Chemsex, femcels, Harrington's Mengele.

thought digest, 02.13.2023

Good afternoon my dear friends. Here’s what’s been on my mind lately.

The Femcel Canon. Why is there so little media for (and about) ugly women?

I’m a broken record on this, I know. I’ve been saying it since After the Orgy.

But it feels like spaces for the ugly, the abject, and the unattractive—save for maybe fandom, where you’re permanently outside of yourself, or /r/ForeverAloneWomen—have been colonized by either the delusion of being attractive or attractive women. Not every woman who feels marginalized by mainstream conceptions of beauty is Phyllis Schlafly, Andrea Dworkin, or, well, queer.

I don’t want my eating disorder content with a side of BPD e-girl with a harem of orbiters. The 89 lbs. hypersexual hot mess isn’t the only archetype of female pain.

I long for content and digital spaces for invisible women, and if they aren’t, at least have the respect to don a digital hijab.

When did sultry, seductive Lana del Rey become inextricably linked with the femcel, the FEMale CELibate? When I search “femcel” on Tumblr, why do I only see image macros of knock-kneed anorectics and pastel edits of Dominique Swain as Dolores Haze? I mean, I know why. But we need more spaces for female abjection that are abject, as opposed to shrines to what catalyzed the insecurity in the first place. Where’s the catharsis in these aesthetics if you get called “lard ass” on a daily basis and have cystic acne?  

And look, I recognize that I steal femcel valor all the time. I haven’t been a proper femcel since Obama was in office. The point still stands, though, because there’s a sixteen-year-old Katherine out there who is thinking the same thing. She’s not the decaying girl boss of the right-wing media’s imagination, nor is she the Lana stan with a made-up benzo problem and make-up smeared across her pillowcase. She’s a different kind of lonely girl who can’t possibly watch Welcome to the Dollhouse one more time. These young women deserve a “femcel canon” that doesn’t include books where the central characters are heroin chic art hoes who selfishly sleep an entire year away. She shouldn’t have to play-act as an object of fetishization, or the member of some liberatory movement. She shouldn’t have to adopt a veneer of positivity or self-acceptance. She shouldn’t have to try and strike a ‘queer’ pose because that’s the only place where people are candidly discussing ugliness.

But where do these women go?

Internet of Frauds. If I’ve learned anything from my time as a Chronically Online person, it’s that the Discourse fandoms which dominate journalism and social media are just coalitions of frauds. What I’m trying to say is that nobody knows what they’re talking about, no one does the reading, and everyone is wrong.

People generally don’t end up in these corners because they discovered that’s too edgy for the mainstream to accept. I mean, it happens sometimes, but it’s remarkably rare. When you scratch the surface, you have a bunch of cults of personality, and that’s about it. Yes, people’s outsider theories have been vindicated, but I challenge you to test the limits of how much (and in which ways) they’ve been vindicated. There is little suppressed talent, only the mythology of suppressed talent and stifled voices. There are many more frustrated theatre kids who found a backdoor to the validation of an audience that didn’t require them to play by the rules of the mainstream.

Let me offer an analogy. When you get deep into Western Esotericism, you realize that there’s no such thing as occult knowledge. You can go as far down the rabbit hole as you want. Do you know what you’re going to find? Flimsy alternative histories, purposefully vague accounts of “personal gnosis,” and misinterpretations of more legit spiritual texts. Wild goose chases for sources that don’t exist or don’t exist as they’ve been advertised.

So often with esotericism, searching for the text is the text. In the Discourse Fandom, the meat is in the interpersonal connections, the act of identifying against, and the narrative of having been silenced. It’s a form of fan fiction, or maybe text-based roleplaying is more apt.

Ditto to a lot of edgy art, too. A lot of it is plain bad—it’s really not about the art. This has been true since time immemorial, though. Kathy Acker sucked. G.G. Allin sucked. What’s cool about their work isn’t the work, most of the time. It’s the context, the artist, the environment. It’s cool because of what it isn’t.

With contemporary expressions of the same, maybe the argument is that these artists could refine their craft if the environment were more welcoming. I don’t think so, though. The shifting landscape of the arts almost feels like a coincidence. Most of what I see is total garbage, and the only currency the artists have is their own rejection. There are so many people who are lucky they can identify against the mainstream because they’d have no chance in hell without the shield of their marginalization.

What I’ve Been Reading

We need to talk about chemsex

The conversation that night brought to light intersectional commonalities in the reasons why people of all stripes engage with chemsex — most commonly, it seems, to dissolve the culturally-conditioned sexual anxieties that can be so tricky to shake off while sober.

