“I want to give you something, or I want to take something from you. But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding on to it.”
“Some philosophers—among them MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor—have insisted that if a narrative is to endow a human life with meaning, it must take the form of a quest for the good. But what makes such a quest an interesting story? There had better be some trouble in it, because that’s what drives a drama. If adversity doesn’t figure prominently in your autobiographical memories, your life narrative will be a bit insipid, and your sense of meaningfulness accordingly impaired. The claim that big troubles are essential ingredients of a good narrative, and hence of a good life, is called by psychologists the “adversity hypothesis.” If true, this hypothesis “has profound implications for how we should live our lives,” observes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.” It also means, Haidt adds, that we should expose our children to the same. But adversity can be taken too far. We don’t want our lives to assume the form of tragedy (easy as it is to weave our autobiographical memories into such a grim narrative, especially when lying awake at three am). Meaning, after all, is not everything; happiness counts, too. […] Let’s say you’ve done the hard narrative work, the work of self-constitution. You’ve put in the “conscious effort” it takes to “extract an intelligible trajectory out of your past,” one that will “make your life as a whole a meaningful unit” (the quoted phrases are from Jenann Ismael). Perhaps your narrative takes the popular American form of redemption, in which the blunders and setbacks and sufferings you’ve undergone are invested with positive meaning in the drama of resilient triumph. You’ve traveled the hard road to the good life. And on the whole, you’re content with the identity you’ve reflectively forged. Are you now a bit like a happy Socrates? Or could it be that you’re more of a satisfied fool? That would depend on just how good your self-story is. So, at least, we are told by the narrativists. “The only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrative or to-be-narrated quest,” declares Alasdair MacIntyre.”
Nüshu (literally “women’s writing” in Chinese) is a syllabic script created and used exclusively by women in the Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China. Up until the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) women were forbidden access to formal education, and so Nüshu was developed in secrecy as a means to communicate. Since its discovery in 1982, Nüshu remains to be the only gender-specific writing system in the world.
ON CONSTRUCTING ONESELF // (1) Birthday Letter (2020) by me // (2) Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (2019) (3) Beautiful Zero: Poems by Jennifer Willough (2015) // (4) // (5) // (6)
One of the most healing things I’ve strove (striven?) to do in my life is viewing sex as just another thing people do, among a host of other things like eating and pooping and playing with cats.
Our entire society, feminists and puritans alike, pushes the idea that sex is uniquely powerful and dangerous, capable of inflicting The Worst Trauma or the Highest Fulfillment, and that’s…just flat out untrue. Other experiences can cause similar trauma: violence, disasters, war, instability. Other experiences can result in transcendent pleasure: trance states, live music, non-sexual intimacy, tattoos.
I think this is where the disconnect in perception about sex positivity comes from, because the phrase itself makes people who already view sex as being uniquely powerful think sex positivity means viewing sex as uniquely good, when actually…it’s mostly about taking sex off that pedestal. Normalizing sex. Making it into just another thing people do. Because that’s the first step in making sure people can engage with sex on their own terms in a healthy way.
Taking sex off its cultural pedestal was the thing that allowed me to overcome the deeply-instilled shame I developed from being raised within Christian purity culture, and from being queer, and from existing as a woman. I think a failure to do that, in feminist circles, often leads to an overblowing of the (very real) harm that sex has the potential to do at the exclusion of other problems facing women and other marginalized groups, which often leads to more shaming rhetoric - just rhetoric that shames different people for different reasons.
Sex is not the enemy and it’s not our savior. It’s just one more thing people can do with their bodies.
