Warm and sticky summers are the kind I hate the most. The swath of heat, cocooning me in such a way that I find it hard to breathe in and fill my lungs with anything more refreshing than a swampy, stale gust of wind. Summer has always found me resistant to its charms, particularly because I have never been the right size for it.

Because there is a size for it, you see. Something small, something malleable and lithe enough to float around. What I am is rigid and self-lacerating, unable to appreciate how I might also enjoy the sun. I am instead a ball of fear, afraid of what might happen if the sun were to melt off my shell and reveal a soft, gently trembling centre.

I am nothing if not contradictory. Truth be told, I quite like the burn. The steady sizzle of skin feels pleasant, as though slowly thawing me from a year-long winter. When I read a book like Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, read how the protagonist notices “the reflection of sebum on her forehead” or “a golden crust of puss on her bitten and infected cuticle”, I realise that what I feel is similar to this.

This peeling, slimy revelation of the natural ways in which human beings are a little gross, a little too normal. The summer I have always imagined to be outside myself is prettier, rose-tinted, but Howarth is determined to capture normalcy, something akin to unattractive.

I find that this element of love is the most terrifying. The idea that someone might notice something as naturally occurring as the sebum sweating out of my forehead in the thirty-degree heat of a British summer is horrifying. The sweat, slick and salty, crawls down my body at a snail’s pace and I let it ooze as it pleases. Someone who loves me might see this sweat, the way it gathers between dark corners of my body and enjoy it. They might want to lick it, hold me close and consume what I have always been self-conscious about.

What else? Well, there’s always the smell. The smell of warm bodies can be quite disgusting. Pure human smell is so difficult to categorise. It changes, mutates with the beat of your heart as you fall in love with it, with the owner of the scent. Like most other things in the summer, I am fearful of whether my lover hates or loves the way I smell. Do I smell good? Do I smell horrible? Do I smell at all? What a terror it would be to have nothing to offer by way of olfactory pleasure, the very thing we still have in common with animals. In the summer I want to sniff and be sniffed. I want to press in close to a warm neck and clog my nose with the open pores of fuzzy skin, scent trapped within the tangles of a cow lick. I want to lick, want to feel skin bristle on my tongue. I want to please, want to have pleasure reverberate through the warm pulse of my wrists and fingers in a mouth just as hot.

God, the heat is so affronting. You cannot escape it. You have to have it, need it even if it kills you. This lover, all-knowing, takes their neck away from my flared nose. Their mouth unhinges, and strings of spit leave a cooling trace. Love is so restless. It is abrasive and waxy at the same time, like hardy candy with sharp, broken edges and a molten centre. I can smell them still. Warm skin, warm hands, raised flesh left in the wake of my searching hands. The summer has sacrificed its sun and handed her to me. She is scorching and soothing all the same. I wonder if, by some wayward type of luck, I can keep her chained to my side forever.

I wish I could take the thumping mass in my chest and crush it. I wish I could stop trying to challenge myself. I wish I could ignore microaggressions, brush past strange but isolated incidents that inevitably culminate in patterns of systemic behaviour, but I can’t. I am not the one who trained myself to do this. I don’t have the privilege of being gullible. Whilst I actively try to utilise critical thinking, its weight is sometimes more overwhelming than comforting myself with illiteracy. I think many people find comfort in illiteracy. In purposefully misunderstanding and compartmentalising nuance into neatly defined boxes that can be categorised based on one’s individual morals. How interesting it is, then, that when it comes to something real, the matters of our current world that rely on each one of us being capable of having a backbone and trying our best to take care of one another and the planet we inhabit, it is much easier to take the simpler route. A path that does not interrupt the bubble of frictionless ease. We are living in Omelas, and we should all be afraid.

Understanding the world of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’

In Omelas, the residents are living amongst comforts like no other. The city is being prepared for the Festival of Summer, decorated with sparkling flags, raucous with “a shimmering of gong and tambourine”, the old people and women with prams filling these streets. Children excitedly breezing through beautiful gardens across the city, “a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.”

This joy is embedded in the heart of Omelas. Le Guin makes it clear that the reason for this is the lack of a power structure in Omelas, no monarchies, slavery or wars. There is no pain to elevate the suffering, no darkness to balance out the light. “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual. Only interesting.”

This pain-free Elysium, as Le Guin puts it, sounds like a fairy-tale city that truly exists only in the mind’s most utopian illusion. She even suggests in the narration that the reader imagine their own Omelas, “for certainly I cannot suit you all.”

Interestingly, this understanding of happiness, Le Guin writes, “is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.” The middle category—‘unnecessary but undestructive’—is where she defines comfort, luxury and exuberance; central heating, public transport, washing machines, the kinds of things that we have evolved to needing now in our frictionless existence.

What do you imagine the limitless happiness of this city’s people is built upon? Did you guess a neglected child in a random basement? If you’ve read the story, then yes. If you haven’t, well, there it is. The source, one could say, of the Omelas’ prosperity is a living being that lies shivering in a basement covered in its own excrement. Guin describes in quite morbid detail how this child, who “looks about six, but actually is nearly ten”, has been left there for an interminable amount of time. People sometimes come into the basement and kick the child to make ‘it’ stand up; some only look on in disgust or discomfort.

Nevertheless, the child remains there. All the people of Omelas know it is there. Some are content to know the child is there, as though it is necessary. It has to be there. Le Guin does not tell us why, only that “the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

I suppose that is the task of the short story: Le Guin has created, with all the expansive, descriptive language the English dictionary will allow, a world that exists on the misfortune of a singular being and gives no reason for it. No great purpose or arc. She doesn’t give any explanation as to the origin of these terms or where this child came from, only that if they were to save the child, to give it care and comfort, all their joy would “wither and be destroyed”. She leaves you with this truth, the searing fact of it, your own undeniable questioning.

But the people of Omelas have resigned to the fate of ignorance. To save this child would be to give up their comfort and happiness, to allow pain and suffering past their gates, a concept already foreign to them. The choice, then, must feel passive. They are merely victims. How could they possibly risk everyone else’s joy for a child’s?

Freedom vs equality, and what we can learn from the residents of Omelas who chose to ignore those who suffer for their comfort.

A while ago I watched a video from a creator that I can no longer remember, about how, at the beginning of her lectures, she’d ask her class if they’d rather choose equality or freedom. As I’ve come to learn, this is quite a common philosophical question, and much like how Le Guin urges the reader to envision their own Omelas, it poses a foundation for understanding what it is we’ve truly come to desire as a human race. With all the evolution we’ve undergone and world-class innovation at our fingertips, a decision between freedom and equality is equally philosophical and political enough to measure where your values and beliefs lie. If you don’t believe me, answer the question for yourself: Would you choose freedom or equality?

As you can imagine, the utopia of a poor man is not the same as that of a rich man. What does freedom look like for someone who has never had it, and what does equality mean to someone who has never had to fight for it? We are asking questions that disrupt the subconscious existence that hierarchical civilisation primes us for, which is why, when the creator says that many of her students choose “freedom”, I was disappointed, but not surprised.

From my understanding, freedom means to be the one unchained, regardless of who suffers at the expense of your freedom. It’s why intraracial discrimination continues to happen: the goal is not a dismantling of racism; it is to appease those who deem you free. A boy who suffers rejection from women based on his appearance grows up to believe that he can only escape the shackles of unattainable beauty standards by becoming the man’s man, a symbol of masculinity that towers over everyone else. A woman who suffers at the hands of the patriarchy believes that her freedom rests in a complete deference to the system to be spared. Both believe that by giving in to the standard, they are protected from its wrath. But it has been famously said that “until all of us are free, none of us is free.” Which is why, in every instance, I believe equality is the only answer.