Gay men and straight women alike spoke of letting go of body dysmorphia and shame while in the disinhibited state of chemically-enhanced euphoria, of exploring desires that the cultures of toxic masculinity and transmisogyny have impinged their abilities to see. “It is possible to look at the shadow without the shadow taking over,” said Mikiki, speaking on how the history that people carry often shapes their sexual inclinations.

“Of course my desires are related to my trauma, but am I not allowed to explore that?”

Discussed this very “grad school” UnHerd piece in a group chat this morning. I think the author makes a fair point, which is, chemsex isn’t always just having an orgy with strangers at a rave; people engage in it for various reasons. It’s fair to interrogate those reasons and interrogation isn’t a tacit endorsement.

Reading this piece, I couldn’t help but think that we seem to be in an epidemic of only being able to experience intense emotions through a vector of disembodiment. This is especially true of sex, where people so often talk about needing drugs or alcohol, or, more tellingly, talk about how they dissociate.

This problem runs deep. Everywhere, we’re trying to transcend our physical bodies, either to escape feeling or, in this case, to experience it more acutely. Or so we think… without the physical reality of our bodies, maybe it is just an escape: we think it’s more real because we’re less inhibited.  

Rise of the TikTok Mengele

Is Madonna’s face reveal any more shocking than Cher’s? To me, Madonna looks the way she looks because she’s trying to ape Zoomer fashion. Her face is just a poor imitation of what’s in style right now. It’s not clear to me that there’s a meaningful difference between her plastic surgery and, say, Joan Rivers’s.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting piece, and I think Mary’s right: the real fault lines of the culture war are how much we want tech to impinge on our humanity.

She also poses a question about what the dissident response to all this should be:

In particular: where does such artistic endeavour stand, in relation to an emerging aesthetics of radically plastic flesh? The eugenicist push, after all, appears to be coming not from the Right but from a tech-enamoured progressive mainstream, where radical physical malleability is increasingly normalised as self-actualisation or mass entertainment. And in the wake of this paradigm shift, any amount of human “upgrading” becomes not just possible but aspirational or even morally necessary. If this is the case, then what, if any, should the dissident response be?

Dissidents, too, long for never-ending upgrades, but for them, I think it has a different moral valence. There’s a fight in the upgrade, and those who manage it successfully, are at the top of the hierarchy. They are Ubermenschen. (Am I using that word correctly?) On the other hand, the mainstream response is for these procedures to carry at least the illusion of being “equal opportunity.” And certainly equal outcome: we’re all beautiful after a little bit of filler. It’s almost a little bit hedonistic, sometimes, too. It can be self-care. If it makes you feel pretty, it makes you feel pretty. Forget why the urgency to feel pretty, so long as you arrive at your desired emotional destination.

Whereas for the Dissident, if you do the work, you eat the diet, you rebalance the hormones, you build ‘fizeek,’ you breed the Aryan virgin—that’s work. You fought for that. And you deserve to reap the fruits of your labor.

Anyway, all of these procedures (and diets) have real-world, physical impacts. If TikTok’s any indication, people might be waking up to the limits of cosmetic enhancement as a path towards realizing their true selves.

There are ripples of anti-filler sentiment, and definitely a strong push against BBLs and breast augmentation. Trans women are increasingly speaking honestly about negative experiences with SRS, and importantly, without a political, anti-woke, anti-trans, or dissident angle.

Farrah Flawless

In her piece, Mary mentions Farrah Flawless, a person on the Goth internet I’ve followed since I was a kid. She’s been famous for something like twenty years for her extreme body modifications: she’s done it all, including SRS. But she’s also been open about her regrets and negative experiences. She’s let piercings close, she’s undergone tattoo removals, and so on and so forth.

She’s an extreme example, sure, but if even she’s trying to undo some of the body mods… Who’s next?

Let’s end on a less morbid note.
I hope you all have a good day tomorrow.

I believe in soulmates. And I think your soulmate is whoever heals the wound you’ve been nursing since you were 17.

Don’t mistake that for “pours salt in the wound,” by the way. Easy mistake. We all make it once. Or twice. Or until we stop.

Anyway, happy early Valentine’s Day, friends. May you all find your Freddie Prinze Jr., if you haven’t already.

P.S. Here’s a playlist of some of my favorite love songs…

Susanne is my favorite…It wasn’t written as a love song I don’t think, but it’s how I feel, and it makes me cry. :’)