Call it anything but love

“I understand what happened. We trauma-bonded.” This is what my ex-girlfriend says to me when we meet for the first time since we left each other in a maelstrom. No contact. Just small discoveries of her belongings stowed away with mine for weeks after, on account of sharing identical dress sizes.

I am furious. She has taken our story and neutered it. I suppose it must be useful to her, but it’s dead on its feet, completely lacking colour. I tell her “maybe you trauma-bonded. I fell in love with you.” I omit that it was wild and beautiful and tragic. That we took road trips through small apocalypses. That we failed to separate our work lives from our lives. That she let me down repeatedly and when I fell apart, my brother said he suspects she’s not gay, but I don’t think it’s that simple. She is so busy being everyone else’s object of desire, she hasn’t gotten around to working out what hers is.

Since we’re learning how to be friends, she tells me about a new paramour. “You know,” she says, “it’s your typical meeting of AFAB fem-bods!” I know what she’s saying but I don’t know what she means and, to the strangers at surrounding tables, we must sound like members of a cult, or like the men who speak loudly into their earpieces in corporate acronyms while queuing for coffee, indistinguishable from well-dressed schizophrenics. I consider the assonance of fem-bod (fem-bot), and I think we needn’t have had centuries of feminist discourse just to arrive at the conclusion that Woman is an object.

She had been romantically entangled with a man for some time. A man I introduced her to. Actually, the man had been my friend. Time has passed and I forgive her parts of the betrayal because even betrayal has parts that move.  Some months into their relationship, his misogyny was revealed. She lists the ways he disappointed her, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she mutilated the outward signs of her femininity with an electric razor and some surgery. Cutting off her nose to spite her face. She always was a literal person.

How intriguing this is, that women with all the freedom afforded them by liberal democracy and the apparently abundant choice of the free market should choose to remain yoked to men they resent, and apathetically identify as hetero-pessimistic. How curious that a queer woman would sooner wage war on her own femininity rather than the man she feels oppressed by.

I wonder about sex and gender and their frailty, how little of it we can really be in possession of, and my questions are foreclosed before I can utter them, as she concludes in a lyrical tone, “hey – gender dysphoria!” Her vocabulary has mutated during our estrangement. The words are concrete but there is such uncertainty in their delivery, a measure of irony there intended to defend her from wondering how useful they are. Because they are bloody gauze. Some language is meant to account for complexity; I am wary of that which reduces it. The language we have for this fragile thing we call identity is only ever good to cauterize a primal wound, so that we don’t suffer sepsis while we go on living.

Never go to San Christóbal

I sat watching people, enjoying the end of a day of ephemeral conversations in Spanish, the kind which are friendly and meaningful but never encroach on the pleasure of feeling absolutely alone. He caught me off guard on account of the fact that he read as gay and circumvented all the usual pick-up lines by immediately asking if I wanted to see some art round the corner. 

     I was busy enjoying how it felt to navigate the world in this pleasant alternative self, one which speaks with the vocabulary and therefore naïve rapture of a small child, so I was slow to realise what was actually occurring. 

     He had perched beside me and was giving me a brief history: his heritage is Italian and Spanish but he was born and raised in Mexico City, he volunteered, a confession weighted with some historical justification I wasn’t privy to, which felt unnecessary, and would have been better suited justifying everything he went on to say.

     “I took my savings and I’ve been traveling for a year now. I love nature too but it’s tricky because I need a good internet connection. I trade full time. Cryptocurrency is revolutionary, it’s going to change everything. Everything is digital now, so it makes sense that the economy is.”

     I told him that I put money in DogeCoin and chose to forget about it because taking financial advice from a cartoon billionaire tech entrepreneur you know is rigging the game is just as meaningful a move as taking it seriously, and I don’t know if he thought I was joking or not. 

     Every time I interjected he looked at me blankly and quickly filled the space with a rehearsed line. This dissociating encounter with the lines men bring on dates recalled almost every one I ever had with a man before and I realised he had tricked me into one. He hadn’t established if I was available for one, or if I was this way inclined, and he didn’t seem interested.

     “Anyway I can’t do it forever, I need to invest in doing what I really care about.”

     “And what’s that? Do you want to set up an orphanage?” 

     With no hint of irony he said, “Maybe…maybe cats or dogs though.”

     “I get it, children are a nightmare,” I said.

     Again without irony: “No! If you raise them with the right education they can be wonderful. That’s what I care about — education. Spiritual education anyway. I’ve studied yoga and in this last year I’ve seen the pandemic really accelerate people’s spiritual awakening. They want to get back to nature, they’re realising what’s more important. It’s all part of the revolution happening and I have the tools to help them.”

     I asked him what those tools were and he gave me a flurry of loosely-related fluff-brained pickings from whatever New Age dogma of the day.

     I felt suddenly angry. I didn’t know whether it was because I hated every single thing he said or because he said it all at me and not to me.

     I told him that something isn’t revolutionary just because it is decentralised, that crypto-fanatics will eventually need to account for the fact that its value is just as divorced from labour as any other currency, and that a personal spiritual awakening is just another phase in the life span of a person as disillusioned with material reality as anyone else, only they have the income and self-importance to have their road to transcendence obliviously destroy local economies and ecosystems. 

     He was so busy not listening to me that when I excused myself he said “What a shame, we’re having such a great discussion,” as if I wasn’t speaking in unrestrained contempt, and he still believes we have a date tomorrow. 

Woman’s Burden

I keep hearing the term emotional labour.

It used to mean something. In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher offers a solid critique of the unspoken dimension of contemporary corporate labour relations, a silent surplus. But this isn’t the emotional labour I keep hearing about. The kind I keep hearing about is best illustrated in something like this Huffington Post piece about middle class alienation between heterosexual men and women, which gives only a cursory glance at class relations (“The white female university professor is usually better off than the Latino migrant farm worker…” Only usually, hm?) before shifting focus back to the site of oppression: will he have texted back by the end of this Zumba class?

Finding balance and reciprocation in any relationship is something we should care about, but it doesn’t require a distinctly market-based rhetoric. By coopting a term devised for material analysis, well-intentioned feminist discourse is once again serving Capital by allowing the commodification of yet another dimension of human experience. The inclusion of personal relations in this discourse reverses the direction of critique. Capitalist Realism sees the human experience, that surplus which should be free of the demands of Capital, dragged into the labour exchange, and resists this. Emotional experience should not be commodified. On the other hand, willingly framing all relations between men and women in the same terms functions as the deliberate movement of human relations into capitalist relations, because when you approach all human interaction with the same schema as you do market relations, you are admitting defeat and accepting that everything is for sale.

It’s that kind of liberalism which supposes freedom is acquired by the total atomisation of being-in-the-world reduced to the core axiom: does this actualise me profitably as an individual?

#unpopularopinions

A lot of fetishism is infantile regression masquerading as an articulated resolution, only reinforced by an identity culture of absolute acceptance without scrutiny.

#unpopularopinions

Under a late capitalism which commodifies sexual variance, asexuality (as an unconscious or otherwise identity-formation) is an attempted resistance to be codified. Like the person who stands in a shopping aisle hypnotised by twenty brands of detergent, and after being overwhelmed by the demand to choose, to commit, and through commitment, foreclose all the liberation in the possibilities to enjoy, instead just leaves the store; in this way asexuality is identity qua rejection of identity in a zeitgeist swamped with identities. Freud came to write that there is inherent deviation within the very concept of sexuality as something to be enjoyed. With this is mind, asexuality as a codified identity itself functions as a collective negation of sexuality as co-opted by neoliberals. Pick an orientation, any orientation, just be yourself and enjoy; we hold the patent to them all. Because if we know anything about neoliberal capital, it’s that it eventually engulfs all opposition into homogeneity, making a dialectic impossible. So this ascetic negation of sex really is as limp-dicked a protest as it first appears to be.