Is it longer? Yes. Does it require self-sacrifice? Of course. But at the core of something like, say, feminism, is the belief in full advocacy for the social, political and economic equality of all genders. The patriarchy may benefit men who desire individual freedom by way of undercutting others, but not those who desire equality, which is why it remains a system even now, because our desire to fight amongst ourselves is stronger than the desire to right what continues to be wrong.

Wilful ignorance, choosing to ignore the obvious bad in favour of the selfish good. Whether this selfishness is human nature or a product of our environment, and how we can instead choose the discomfort of radicalisation.

“To throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.”

A fear of the unknown is such a fascinating thing to unpack. Much of the world’s bigotry and oppression is born from either a refusal to know or a deep, shameful understanding that is ignored. You should be ashamed of your ignorance. It is not enough to simply not know. For many who are marginalised, it is much more difficult to turn a blind eye to bigotry because you exist in it. A Black woman cannot fully embrace white feminism because how it ostracises her is too obvious. A queer person cannot fully embrace non-queer spaces where compulsory heterosexuality is baked into the walls. When your existence is inherently oppressed, you do not get rose-tinted glasses. You can choose to ignore it, but it will never ignore you. It will follow you around your Omelas, mirroring your shadow until it manages to fall in line .

This idea of being “awake” to how blind ignorance is woven into so many pieces of media, particularly in the Wachowski sisters’ 1999 film The Matrix. The film follows Neo, a computer programmer and hacker, who has always questioned the reality of the world around him. His suspicions are confirmed when Morpheus, a rebel leader, reveals to Neo that he is one of many cogs in a machine—the titular “Matrix”—and he can either choose the blue pill, which will keep him ‘asleep’ and none the wiser to the knowledge of this machine, or the red pill, which will awaken him to the real world, which is actually a dystopia ruled by AI.

In both The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and The Matrix, two versions of utopia are described. Smith, an agent from the matrix, says, “Humans define their reality through misery and suffering” as opposed to the “batteries” who live without sentience. “You are a plague, and we are the cure.” Ignorance is the cure. The utopia. Guin says that the balance of light and dark does not exist in Omelas because there is no need for it. Both messages are saying something different, though Smith himself eventually admits that he believes the Machine to be a prison he wants to be free from. This understanding of utopia as a place free from misery or fear permeates across both stories as a paradox; for happiness to exist, someone or something must suffer, but you cannot acknowledge the suffering otherwise there is no happiness.

Ignorance works on a lack of knowledge, a neutral condition at best, but if the information to learn is so readily available, why don’t we pursue it? If happiness and joy can only exist in states of unawarness, then what is the point?

Many people consider joy to be an act of resistance, especially since we’re living and working through global unrest. We’re waking up to news of war, eating lunch whilst scrolling past unfettered hate speech, going to bed with the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, sleep is a luxury. It isn’t as though I’m advocating for misery and suffering. But being aware of it, choosing to acknowledge the reality of pain and sacrifice, is where we navigate how to continue living. Walking away from idealism and embracing reality has never been an easy task, even for the strongest of activists. But being aware of the world’s worst parts is what breeds compassion.

It isn’t easy to be honest. If anything, it costs much less to scroll past. I still do it. It becomes overwhelming to know that there is so much burning right before you. But there is no real effort in that, is there? The heart will bleed and pump, and the brain will throb, and I wish to hold more comfort in my ability to actively dissuade evil. To sit comfortably in your blind ignorance does not make me envious of you. It makes me angry.

At the end of Nadja, an autobiographical novel written by the founding father of Surrealism, André Breton, writes:

“Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be.”

Beautiful women are either mad, morose, or both. Any in-between casts too mysterious a shadow for the modern mind to comprehend. Nevertheless, André Breton was fascinated by the madness, by the vacillating nature of hysteria, so much so that he believed it to be “the greatest poetic discovery of the end of the nineteenth century.”

One branch of Breton’s surrealist framework was the revolt against rationalism, a call to turn away from the Enlightenment era of hard science that limited the human experience with its idea of there being no basis for spiritual understanding. Surrealism appeared as a sort of Neo-faith, championing the power of the unconscious, and you’d be unsurprised to know that one of Breton’s earliest inspirations—aside from Freud, another unsurprising discovery—was Jean Martin Charcot, a doctor of hysteria who set up a hospital for hysterics…so women. Charcot was known for turning his patients— often working-class women—into public spectacles for male consumption, setting up an exhibition of women whom he would hypnotise to induce these attacks of hysteria. Most notable was the arc de cercle - the arc of hysteria1, in which a woman is seen arching on a bed, her arms and legs exposed but her head hidden. This inspired quite seminal works like Louis Bourgeoisie’s titular arch of hysteria2, where a woman’s form is bronzed into a literal circle. Salvador Dali also incorporated the arch in his 1967 painting, Nude with Snail3, depicting a naked woman arched backwards with a snail on her stomach.

The interesting thing about all of these interpretations of hysteria is that the women themselves were largely unresponsive. They were present, of course; in fact, they were muses, according to Roland Penrose4, but never agents of their own image in the myriad of photos, paintings, or literary works that emerged from the early years of the Surrealist movement. Much like how many male directors and writers portray women, they are merely subjects of the man’s mind, which is to say that their own minds, the woman’s interiority, is just as subject to how any given man chooses to perceive it. How terrifying.

It is both fascinating and depressing to realise, through an era so canon in the history of art and literature, that for a long time we did not know what lived in the minds of those hysterical women. It had been decided for us by men like Breton, who went on to develop said movement from scrutinising the ‘youthful hysteria’ of patients like Louise Augustine Gleizes, a woman who, amidst psychosis, was photographed by Charcot and became his most “celebrated hysteric”5. In the end, Breton, along with his co-author Aragon, came to this conclusion in their manifesto: “hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and may in all respects be considered as a supreme means of expression.”

The mind of a hysterical woman can be metaphorically summarised by Leonora Carrington, who, in response to Breton’s idea of convulsion being the most supreme human state, said in a 1993 profile of her life in El País, ‘not Breton or anyone has ever seen the inside of a Spanish madhouse’.

Carrington was placed in a mental asylum in Santander and frequently had spasms from the medications she was given. Her madness was not ideal nor was it romantic, and yet Breton developed Surrealism based on this romantic idea that madwomen have an affinity for it, for wildness and ferality rather than the madness in question springing from trauma or distress.

Where women are actually considered, there’s a clear re-evaluation of belief. The detached voyeurism of the female form becomes internal as artists like Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Césaire allow us access into their imaginations. From the traumatic impact of Freud’s psychoanalysis, to Cahun’s radical self-assertion as a non-binary lesbian part of the French resistance during the Nazi Occupation, and Suzanne’s assertions of the politically liberated state one can assume through surrealism. These women, who at one point would have been victims and subjects and muses, rightfully inserted themselves back into the frameworks that only profited off their ‘peculiarities’.

My reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is what birthed this rabbit hole I dove headfirst into. What we see at several points in The Yellow Wallpaper is the narrator being constrained in the ways she expresses herself. The story follows our narrator as she settles into the room on the top floor of a colonial mansion, isolated and confined, resting after giving birth. In this room is a hideous yellow wallpaper, whose “outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.” It is clear she does not want to be in this room, but it is where she must stay. To her physician husband, the ‘rest cure’ is reasonable. It’s rational. But clearly, as the story progresses, that sort of stifling only increases the intensity of the narrator’s interior. More exclamation marks, more surety that there is, in fact, a woman in the wallpaper. The only way we’re exposed to her interiority is through the words on the page, which are written in an almost epistolary format, inviting us squarely into the imagination of a woman who is being told that to imagine anything is to tire herself out. Her husband doesn’t allow her to write because he doesn’t want her to entertain ‘fanciful’ ideas, unknowingly pushing her further across the barrier of the fanciful and right into the fantastical.

Where Breton and his ideas paint hysteria as the womb growing his larger beliefs about Surrealism, essentially pedestalling women’s suffering as a tool for higher understanding, the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is barred from exploring her imagination for fear of her getting sick, despite her desire to write being the only real outlet in which she’s able to express… well, anything. She’s kept to a routine where she must do absolutely nothing; all matters of agency are taken from her, and she expresses that she should be grateful for this.

It’s such a fascinating contradiction, isn’t it? This story was written in 1892, 30-odd years before the Surrealist movement took place, almost as if it were a forewarning of how little agency women would have, even with their own imaginations. What I’ve learnt about surrealism from the eyes of women is that where men found intrigue in hysteria and convulsiveness, women found respite in the private, internal struggle of womanhood. If the narrator were to freely explore these things in her writing, what would have become of her? If she had the support of her husband instead of his restrictive dismissal, a chance to inhabit the emotional turmoil that comes with postnatal depression, would her story have been different?

As I’ve said before, the understanding that men have of the female mind is categorical. It is both entrancing and infuriating, this mind, but first and foremost, it is illogical. The manic pixie dream girl is the reincarnation of Charcot’s ‘young hysteria’. She is the ethereal femme-enfant, a smorgasbord of every romanticised trait that has plagued women for centuries, made flesh—“It is relevant to mention that the language used to describe women suffering from hysteria was not unlike the phrases used against feminists - ‘capricious, coquettish, wilful, and troublemaking’”.6

The manic pixie dream girl is a gateway drug to absurdity, an absurdity she herself never truly expresses because then she would just be a complex human being. No, she is simply the bridge by which a confused young man experiences a bildungsroman to rival all bildungsromans.

I also like to categorise some of these women as charismatic martyrs. They’re often the type to be shown through a film camera or camcorder, splashing water into the lens, smiling and laughing, resplendent in their joy. She exists only through the eyes of a miserable male protagonist who loved her just enough to care about her death for the first thirty minutes of the film, and she is a martyr because death or disappearance is the final act for any woman in a man’s story.

This character has evolved now, though. Everything from the rape-revenge genre7 to Yorgos Lanthimos’s own femme-enfant in Poor Things, we have no shortage of hysterical subjects in modern-day media. Though not directly influenced by Surrealism, the origin of the movement is opaque in how often these characters are used as vessels for a man’s ascension or redemption, despite the lack of individual work done on his part to self-reflect. But that’s the beauty of the hysterical woman. Her disregard of social conventions only works to convince her onlookers that she has come into a man’s life and given him the tools necessary for his betterment. She herself is a tool. She is mad enough to make our down-on-his-luck protagonist feel special for being chosen and morose enough that when her womanly insecurities manifest (because they always do), his ego is sufficiently stroked when she inevitably asks him if he thinks she’s pretty. They’re having a pick-me-off, and no one is winning.

I hope you don’t take this as a denouncing of Surrealism. I love Surrealism, and in fact, I’m currently studying Surrealism across several mediums, but in venturing down this course of study, an understanding of its buried roots is critical. I am always more interested in what women contribute to art and literature, and so it’s unsurprising that many of my favourite works—some of which I mentioned above—expressly cover female interiority. The reclaimation, as I’ve said, has led to many more surrealist works made by women that don’t place themselves at the centre of a romantic idea, but rather at the helm of what was always meant to be an embodied expression of human creativity. I think Surrealism is an innately human movement, one that needed to be fed varying perspectives and failed to recognise the voices of those it took from.

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A much more thorough and nuanced dissection of the Surrealist movement and all the inspiration it draws from the women who went mad for it:

surrealist covens

The Mad Woman

Dear Coven…

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10 months ago · 370 likes · 10 comments · surrealist covens

Womanhood is not a thing I can easily define, perhaps because, like most other things in society, it was first constructed by everyone but women in the hopes of defining it for us. A woman is all the things the system of patriarchy expects her to be. She is a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a fossil. She has the map towards the end of her life readily available if need be. Then, somewhere along the way, women decided that if womanhood was simply a constructed identity, we might as well define it in our own ways.

There are many ways to be a woman, some of which still rely on a permeance of patriarchal values. It’s a hard leech to peel off, unfortunately, but some don’t see it as a leech. As with anything oppressive, there will always be a group who, intentionally or unintentionally, mould their oppressive state of living into a falsehood that somewhat resembles freedom. Enter: the world of divine femininity.

There is a long and studied history of the divine feminine. It gets its roots from several parts of the world as a celebration of ancient goddesses1, but the Western understanding of the divine feminine sophisticates2 the message with its own desire to somehow live in equlibrium the patriarchy by directly engaging in it. Much of the messaging of divine femininity content has been debunked to its very unmarrowed bones, so I won’t bore you with my thoughts on it, but know that I do not believe that there is some inherent feminine or masculine energy. Feminine and masculine are social constructs we perform as part of our desire to exist in society. You can be masculine or feminine presenting, but this is not because you are biologically those things. However, the point of this content is to convince you that this is, in fact, an innate part of your womanly nature, the ability to ‘tap into’ your feminine and ‘discard’ your masculine.

@shivanipauWhy we need to tap into our feminine energy #feminineenergy #highvaluewoman #softgirlera #feminineenergie

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As a fat, dark-skinned Black woman who has often considered my womanhood as othered to the experiences I’m told I should have—in dating, in friendships, in self-agency, etc.—, a concept like the divine feminine would appeal to me. It has actually, and I don’t want to take away the reclamation of historically denigrated traits from women who have been masculinised their whole lives. But when building an identity based on the divine feminine, what does that look like for women who do not fit the mould of being traditionally feminine? If the Western proponent skews eerily close to that of Christian nationalist conservative propaganda in a liberal wig, then how could you, Black woman, be divinely feminine?

A creator [@Bunmisupreme] defined the ways patriarchy has wounded black women and white women. Where white women have existed in the cage of social transaction, often being paraded and conformed into the non-rebellious roles of wife and mother, Black women are treated as bodies to devalue, devoid of personhood and predisposed to a life of “strangling commitment from resistant partners.” The natural consequence of this is that the burdens accompanying each wound are misconstrued by the other side. White women misunderstand Black women’s lack of personhood as freedom or autonomy, a sexual rebellion, because they have no legal or social currency to withhold them. Black women see the social currency of wifedom as stability, a legal promise of care.

These are just the racial implications that come with the label of womanhood, sans class, sexuality, etc., but we’ll focus on race—and a little on sexuality later on—, as that defines the argument that Bunmi states clearly in her video: “historically, black women have been denied the bourgeois wife script.” And the issue here is that you cannot easily curate a “soft life” without somewhat trying to entertain that script.

