for $3,000 per month and work nine hours per day plus two hours of driving.

I do my last walk down the moated path to collect her mail. I hear a coyote in the distance, and I dream of it devouring Joann, or even me. Nature violently reclaiming these canyons, taking back what is rightfully theirs.

Dating & Sex updates b/c I am Carrie Bradshaw if she lived in LA with her 90-year-old grandma because having a weekly column no longer pays for an apartment like it did in the 90s

So if you recall, I had begun a flirtationship in December with a 67-year-old butch lesbian named Tania. Yes — I am 24. You don’t have to want this level of age gap for yourself, but if you are truly disturbed by this age gap, you’re not cool or cunt enough to rock with this blog. If you’d like to read something more up your alley, may I recommend Colleen Hoover?

I go to Tania’s house again last week. She pays for dinner. Again. This time, we really, really click — over the fact that it’s so difficult to be a woman with a high sex drive and low inhibitions. I call myself a low-inhib freak. She tells me she’s been so horny that she’s jerked herself off while on the freeway. I have never met anyone else who’s done this, and I shout in excitement back: “I’ve come on the 101 before!”

This definitely should have been one of the lines on SNL’s The Californians.

We share stories of times we’ve had to constantly be the leader or initiator with other women, women with lots of inhibitions, insecurities, uncertainties, lack of erotic imagination who want someone to play with them like a passive doll. I feel like I’m speaking to a mirror.

At her place, we start massaging each other. This time, when I reach under her shirt to get her lower back, she slips her shirt off. When it’s my turn, she grazes my ear lobes and say if I get them pierced, she’ll pay for the first pair.

“Any kind of gold you want — white, yellow — you pick.”

We start holding hands and rolling our bodies against each other, when she says,

“Okay, I have to send you home before I seduce you.”

“Who’s to say you’re going to do it? I can do it.”

My back is turned to her, my head resting against her strong right thigh, one of her hands on my shoulder and the other cradling my wrist.

“You’re too young.”

I spin back like a helicopter blade.

“What?”

“I feel what you feel, you’re very cute, I understand why you want to, but you’re just too young for me.”

We go back and forth, back and forth.

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like to fuck yourself? A younger version of yourself?”

She laughs, but we resolve to not do it. On the way to my car, she walks me by basically carrying me at the waist. We exchange these texts when I get home:

how can you adore me but not want me! comme c'est tragique

I post a TikTok about the situation, and it gets 300,000 views.

At the end of the video, I tell all cool gay women of LA to message me for a good time, if they’re groovy and if they’re truly down — and if they’re at least 5”4. I get flooded with about 50 DMs from women:

“5”6 lesbian here. whats up?”

“5”5, in LA. I don’t meet the 67 age requirement but I’m down.”

“LA dyke here. If you’re still feeling feral, message me on insta, it’s the same username as on here.”

***

I start messaging furiously back and forth with a woman named Brooke. We exchange long voice notes, and finally sext a few days later. I ask her out to a movie on Saturday, to see Babygirl. (for those who do not know, Babygirl is like girlboss fifty shades of grey, a sexy movie more or less). Brooke texts back, “I’ll bring a blanket to the theater.”

I jump for joy behind the screen. I always wanna say some unhinged shit like that, but feel like I need to reel it in to not scare people away. She tells me doing public stuff is one of her biggest kinks. I feel like I’ve met a woman who can finally match my freak.

***

A few days before that date, I grow desperate and hit up a guy who lives just a four minute drive away from me, which in LA is a green flag akin to emotional availability or a therapist-written recommendation letter.

I just quit on Joann and got into grad school two days ago, so I feel like taking advantage of my new freedom.

Sex with him is boring. I keep hoping it’ll get better if I work hard enough at it, like an internship becoming a career. Instead I’m just stalled at the sexual equivalent of picking up coffee and shredding sensitive documents.

I came over late at night and ended up being too tired to fuck. His one saving grace is that he was raised by a single mother and four sisters, so every time I come over he has prepared some sort of immaculate charcuterie board, ice cream, and red wine in spotless glasses.

This, combined with the fact that he fucks me like it’s a terrible chore, does problematically make me question his sexuality. But not in a bad way! I just mean, truly, if you do not like a woman’s body you should go be gay. He eats my pussy for like ten seconds and always wants to fuck me with as much physical remove as possible, no sensuousness or touching.

