I’m removing the paywall for this post and offering a 24-HOUR 24 PERCENT DISCOUNT on both monthly and annual subscriptions. That’s just $3.80 a month. Less than a cup of coffee. ☕️ 'Lysistrata' but for marriage, tooA movement to sexually, romantically, and reproductively boycott men. Also: wrestling as gonzo porn, putting your novel on the couch, and more in the weekend roundup.
This week, I had far too much to say about some of the links I’d saved up to share, so instead of the usual roundup you’re getting three micro essays. A movement to boycott menMy TikTok feed was overrun this week with videos of women talking about the 4B movement. At first glance, all I could gather was that it was an initiative originating in South Korea with the aim of heterosexual women sexually, romantically, and reproductively boycotting men. No sex, no dating, no marriage, no kids. Well, ELLE.com has an explainer:
Of course, there are historical examples of “sex strikes” being used to end wars. What’s interesting about the 4B movement is that it doesn’t just withhold sex for an unrelated aim. It broadly withholds traditional feminine roles as a way to overturn those roles. Has wrestling always been this horny?Semi-ironic fan as I am of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, I do not pay much attention to his occasional forays with the WWE. But this week he posted a clip to Instagram of a recent performance that I found totally fascinating, and which had me screaming: “THIS IS PORN!” He presents the video as a behind-the-scenes moment after the producer called “cut,” where he just kept wailing on his co-star with a belt because he “hates constraints and bullshit rules” and “can’t shut my high emotions off just because a script says we’re done.” I do not for a second believe that Johnson actually lost himself in the moment. This scene, and his IG post, are the performance of the loss of control. Like mainstream porn, professional wrestling is a frequently implausible entertainment medium that tries to facilitate the suspension of disbelief. This particular scene-within-a-scene overlaps with the, ehem, cinéma vérité genres of amateur, gonzo, and POV porn, where scripts are ostensibly tossed and the fourth wall is broken. It’s not just the style of camerawork that aids claims toward authenticity. I’ve written before about film theorist Linda Williams’ contention that porn portrays a “frenzy of the visible” as a means of reassuring viewers that what they’re watching is not a “voluntary performance” of pleasure but “its involuntary confession.” To this end, all sorts of sounds, paroxysms, and bodily fluids are deployed; the whole reason for the “money shot” is to prove that the sex is “real,” she says. Well, Johnson wipes blood, sweat, and tears from his co-star’s face and then smears it on the belt he’s just used to “beat” him, before he emphatically spits on the ground. Before the show aired, he tweeted a promise to his soon-to-be co-star: “Tonight, I’m gonna make you bleed.” During the beat down, Johnson told him: “How does that feel? Does that feel good?” The show itself is called “WWE Raw.” I mean. Should your therapist read your book?The other day, the novelist R.O. Kwon tweeted about talking with writer friends about the question of whether or not to have your therapist read your book. “my immediate reaction,” she said, “was to violently recoil because my novels are ‘too private’ for my therapist to read???” Kwon suggested that she might flee the country if her therapist actually read any of her books. It’s such a relatable sentiment and one that reveals the dual impulse behind so much writing: to be seen and to hide. There are the things you write but cannot say out loud. The things you want to express but only in the constructed venue of a personal essay, memoir, or novel. A book is an object that can be put on a shelf and pulled down, opened and closed. It’s a box! A thing of exposure and concealment. A contained but exceedingly public “over there.” When my “sexual coming-of-age memoir” came out, my therapist asked how I would feel if she read it. I was surprised that she would be willing and interested to read it in her spare time, pro bono. Then I was scared. We had talked about the general shape of the book, but hadn’t discussed many specifics. Can she handle it? Will she judge me? What will she see that I don’t see? Therapy is its own box that comes with certain assumptions about what goes in it and what stays out. I’m so glad that my therapist did read it. It shook up my assumptions about which topics were appropriate or relevant for therapy. Just as important: it helped me to recognize all my various little “boxes.”
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nedjelja, 31. ožujka 2024.
'Lysistrata' but for marriage, too
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