Given my history of desiring and wanting to be desired, I cannot immediately bash these women. I myself craved reciprocal intimacy, where I’m seen as a whole and not a scrap. But it is difficult to watch Black women feed into the puritanical tradwife grift. Black women who, if these were different times, would have never seen the inside of a house.

I’m gonna tell on myself a little here; I am deeply monogamous. I read a lot of fanfiction, consume a lot of self-insert media, and the ones that I find myself subconsciously scrolling past are the ones where there is no established relationship. I avoid cheating fics, I avoid one-night stand fics ( this is circumstantial), and I gravitate towards stories where the characters are married or happily in love. This doesn’t apply to books that I read, only fanfiction. Note: I compartmentalise these two by what I’m reading as a self-insert and what is a separate, constructed story.

Whenever I set up my little scenarios before going to bed, it is almost always an established relationship between me and my “scene partner”; any deviation ruins the fantasy. I find no thrill in being a one-night stand or situating myself in the angst of cheating. This is my fantasy, after all, and I get to imagine what I desire: a stable, happy relationship.

That being said, being a wife is not aspirational to me. Despite what my fantasies suggest, I don’t desire wifedom. I desire partnership. I desire love, slow-moving, everyday love. I find it irksome when people say, “I want to be somebody’s wife” because the opposite sentiment is never shared. I have never heard a man say he wants to be somebody’s husband, because systemically, there is no profit tied to the latter like there is to the former. Wives act as a function of society; there’s a necessity in becoming a wife, whether as an unpaid labourer or a symbol of the brand-managed heterosexual relationship (i.e. family channels), whereas husbanddom (see? doesn’t even roll off the tongue) is not a pursued role but rather a thing that a man becomes if he wants a wife. Even when it is, much like the “I wanna be a dad”, it is said with much flippancy, as though a child is a new toy you can return.

The weight of heterosexual marriage obviously burdens women more than it does men, but as Bunmi says, “this burden is abstract to Black women.” A bad partner is manageable as long as he’s around. A cheater is manageable as long as he knows where home is, and a ring is always enough to convince a woman that being kept by a horrible man is more bearable than being considered not worth keeping.

These Black women are not trying to be vain; they simply want to be picked. Understandably so, because we have never really existed with the option of being picked. In my experience, I’ve had to abandon the idea of being chosen based on my appearance and focus centrally on my personality, which now makes it difficult to decipher whether a man is flirting with me as a joke or not. For years, it’s made me incapable of envisioning myself as a romantic prospect, despite being a perverted glutton for romance. Said romance lives outside of me, and I am only now coming to realise that I am a being capable of the things I read and watch and fantasise about. Fortunately for me, I’ve been able to cultivate a self outside of romance—mostly for the sake of survival, but the point still stands—and so I don’t allow the desire for it to change me as it once would have. For many Black women, this is not the case. Our positions are devalued from young, reducing us to stereotypes that many of these divine femininity grifters baulk at. To become “wifeable”, you must shun any semblance of the sexual association to rebellious, almost to the point where you begin to mimic the puritanical supremacy of your white counterparts, and thus the reformation begins.

To shed these stereotypes, you must, in some ways, lean into the whiteness of it all, because ‘softness’ as prescribed by the divine femininity gurus is inherently white. She exudes purity, adorns herself modestly, and has a mignon-esque way about her. Much of that delicacy invites whiteness and rejects blackness, which is immediately assigned to aggression, intensity, passion and sex. Even when the goal isn’t this idea of ‘softness’, there is still a subconscious desire for acquiring that other currency. Marriage culture for Black women is still rife even without the rejection of stereotypes. The conversation about cheating comes up every five business days. Relationship debates have smoothed over the collective brain grooves we once had, and there is no shortage of dating advice on how to attract, keep, or get over a man. At every point in which we try to attain agency or power in an increasingly patriarchal society, switching currencies and increasing our value, we are still being spent and traded by men.

The aim then shifts from taking back the role of agent to slotting oneself into whatever position yields the highest rewards. It’s why trends exist and change with such rapid succession. Clean girls become Mob wives, become coquettish girls. Whilst I don’t think these trends exist directly for men, the quickness with which they alternate makes you wonder why women must have so many variations to themselves to be desirable. And need I remind you, it isn’t always men you’re trying to please. The patriarchy is a system, which means it can and is perpetuated by anyone socialised within it. You’ll notice that many of these trends don’t include Black women because, as I said, we already have a market, and it is most obvious with how people like to masculinise Black women as a way to keep them within that constant state of suppression.

The topic of masculinisation gets more and more complex the longer you realise that people subconsciously assign labels where they don’t need to be. I mentioned this in my last essay:

“Even when the goal is to bring awareness to a trope or stereotype, it seems people can’t help but see women as those stereotypes first and foremost. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess. Caught in the crossfire of discourse wars over One Battle After Another was Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s feature about the SmokeStack Twins running a juke joint during the Jim Crow era. Smoke’s ex-wife, Annie, has been used as collateral damage over and over again as an example of a “mammy” caricature, which tells me that some of you don’t know what a caricature is.” - The Overfed Artist.

Micheala Stirling, a character from Bridgerton, is the newest target for this strange phenomenon. With the release of Bridgerton S4, we were introduced to a gender-bent and race-bent version of Michael Stirling, the cousin of John Stirling, who would soon become the love interest for Francesca Bridgerton. It’s important to note two things here:

1. Francesca is, aesthetically at least, very much the type of woman that fits into the image of a feminine woman in the Victorian era. She’s waifish and demure and the perfect love interest to fulfil the hetero dream of being dominated by the uber-masculine and incredibly abusive cousin of her dead husband.

2. In the show, Micheala is portrayed to be just as feminine, though more lively and chaotic. At no point does Micheala come across as dominant or arrogant. Instead, she is much like Eloise, who has a strong sense of self and cares very little for the propriety of the ton.

The initial audience response was an unsurprising mix of racism and homophobia from fans of the book and show alike, enraged by the fact that their dainty princess, Francesca, would be corrupted by a Black lesbian. The horror!

However, what’s been more interesting is the recent disdain Black women have been voicing, which has less to do with her Blackness and more to do with her being “masculinised” by the show.

@booktokandbonnetsAnyways cant wait to see shonda let two women kiss on my screen 🤭🤭 #bridgerton #fyp #bridgertonseason4

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In my opinion, Micheala is never masculinised by the show. If anything, she is constantly hinted at as being the submissive one between her and Francesca. No, the issue these women have expressed is that Micheala should have been with a white man; that her being a Black lesbian, no matter how femme presenting, is an automatic form of masculinisation. Guilty until proven innocent.

This highlights the almost extreme grasp femininity has on Black women because of our history of being discarded for a lack of it. To be loved and cared for by a white man is often considered more desirable than being loved and cared for by a white woman because, by the rules of the divine feminine, there must be balance, and so begs the question: who wears the pants?

I’ve been using heterosexuality as the basis for my arguments because the divine feminine does not consider women who exist outside of heteronormativity. Lesbians, trans women, fat women, Black women, disabled women, women who can’t have kids, women who don’t want kids, promiscuous women, angry women. You cannot separate much of the beliefs they hold from the idea that a woman’s spiritual peak rests in her biological existence as a woman, and thus, anyone outside of the traditional woman is not allowed to consider themselves feminine. I, of course, beg to differ.