In the morning, when we start fucking, he has no rhythm. He’s not having sex with me, he’s using my vagina as a better version of his right hand. He’s using my body to jack off and it pisses me the fuck off but I’m horny so I try to make it work. (Special skills: persistence and ambition). I keep trying to show him what kind of rhythm to have, to not just sloppily slam his dick in and out or around in bad circles, like some trick he read on Reddit in 2012. He is not teachable.

“Let’s put on some music,” I say. I play “B2B” by Charli XCX. He fucks me to the synth pop beat, and I feel like I’ve put a shock collar on a dog. It works. He fucks me with a proper rhythm; his chest gets closer and closer to mine now that he’s not trying to posture his body in some bizarrely distant position; and I can lean in to smell the pheromones emitting from his neck.

Finally, I’m into it. I look to the left and I see the sun shining and a palm tree staring back at me through the apartment’s window. A warm ray touches my arm and his big, hairy hand is on the other.

He pulls out for us to take a break and there’s a bright red smear on his white sheet. No wonder I was so horny.

I got my period a week early, and I know why. I have been DMing with Brooke, who I am almost certain I will fall in love with (yes, I need to be medicated) for a week.

She told me the night before that she just started her period. I have a 100% rate of period-syncing with women I am dating or interested in.

And may I add — my period always syncs to meet theirs exactly, even if it means coming a week early or late. I think this suggests really great compromise skills as a partner!

It’s also one of my favorite things about being with people who get their periods. Period-syncing is one of the most primal things I can imagine. The production of eggs and blood and shedding in our bodies aligning because we like each other, the hormones and chemicals in my brain and pelvis transfiguring to tune in with hers. It’s a reminder that we are all bodies. Human, animal, feral bodies made up of pheromones, hormones, attraction, desire, drive, raw animality. We are not meant to spend every day on Slack and Zoom, our touch starvedness staved off by the warmth of a million screens. We’re supposed to connect as beasts who sweat and bleed.

I see the rich, red blood stain on his hospital white sheet, and it’s like a flash of the wild against the clean, corporate, cold world.

When I go to the bathroom to wipe the blood off before we fuck all over his room, kitchen, and bathroom, I’m overcome by the intense somatic synchronicity.

I feel that my body is the body of an animal, whose menstrual blood cycle syncs with the women I love around me, like the howls of wolves harmonizing at the same moon, our shared blow flow a sapphic mating call, the body yelping for sameness and connection.

People talk a lot about the plentiful biological mechanisms which foment heterosexual sex, reproduction being evidence of that, blah blah blah. I wish someone would study the fact that women’s cycles sync and for me this has always been a biological-sex drive mechanism to also facilitate female-bodied people having sex with one another, since if you menstruate at the same time it’s easier to have sex the rest of the month. Too, it’s a carnal channel which brings your body in closer contact with another, which suggests your connection and intimacy before it even begins. Our insides have linked in lockstep, why can’t our outsides?

I cry a few tears. Maybe it’s the hormones, but I think it’s the gratitude I feel to be so rooted in my body, for so many signs to hit me. I feel the body hair on my armpits and legs that I’ve left unshaved for 11 years, my 14-year-old self already realizing the banality of removing hair every five days that we all know grows there, to be a shaven shell of a real woman with fat, hair, sweat, blood, tears. I don’t want to be waxed, polished, smoothed. I don’t want to wear Spanx and a polyester outfit with keratin-ed hair to a freezing cold office where we all ensconce our bodies in robots and machinery and profit.

I was meant to feel the blood drip down my thighs as I fuck this hirsute man, the hair on my calves brushing against his, entwining.

I was meant to have sex at 11 AM to Charli XCX’s vaguely menacing, cheekily disdainful electronic drone and spend the afternoon walking dogs, tutoring children in reading, and writing and sipping tea with my grandmother, not wasting away another day gassing up a luxury vehicle and deleting spam mail and scheduling an at-home nail appointment.

I am not a cog, I’m not a machine, I’m a woman of the jungle. I’m undomesticated, a dog in an alleyway, a bitch in heat. Don’t ask me to learn another CRM technique or SEO system.

Back in his bed, I start asking questions about his job. He’s a construction contractor, and amid our time in bed I had asked him if he ever gets hit on by clients.

“No, it’s mostly old couples,” he says. Snoreeeee.

“Okay, let’s pretend I’m 33, and I’m a mom. I’m religious, so I’ve only ever had sex with my husband, and he’s gross and sucks in bed.”

