I’m on vacation this week and, as you’re reading this, probably on a plane finishing Sarah Manguso’s Liars. It’s “a crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage,” as lyz says. In the wake of Liars and so many other buzzy releases, as well as the growing noise around women swearing off heteronormative love and sex, it feels pretty apropos to recirculate this post from last year, where I wrote about the explosion of novels about young women dwelling in, and sometimes feeling stuck inside, sexual and romantic contradictions. This quote from Liars is especially relevant to the protagonists I write about below, many of whom feel betrayed by their own desires: “Agreeing to be someone’s wife should be done only if you can’t help yourself, I thought, but of course no one can help herself.” This week, a young woman told me that she found my memoir through a snippet of audio that is trending on TikTok. It’s just a few seconds of the actress Suki Waterhouse saying, “I think when you’re a young woman in your twenties… I don’t think there’s any getting out of, you know, it’s the trenches.”¹ The sound is often being used to make book recommendations for 20-somethings. Well, I got curious about the books that young women are telling each other to read while in “the trenches.” Swiping through the videos, a handful of titles stood out: Acts of Service, Hysteria, Sirens and Muses, Luster, Acts of Desperation, Conversations with Friends, and Insatiable. These are all novels with young women protagonists and they share a theme of uncertain, confusing, and conflicting desires. Of these, I’ve only read Raven Leilani’s Luster and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, but the book descriptions and reviews say plenty. Taken together, it’s young women’s “wanting” interrogated from every angle: who, what, when, where, why, and how. This wanting is often explicitly tied to love and sex. Take, for example, Acts of Desperation, which apparently asks, “Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?” Insatiable is an exploration of “our desire to be loved and included,” and “how it's easy to confuse being wanted with being used.” Acts of Service questions, “How do we reconcile what we want with what we think we should want?” Similarly, the book description for Luster asks, “How do we even know what we want?” Then there’s the title of my own book: Want Me. The book jacket description says it’s about how I navigated “the mixed messages of sexual expectation” and discovered “the complexity” of my own wants. Combine all of these protagonists into one and you have a young woman in the depths of an “alcohol-fueled, masochistic, sexual bender,” making “a series of inappropriate sexual choices.” She is navigating desires that are “split between rebellion and submission,” “escaping degradation and eroticizing it,” “loving and being lovable.” And she’s trying to square her politics with her desires, while asking, as Electric Lit puts it, “Does being aware of power dynamics mean anything if you still succumb to them? Does knowingly entering a trap make a difference?” None of this confusion and questioning is fundamentally new. It’s an inevitability in a world that presents girls with a “dilemma of desire,” as the developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman calls it, which pits girls’ own embodied feelings of desire and pleasure against the many social and material dangers associated with their sexuality (indeed, “how do we even know what we want” when safety means being alienated from our desires?). This is all a direct consequence of seeking love in a culture that hates you. I’m reminded of a question asked by Sallie Tisdale in her 1995 memoir Talk Dirty to Me, which is one of the books I was lucky enough to read in my twenties: “Here I am, in the patriarchal, materialistic, sex-drenched, sex-phobic West—and who have I become, here?” I’m reminded, too, of the landmark 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality, which explored the politics of everything from porn to BDSM to butch/femme relationships. We’ve been asking these who, what, when, where, why, and how questions for a long time. The “trenches” are old and deep. 1 Just a footnote of an update to say: comparisons of love to war really hit different a year later. Also: marriage is often sold as the way to get out of “the trenches,” but the recent raft of books about marriage, motherhood, and divorce shows the many ways it can instead be a trap. A programming note: I’m taking a break from the weekend roundup this week because of the aforementioned vacation. Back soon!
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četvrtak, 25. srpnja 2024.
The betrayal of desire
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