The existence of a black lesbian does not immediately masculinise her. If a woman decides to be childless or physically can’t get pregnant, that does not erase her femininity. Fat women do not need to lose weight before they can be loved. Femininity is not a biological assignment women must adhere to, and it sure as hell has no real basis for the way women should live their lives. Without sounding like a choice feminism apologist, the desire to be desired lives in us all. It isn’t dictated by how your biological makeup preordains you. You cannot bend into the shape of a desirable woman. You must be unbendable and willing to be loved in the shape that makes you happiest. Black women will never exist as those in the realm of divine femininity do because they don’t view you as deserving of the wonders they preach. That innate divinity does not extend to you because, by nature, you are not a woman. To conclude, I’m going to quote my own novel, a work in progress, that I think is quite apt for where all of this leaves us:

The Black woman, first and foremost, is a lesson in perseverance.

Ever since the soles of our ancestors’ feet kissed soil, we have been holding out, holding out, holding out. In this generational rotation, it can be quite challenging to ask yourself whether you’re doing the right thing. Your focus is to keep going, keep holding out. As Sethe says in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.”

In many ways, we have watched Black women hold out until they crumble under the weight of holding. The act of holding something, once literal in nature, becomes a dynamic web for keeping everything and everyone together. Holding it down, holding it together, God, we do so much fucking holding. To the point where, if the arms tire or the legs tremble and we falter, the wrongdoing is not placed on how heavy a burden we’ve been strapped to carry, but rather our unwillingness to be like our ancestors, our grandmothers, our mothers, who held until they were nothing but string.

When I think of the Black women who present themselves as role models, moulded into casts so that I may step into and fit my body within their hollowness, I seldom think of my ancestors. It is difficult to imagine myself filling those spaces. Instead, I wonder why a role model is even necessary. Do these women, these mothers and grandmothers, want me to be them? Do they want me to hold until I can’t?

In asking myself this question, I’ve concluded that I do not look to Black women I have admired or revered as role models. To do so would be to nullify the fullness of their beings. This thinking extends into my writing. I do not write black women to be role models. To expect so much from the inner workings of one woman amongst thousands is frankly stupid and reductive of what really matters: representation.

To be clear, these two are not the same. Being representative of Black women, though at times impossible for the same monolithic reasoning, has its own requirements.

Being a good representation of a black woman does not require a moral code. Good does not mean pure, and to represent someone is to understand that. Do you understand this woman? Do you empathise with her, even as her flaws, as frustrating as they might be, drag her into self-destruction? I gravitate towards abject women in media often. It soothes the parts of me that have shut down due to years of repression, and now, the feeling of elation I get watching a Black woman be strange and complex is unbound.

I expected to feel this way when I watched One Battle After Another for the first time a few weeks ago. I bypassed the initial excitement and waited until the discourse got the better of me to watch it, and unsurprisingly, I had thoughts. Though the thoughts come in two-fold: a dissection of the film itself, its characters, and their portrayal, and secondly, the noise surrounding what a flawed character should be.

PERFIDIA AS A LESSON ON HYPERSEXUALITY

I will always encourage a healthy dose of questioning towards a white man who decides to write a Jezebelian Black woman into his script. I can understand the overall disdain for this trope, considering the history and the particularly white lens through which we are perceiving Perfidia Beverly Hills’ sexuality, but I feel the discourse in particular ignores the fact that Perfidia’s hypersexualisation is not isolated. It exists, as the Jezebel does, in a larger conversation of why many Black women hypersexualise themselves as a means of accessing control. Does it work? Not really. But it exists. Portrayal does not mean endorsement, and the maladroit tackling of the subject does not negate its broader importance.

Now, however, I want to hyper-focus on Perfidia and the responses to her hypersexualisation as an isolated issue. In a bathroom scene early on in the film, there was an immediate fear I had that Perfidia was about to be raped by Lockjaw, a military officer who crudely lusted after her from the minute he appeared on screen. It was frightening to consider that he might finally force himself into her orbit, taking back whatever sense of control he lost when Perfidia had him at gunpoint at the beginning of the movie— though we find out that he might like that sort of thing. Nevertheless, I wondered, “Is she going to seduce him to get out of this?”

I was right. Kind of. Her initial response was to narrow her eyes and press herself into him. Thankfully, we didn’t have to witness what would have been at best a coercive blowjob, but I could still sense the residue of terror. We see it a little while later. After she successfully escapes Lockjaw and meets up with Pat—soon known to be Bob—, he kisses Perfifda, and the camera lingers on the way her expression, usually charged with lust, slowly morphs into distress. Teyana Taylor, that Golden Globes award was well deserved.

A branch of hypersexuality is the matter of confusing perceived violence with arousal1. It’s the brain’s way of protecting you from trauma. Consequently, you may find yourself aroused by the notion of something violent or insidious because any other interpretation would retraumatise you. It’s not often voluntary, nor do many people act on it, but in the case of a Black woman whose position in the world is treated as one of an innately sexual function, to be decidedly hypersexual is an attempt to regain control. Perfidia wants to fuck all the time. Arguably, it’s at the most inopportune times, which makes the image of a revolutionary figure seem mocking, but I have a different perspective on things.

I have been hypersexual since I was a child, and until now, I have never known how to understand what it has done to the way I approach normalcy because I have not had the representation necessary. I understand why Perfidia utilises it in inappropriate circumstances because it is something of a stress toy. The devil you know. Bodies for Black women are not treated as such; to deny this is to close your eyes and proudly call the sky black.

The portrayal of the hypersexual woman is exhausting, and I understand well. I famously dislike Tyler Perry’s rolodex of used and abused Black female characters because they’re often caricatures of women who, despite being used and abused by men they trusted, have fully complex inner lives. The closest we got to that was Taraji P Henson’s Melinda Moore Gayle in Atrimony. This trope is maltreated, usually by male writers and directors who put little to no effort into understanding how integral misogyny is to the motivations many of these women have. Hypersexuality is a byproduct of misogyny. The belief that a woman, to gain control of her autonomy, must overexert that autonomy to survive even as it circles back to demean her is a form of internalised misogyny. These movies rarely understand and make room for that because I guess it’s not as interesting to empathise with women who actively utilise what is often meant to be exploited.

Black women are given their purpose in society before their bodies have absorbed enough formative information to develop their own place in the world. The decision is not really yours, and when it is yours, it is only because you have chosen to completely succumb or completely resist. Either option will get you crucified.

I find hypersexualised characters deeply fascinating, especially black hypersexualised characters, because there is a presumption of promiscuity that, if mishandled, can just as easily veer into caricature. I don’t think Paul Thomas Anderson has the tools necessary for writing a hypersexualised Black woman well, but on its own, Perfidia’s actions invite another question into the mix: Can you guys handle real uncomfortable portrayals of hypersexualisation?

Despite my hesitations, it’s complicated for me to try and muddle through all this, because I ended up agreeing with people I thought I’d disagree with. Unfortunately, we’re once again reminded that a topic like hypersexualisation cannot be dealt with such a blasé approach.

THE BLACK WOMAN IS AN IDEA FIRST, PERSON SECOND - Black women as foils for white heroes.

Even when the goal is to bring awareness to a trope or stereotype, it seems people can’t help but see women as those stereotypes first and foremost. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess. Caught in the crossfire of discourse wars over One Battle After Another was Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s feature about the SmokeStack Twins running a juke joint during the Jim Crow era. Smoke’s ex-wife, Annie, has been used as collateral damage over and over again as an example of a “mammy” caricature, which tells me that some of you don’t know what a caricature is.