He laughs mockingly. Straight guys always do this. They discount the value of someone who’s verbally talented in bed, or the power of a good bedtime story, so to speak.

“I’m way hotter because I was married off by a matchmaker and I had no idea how hot I was when I was 19. I have two kids and husband’s at work all day. You come over and I notice your big hands, your tall body, naturally muscled by all the demo work. I start flirting with you and I think you won’t notice, that this will just be something fun to do because I’m so bored, but it won’t lead to anything. But when I bring you into the room that needs work, I’m brushing my hips against yours constantly, moving past you by quickly rubbing my breasts against the side of your arm. You grab me by the extra fabric of my shirt, your knuckles brush against the soft pool of skin between my ribcage.”

Now he’s really into it, I feel his dick harden against my thigh.

“Yes, more, what happens next?” he asks, desperately. Got him.

“You tell me that you’re not here to just fuck around, if I’m going to behave like that I need to take the consequences. You won’t be teased. Then you flick me away.”

I complete the story, with the “choose your own adventure” edits he gives me — he wants a double penetration scene with one of his construction workers. I give it to him, and even pretend to enjoy his final request, that they both come on my face. If it’s just for the story, I guess I’ll do anything. But honestly I’m bored and feel like the sex was good because I made it good, a realization many women come to in their long careers of having sex with men.

***
Saturday is date night. With Brooke. I bought us tickets for Babygirl, and I spot her waiting in line to show our tickets. We walk up to the concession stand and I ponder aloud what I might want to get.

“You can get whatever you want,” she says, taking the wallet out of her pocket.

My body flutters, not just because it’s hot when someone offers to pay, but also because I’m not sure if I have enough money in my checking account to pay the exorbitant amount that AMC charges for popcorn and one candy. The total for everything is almost 30 dollars. I think I could have afforded that.

The movie begins, and the first few sexually tense scenes are more comical than sexy. We laugh with the rest of the theater. Then the movie heats up and the first real scene, so to speak, begins.

Babygirl, in short, follows a high-powered female CEO who hasn’t had an orgasm in 19 years from her husband, because she secretly craves rough, BDSM sex — and when she encounters a much younger intern who can give her what she really wants, it changes her life.

In a private office room, he keeps telling the CEO to “say it.” At this point, she’s denied herself what she wants. She doesn’t know what “it” is. He tells her to say, something along the lines of, “You can do whatever you want to me.”

She says it through a pant: “You can do whatever you want to me.”

The mood in the film and in the theater shifts, completely. A collective fuck is felt in this big, dark room, and in the small space between Brooke and I, our shoulders already pushing against one another.

She throws the blanket onto my lap like an owner throwing a leash at a dog. It lands with a heavy thud, and I scramble to unfold it and throw it over our laps. We start slowly grazing each other’s inner thighs over our jeans and cargo pants. The scenes heat up and I can’t help it anymore, I lean in and give a long lick to the side of her neck; we start making out. It is ecstatic. I rarely enjoy kissing that much — most of the time I find it boring and just want to move on to the next thing, but I feel like I could kiss her forever.

The next time I try to touch her or myself, she tells me I “have to wait.” When I try again, she grabs my throat and tells me I need to learn how to listen. I feel a wave unrest through my body, and my breath somehow slows to a halt and also picks up with the force of a riptide.

(For those of you freaking out — don’t worry, the theater was basically empty, save for another young couple in the far back seats)

We go to fuck in her car. We drive around different parking lots near the beach, but each one has a park filled with kids, or cop cars — UGH.

Finally, a quiet, dark, residential street appears with a parking spot far away from the rest. She has one of those cars where the seats can fold down, so we basically have a bed in the back. The rest of the night is immaculate. I go down on her, and she’s at the very end of her period, which I love. I lean in and take a deep, yoga inhale.

I love the scent of blood, that slightly metallic-y and hormonal miasma filling the car. The more I lick, the more I taste the combination of the mildly sweet, fictile, erotically acrid, nature dew-like savor, a whole mother earth between her legs. I’m getting so turned on and the car is getting hotter and hotter. She throws me onto my stomach and fingers me from the back while using her thumb to gently punch my clitoris; I feel a building, tight stir.

Afterward, we meet her friends at a nightclub, and dance until the lights come on, but before that I leave my mark on the car’s dashboard window: