Note: This was supposed to be my newsletter dispatch for the end of June, but it’s been sitting in my drafts for well over a month now. I wanted this one to be good and well thought out, but alas — life and circumstances and perfectionist fears ultimately won out. Here it is anyway, though!
Dearest friend,
I've been thinking about women a lot lately.
But in particular, I've been thinking about female pain, rage, desire, hunger, and social control. The way women hurt, yet the way that hurt is made to seem banal. The way women's complaints are time and again ignored, rejected, and scoffed at. Medical misogyny, femicide, pay gaps, etc. etc.
Sometimes I wonder if being a woman simply means existing alongside pain in perpetuity. If it means bearing the constant burden, and simultaneously putting on a face of pleasant deference and submission. But is this really how it is? Or how it should be?
I want to refuse this narrative – this understanding of womanhood that is placed so squarely within the confines of what society demands it to be. Womanhood in a neat little box. In a binding binary of black and white. In an insane asylum. In a lobotomy chair.
There’s much to be said about why the “unhinged women” and “female rage” subgenres (in literature, film, and media) seem to continuously crop up and garner wide lasting attention, regardless of time. In the 1890s fin de siècle, we had Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In the 2020s, we have Raven Leilani’s Luster and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. As long as there has existed a perceived and distinct gender binary, there have been scorned women writing about their pain. At times it’s muted, distorted, and muffled. Other times it’s loud, angry, and rageful.
I know I must seem like a cynic a lot of the time, but the truth is, I am an optimist at my core — an optimist cloaked in a hard, cynical armor. But it’s only surface-deep, really. Maybe optimist isn’t the word? Maybe it’s more that, no matter what, I cling onto kernels of hope — small strongholds of belief in life and love and good things. In large part, the reasons for the existence of these small inextinguishable flames are the women themselves. Those who have come before me, who exist today, and who will carry onward after me. I think of women in all walks of life. Alone, coupled, mothers, transitioning, looking, finding. Each of them blazing paths before them, or brushing aside the tall grass, or tiptoeing across life’s fields.
I think of my mother. Smiling and hurting and trying trying trying. Taking care of me. Despite everything. Because of everything.
And, I don’t know. Even if none of that changes anything fundamentally, at least I know I’m not alone. Sometimes, that’s the best you can do.
the library
You can read my thoughts on Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado here and here, and my thoughts on Luster by Raven Leilani here.
the record player
//the mixtape//
In honor of pride month being (long) over, here’s my playlist titled Chanel. Iykyk.
the salon
Here are some other interesting pieces of the internet I loved this month that I think you might enjoy as well. A warning, beforehand. Each article is fairly long, heavy, and triggering, and all of them deal with female pain in one way or another.
The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado (the first story in her collection, Her Body and Other Parties)
“He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt. He is not a bad man at all. And yet –”
“In class, I don’t say to my students, ‘Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity? How much more it hurts to be let down by ‘one of the good ones?’”
A Love Letter to the Girls Who Die First in Horror Films
“When a woman is described as “asking for it,” for whatever trauma or violence has befallen her, what she’s really being accused of is not doing enough to prevent it. Harassment, assault, violence, death are supposed to be things women plan around as habitually as checking the weather forecast before getting dressed. We’re taught that someone wants to hurt us and our job is not to let them.”
“The Final Girl is an empty promise. What it seems to offer women is the guarantee of survival if we do everything right. But what it actually ensures is that, if you are hurt, there will be a way to trace it back to a rule you broke. You become the Final Girl by attrition, not achievement. You can’t earn the title. You can only outlast everyone who didn’t get it.”
I’ve seen Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker article on abortion and state surveillance circulating the web recently, but here’s an equally well-written article on the religious and ethical issues of abortion. In the article, Tolentino explores the history of abortion (and its related movements), and the moral dimension of bringing a child into a worsening world. As someone who was also formerly a devout Christian, I found this one particularly relatable.
“The idea that guilt inheres in female identity persists in anti-abortion logic: anything a woman, or a girl, does with her body can justify the punishment of undesired pregnancy, including simply existing.”
“One need not reject the idea that life in the womb exists or that fetal life has meaning in order to favor the right to abortion; one must simply allow that everything, not just abortion, has a moral dimension, and that each pregnancy occurs in such an intricate web of systemic and individual circumstances that only the person who is pregnant could hope to evaluate the situation and make a moral decision among the options at hand.”
Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
“I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date—twice-told, thrice-told, 1001-nights-told—masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-awareness once the story of all pain has already been told.”
“The wounded woman gets called a stereotype, and sometimes she is. But sometimes she’s just true. I think the possibility of fetishizing pain is no reason to stop representing it. Pain that gets performed is still pain. Pain turned trite is still pain.”
Scenes from an Open Marriage. This article was one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read, from the craft to the content. I’ve been sharing it with everyone I know and would love to hear your thoughts on this piece if you read it!
A poem for the road:
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
By Kim AddonizioIf you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
See you again every soon.
With the utmost of love,
Charlotte
“In large part, the reasons for the existence of these small inextinguishable flames are the women themselves. Those who have come before me, who exist today, and who will carry onward after me“
This whole thing but especially this part!