In trying to bring awareness to the misuse of the labels, people have ironically been misusing the label. It’s weird, because none of their actual characterisation points to these labels being true, only that the people who point that accusatory finger subconsciously believe it to be true.

Black women in media are often reduced to the ideas they present rather than the importance of their actual characters. Annie is central to revealing the identity of the vampires and teaching the remaining survivors how to protect themselves. Yet some dofus on Twitter is convinced that she is a caricature because she is fat and dark-skinned. Guilty until proven innocent, and even then, innocence is not promised.

On the issue of Perfidia as a pedagogy for hypersexuality, I won’t act as though it was explored perfectly. In fact, I think it could have been done better. The weird interracial overtones definitely sour what could have been an interesting take on a woman’s choice to exaggerate her sexual nature for the sake of survival. It’s not a new story, nor is it done all that well, but I chose to unravel what Paul Thomas Anderson wanted me to unravel. I followed his trail, I empathised with his almost cartoonish portrayal, and I waited for the other shoe to drop, the one where Perfidia is also unravelled, given a history that supplements the mess she made. I did not like her, but I did root for her. And then she disappeared.

Where PTA’s portrayal of Perfida loses me is her story being used as the catalyst for two white men who remain losers up until the end of the movie, one less so than the other. True to history, all the women are subsumed in the murky waters of this almost three-hour film, from Deandra and Junglepussy to Rochelle and the sisters. It’s clear who the hero is meant to be in DiCaprio’s character, but I didn’t view him as one at all. Sergio was way more interesting as a revolutionary figure. He had presence, connections, a sense of rerouting even as Bob got himself tased and dropped from a fucking tree. Everyone who wasn’t given a majority of the screen time bar Willa, was more interesting, and, unfortunately, we don’t see many of these interesting people for the rest of the movie.

Because of this, Perfidia’s hypersexualisation is treated as the utility of her role rather than a tactic used by a woman who is many more things. It’s annoying, because I wanted to defend this movie, but the more I waded through its run time, the more I realised that it would not be the case. By the end, I’m confused as to whether she was meant to be a sympathetic character or someone who simply made a bad choice for the sake of her individual survival, even as that choice completely upended a crucial point in the French 75’s mission.

To end my thoughts on the film, this comment under Waving The Red Flag’s review said it best: “I don’t think PTA is equipped to answer who is Perfidia as a full breathing character. I don’t think PTA can answer for what this film is asking us to believe about political revolutions. It’s just a movie about a family, and when I look at it like that, all I can say is shits was aight.”

THE ISSUE OF PURITY AND REPRESENTATION.

Now, on the matter of who the character should be, I meet with more vim than I did in the film. As discourse does, I was dragged out of the world and down below into the underbelly of people wanting to purify Black women characters, which can be separated from One Battle After Another because there are a myriad of stories that do it better. Toni Morrison, for one, is known to strip her characters and make them lean enough to face even the worst of crimes, which often involves a blurring of ethics. Luster by Raven Leilani is a book about a Black woman who ends up living with her affair partner’s family, including their adopted Black daughter, whom she essentially becomes the caretaker of. If you read some of the one-star reviews of Luster, you’ll see that many people are quite appalled by how gross and indecent Eddie, the protagonist, is. I didn’t love the book, but I’ve grown to appreciate it, certainly more than its detractors.

This isn’t to say that you have to like bad women in media, but I’d like you to at least question your resistance to Black women being bad. What kind of Black woman are you expecting to get? What constitutes a layered and complicated Black woman? Answers will definitely vary, but as As Told By Kenya has said, we don’t get manic pixie dream girls in brown skin. It’s quite an unpopular portrayal. All we get are complications, but often those complications are uncontrolled and at our expense. When a Black woman presents herself to have any semblance of agency in her bad decision-making, no matter how real it is, that is often where people have a problem. Black women are easy to pity when they’re forced into uncompromising scenarios, but once they shift that power dynamic, that is where the matter of role models is constantly rehashed. The same could be said for Perfidia. That bathroom scene was enough for me to realise that the hypersexualisation was an act and, however poorly written, deserved much more consideration.

As a whole, I find complicated Black women who are active participants in their own demise far more fascinating. It’s in the Sulas’ and the Eddie’s that I see myself, not as role models but as a representation of how suffocating it is to feel as though you have little control. People have motivations for everything they do. Whether it’s written well or not is the task of the writer, and a bad one can tarnish good potential.

I don’t need Black women to be morally good. I don’t need them to be morally reprehensible just for the sake of it, either. I need them to be active, responsive and layered. The reason I think it’s so hard for Paul Thomas Anderson to write Perfidia is that he’d have to develop her past the hypersexualisation. As much as I’ve made a case for it, it isn’t the only trait she should have, and yet when the story could have progressed, she disappeared. To write a good flawed character, you yourself must have an understanding of where this flaw comes from and where it will end up. Paul Thomas Anderson did not. So while I agree that Perfidia was hypersexualised and her hypersexualisation has merit, she wasn’t given the time to be anything else.

This is a space for evolving opinions, though the one that stays quite firm is that so many of you expect Black women to be easy heroines. You want Black women in media to be exceptionally capable and constantly unmarred by self-inflicted flaws. That’s boring and unrealistic. Harper Stern, the protagonist from HBO’s Industry, is one of the most fascinating women I’ve come across on TV. She is corrupt and crooked and willing to desert any sense of morality for the sake of getting ahead. She is not ashamed of it. She is a bad person, and she is undeniably compelling.

A movie I don’t see getting much love is Hedda, which follows a Black woman over the course of one night as she makes horrible yet admittedly understandable decisions. Hedda is at times a victim but never a bystander. She plays an active role in turning the night into a frenzy of liquor-soaked fun, sprinkled with close calls with her old lover, her current lover, and her husband. Hedda is a mess who thrives on dragging others into her mess, and I loved her dearly. In an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Tessa Thompson, who plays Hedda, makes it clear that the binary of villain or victim did not appeal to her in unpacking the role. She simply asked herself why we make the choices that land us where we are. As an emotional core, I think it’s what allows me to empathise with Hedda, even as she does things that are endlessly frustrating and quite senseless. I do not question the writer because I know where the senslessness is rooted, and as all good stories are known to do, I have many theories as to how her story will end. For Perfidia, I could not say the same.

To conclude, I’d like to circle back to my initial frustration. Black women already have so little in the matter of representation in comparison to the full breadth of white heroines and pale gothic figures and manic pixie dream girls, that each sliver of representation is treated as a goal post that shifts ever so slightly because we’ve become incurious to complexity. Easy media often wins, which is why this representation is so sparse in quantity and questionable in quality.

I say this in reference to the exceptional negro. Working twice as hard to be seen with a light half as bright. Everyone who looks like you is looking to you. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to say, but I have no desire to be a role model. If you find that your footfalls follow a similar pattern to mine, then by all means walk the same path, but do not expect me to lead you.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear - Joan Didion.

I don’t think I’m all that good at personal essays. I used to believe it was my strong suit because I’d been so tightly wound up in the world of fictional women who relished in their self-importance. I wanted to be self-important. I am self-important. Translating such an unrefined sensibility is hard, especially as a young girl who can only be honest when she is self-critical. When I started writing personal essays, I noticed a pattern in my writing that had only grown more greedy since joining Substack: I had an affinity for languishing. It wasn’t over the top, because then I would notice, which meant everybody would notice, but it was faint, light dustings of woeful romanticisation. Much of my sadness was comforted by mystery, a language vague enough that I would never have to put into words what I was really feeling. Then, after bloating my essays with paragraphs of ambiguity, I realised I had no space for the real thing. The real thing wasn’t as pretty.

Now, however, after dipping my toes back into cultural analysis, I still feel that fatalistic self-importance that appears when throwing yourself to the wolves. You give your flesh for others to gnaw on, but nobody bites. Do I not taste good? You bite yourself. You rip into your own body and gnash at your bones, hoping to crack through and release the soft inner marrow. My marrow was still hidden in all the things I’d written for The Audience. Hidden far behind the performance of authenticity was my truest self.

My performance, as it slowly unravelled, was merely instinct. After all, how could I know that I had more to say? The internet told me what to say, and after countless hours of scrolling, I would write something that was simply an amalgamation of all the thoughts I’d ingested throughout the day. In realising this, my impulse was to quit altogether. I’ve always been better at fiction anyway. Fiction is easy to disappear into. But I wasn’t doing a very good job there either. All my characters were made up of me, chopped and skewered on sticks of different shapes and sizes, just enough to be swallowed by willing readers. I wanted to be seen; I wouldn’t have spread myself across so many words if I didn’t. I just didn’t know how to do it honestly.

My last four essays have been the most honest pieces of writing I’ve put out on this platform, and even then, I can imagine that in a few years, I will look back at them and find an issue. I’m realising that this is okay. I want my opinions to evolve as I do. I expect that slowly I will become more honest with myself, more unfettered in my approach to writing for The Audience. I want to, truly. But I mythologise too much. It’s the greatest sin most writers commit, placing themselves in a position of unreachable aggrandisement, all the while fighting an impossible loneliness. Even now, I’m making it sound more dramatic than it is. How lonely it is to craft so many versions of yourself, especially because you are doing it to keep busy, keep awake. Once your eyes are closed, the subconscious filters out all that extra stuff and leaves you with yourself, curled up in a ball, staring up at your towering figure, curious about how you’ve been. You’ve left them inside for too long, you know. Without sunlight. They’re rotting, the real you, forced into the shadow to make room for that awfully bright light you insist on using to blind The Audience from the truth. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame myself. Oftentimes, we refuse to acknowledge the fact that there is something we aren’t acknowledging. The truth makes liars of us all.

Half Fiction, Half Dead is the title I’ve given to many things in the last year. An unfinished essay. A zine. And now this. I think it’s a good title, though it took me a while to realise what it means. The conclusion I’ve come to is that half fiction is where I live as a myth, absorbed in my own inventions and terrified of actualisation, and half dead is the blunt force of actualisation, living in a world where I have no choice but to be myself entirely. The things I love are being slowly subsumed by hungry, overfed beasts. I cling to my myths even as death surely follows because I need these stories to trail behind me long after I’m gone. I’m keeping a journal now, and I hope to one day pass it along to someone who needs it.

Living, the experience of it, is novel to me. Much of my young adulthood has been spent in cavernous online silos where I express the same thoughts as everyone else. All we do is think things through. A gift, truly, in these end times, is that of thinking, but it is also our greatest limit in the age of the internet. We’re all positioned at extreme ends of very different spectrums, constantly exposed to the worst of humanity that has been reconstructed into a perverse sort of entertainment; we don’t have to actually…live life, do we?

I think about this a lot, my own position in the world and how well I’m able to achieve my existence alongside everyone else’s. I’ve talked about how performing is second nature to me, and a part of that comes from the fact that I am often stuck in theory.

I love theory. I’ve been exploring sociological and critical theory for the past few months now as a part of my personal curriculum, but outside of that, I do not live. My life is not as colourful or as noisy as I’d like it to be. Research is a favourite hobby of mine, but I will admit that my allegiance to the internet has eroded my means of researching. I don’t go out enough, I don’t eat new foods, meet new people, or see new places. It’s very easy to throw myself headfirst into research papers by people who have done the exploration already, so that I can imagine in my mind’s eye what it would be like. I can mythologise.

But I am also aware of how dangerous this becomes. It’s one of the reasons I think many people don’t read philosophy or theory. Living in other people’s words for so long that your own slowly blends into the background is terrifying. You have to come up for air eventually, and when you do, all that is waiting for you is the quiet. I realise it sometimes after I’ve talked myself in circles about a TikTok video that sparks something in me. I could argue about the hypotheticals for hours. I think we all do. There’s a thrill in the extremism of a hypothetical. It could never be me! I could never do that! How do you know? How will you ever know if you keep arguing with strangers online?

I didn’t create any New Year’s resolutions this time around, but I’m conducting a series of experiments inspired by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist who wrote the book Tiny Experiments as an alternative to goal setting. The idea is to set out experiments, tiny ones, of course, so that I can measure what changes occur as each variable dips or increases. Failure is less of a reflection of my abilities and more of a data point. I make a pact to carry out an action for a limited amount of time and track what happens regardless of the outcome. The goal is to understand what I’m capable of, rather than expecting an immediate capability where it isn’t promised. It’s exciting to feel both in control and unsure of the future. Setting up these small curiosities, asking myself questions about what it is I’m actually trying to achieve, makes it easier to work towards actualising an outcome.

Aside from the self-help rant, this essay is my reentry into the world of personal essays. It is also a promise to myself to relinquish that pesky desire for performance and embrace the wonder that comes with writing. Many of my projects take shape as I go, and I almost never have a fully formed piece until the moment I decide to put it out in the ether. I don’t think performing is the worst thing in the world; it’s surely given me the confidence one needs to be a little delusional on the internet, but I also think it’s taken something very precious away from me. And I’m entirely set on getting it back.

“A land which spits and spews, which spews life. That is what we must be worthy of. This creative part must be nurtured. This anger must be continued. We must continue. And not fall asleep into a sort of acceptance and resignation.” - Aimé Césaire.1

The West is built on the hot coals of individualism. Everyone is fighting for cake slices cut into smaller fractions, whilst billionaires, who often collude together about barricading their wealth, shill out individualist ideology, making sure that those fighting over these halves never fix their gaze on the larger slice of cake just beyond their purview. In one case, a billionaire like Taylor Swift is not fighting for the same halves as her successors. She is admittedly in a lane of her own, though I don’t believe that’s an admirable task. Nevertheless, Taylor Swift can sleep for another ten years and still rake in millions in the time it takes her to blink the crust from her eyes because she is an industry all on her own. Big Swift has amassed an impressive cult following that does not care for the rationale in critiquing a disgustingly wealthy white woman. They care for regurgitations of their favourite fantasy2, artistic merit be damned!

Though with the release of her album The Life of a Showgirl, it seems even Taylor’s most loyal fans are seeing this new “era” in the worst light. In many critiques surrounding the album, there is a pattern of calling out her lack of evolution. It isn’t just a bad album; it’s a sign of the unfortunate times. The catalyst for those calling into question the strange terrain of T.Swift’s career.

@sotfogsotfogTaylor Swift’s new album The Life of Showgirl exposed a lot of her internal world imo. Please tell me this isn’t obvious to only just me #taylorswift #thelifeofashowgirl #arianagrande #mileycyrus

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“The brand of being a white girl is very much being a white girl. What happens in a few years when she’s 40?”

For some context, the speaker in this video is not disparaging T.Swift for her age, but rather the importance of how her career-long brand image of “Pop Princess” contradicts with The Life of A Showgirl’s foray into the more adult elements of music entertainment; dazzling visuals teased a burlesque-ian glitz and glamour, lyrics coyly suggesting that she’s sucking dick and cawk, and most importantly, the double-edge sword of being a heavily scrutinzed pop star evolving into womanhood before our very eyes—marketplace feminism come get ur juice.

Except, Taylor Swift has not evolved. It is an opinion I share with many of my Taylor-hating friends that her music constantly paddles across the shores of corporate consciousness, omitting any real artistic perspective from even her most subversive of songs. It’s safe, general, and commercial. These are not inherently bad things, but they do paint a wonderful picture of this lack.

@jia_yapsadding to the dogpile, i’ve been waiting for vindication #taylorswift #music #musician #women

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Now, as someone who knows nothing about music theory and likes to pretend that she knows everything about storytelling, I can agree that Taylor Swift does not have a bad discography. It isn’t my preferred taste, but I will acquiesce to the fact that she has dropped some bangers. The issue is that, and like most of her critics will tell you, this album is an indication of an issue arising from the brand of Taylor Swift. She has become a cultural hallmark for not just white women everywhere, but for the economy, too. “Swiftocomics” was a term coined in 2023 to explore the singular impact of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Aside from sponsorships and merchandise sales, Bloomberg estimated that each Eras show grossed around 13 million, “bringing Swift more than 300 million after playing the first 22 concerts.”3

She sits at the helm of pure commodification, a symbol for what art under capitalism can look like. For her fans, this is a reason for pride. The woman they cherish so dearly is succeeding. And she’s self-made! Take that, patriarchy! Except, Taylor Swift amassing all this wealth does not correspond with her music evolving into a product worth all the money that’s being spent on it. As I said before, her marketing works harder than her artistry, and the strategy of regurgitating the same songs and sounds from her most resonant eras is her MO, hence the co-opting of “Eras”. Now, however, she’s venturing off course into something new, an exciting premise for an artist who’s lived so many lives, especially in the spotlight. In Life of a Showgirl, T.Swift wants to present you with a veneer of complexity, but any further investigation, and you’re shown how unwilling she is to push past the boundary where the product and the market might be drawn askew. We knew the end of this before it began, that despite the glossy visuals and the anticipation of an evolved sound, Taylor Swift is hardly going to stray from the thing that lines her pocket.

Commercialise, Commercialise, Commercialise!

I’ve been writing this essay over the span of a month or so, and I recently read Charli XCX’s The Death of Cool, which I found interesting, both in the responses to it and the material itself, so I’m going to use it as a case study here. The part of it that caught my eye was her assertion that “the rejection of commerciality ‘just because’ is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others, but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever.”

I agree - there is elitism in the notion that art that is well-loved by the general public immediately deems it unworthy of being considered art. I’ve talked about this at length with the publication of a Slate article4 that criticised Interview With The Vampire for being—and I’m paraphrasing here—vain slop for women.

I disagree - commercialisation almost always involves the smiting hand of a large corporation. Mass reproductions, watered-down advertising, beating the dead horse until its skin falls off. Trend forecasts. memeification. Each circle of commercial hell is its own corporate regurgitation disguised as culture-making. Bringing it back to Charli, the most pertinent example I think of was Brat Fatigue, which was also the title of an article that I never got to write because I was too inconsistent with writing—I apologise, , we will have that collab come to fruition one day—Still, the commercialisation of art, especially in our current societal climate, where art is stretched to its maximum for maximum profit, is difficult to ignore. It’s clear in what was left of a cultural moment like Brat, the remnants of which found itself squeezed dry by companies protracting the memified format. I’ve reached peak cycle in my approach to gatekeeping because of this, unfortunately, but I understand the desire to push an artist or a piece of media into the mainstream.

Commercialisation is pure product and profit. If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t a viable product, and that removes the product’s access to larger markets. I understand the necessity, but I also fear the repercussions. Sinners (2025) grossed over £360 million globally through word of mouth and critical acclaim. It’s all anyone talked about this year. A film like Sinners dominating cultural conversations is what commercialisation at its most utopic looks like. It subverts the usual franchise blockbuster formula whilst retaining its own character, despite the success. It’s cool, and it’s commercially viable. The issue of being both or pitting one against the other is complex and circumstantial, but the foundation is the same. Commercialising art might be necessary to get it in front of more eyes, thus broadening the ability to make more art, but we do not live in a society that means well for artists. A Variety report faced backlash during the initial buzz of Sinners for downplaying its 60 million dollar opening, suggesting that Warner Bros’ £90 million spending budget means the film has yet to truly succeed. Aside from what we know now, this reaction did not shock me, but it did remind me how unexpected the film’s commercial success was. A movie like Sinners carries the symbol of “cool” on its back; a priceless experience, watching magic unfold gradually through the course of a soulfully sinister night of blues, jazz, and bloodsucking. When a film like this lands such a monumental W, it’s par for the course that studio execs and media publications would hesitate to regard it as a commercial success. Outside of the blatant racism, this indifference to art is the reason commercialisation, when handled by those who only care for profit, will ultimately ruin a project if left entirely up to the desire for money.

For someone like T.Swift, she has long since been separated from the notion of cool because of how heavily she feeds into commercialisation. Her purview for whether or not her work is successful is measured entirely through numbers, so there is no real need to evolve with your work as an artist, especially not now, when nostalgia rules all5. The goal, ultimately, is to sell something, and if that means watering it down to make it more palatable to suit general tastes, then that is what happens. The death of cool often is commercialisation.

The same issue arises for the publishing world, and this comes in twofold: The first is through romantasy, a genre popularised around 2023-2024, but had its teeth within the industry since the late 2000s. Its most notable torchbearers are Sarah J. Mass, Rebecca Yarros, and Jennifer L. Armentrout. Of course, there are more who are, in my opinion, leagues better, but these three are simultaneously the best-selling and the ones with the weirdest shit going on.6 Their impact on the genre is undeniable, as both an accelerator for the influx of romantasy books that have come out since the genre’s popularisation, and as a commercial brute force, making millions off books some would consider questionable in literary content.

Now, to speak on Romantasy, I will admit that most of my knowledge on the genre is second-hand because it isn’t my flavour of book. It would also be wrong of me to disparage genre fiction for relying on structural tropes since that is where most of the category’s intrigue lies. If you watch any video of a romantasy author, or genre fiction author in general, promoting their book, there’s often a bullet-pointed list of tropes used to sell the book rather than the concept itself. I can understand the appeal of knowing what you’re getting into. However, an issue arises when those tropes become the concept.

A recurring complaint you’ll find on Romantasy is that it lacks diversity, not just in characters but in storyline as well. These tropes often make up most of the plot in a way that is devoid of any real arcs or development in characters. If you have a stubborn and fierce heroine, she will nine times out of ten remain that way throughout a 400-page book. If you have a dark and brooding male lead, he will possess no other personality traits for the duration of, typically, a war. They have not created these tropified characters to evolve them or subvert the trope, but rather because that is what’s popular. At times, these characterisations are, at best, inconsistent, and at worst, unnecessary to advancing what is meant to be a plot-heavy genre.

For the genre, predictability is its selling point. Many popular romantasy books have been criticised for the overuse of fairies, faes, and dragons as their mythical devices, and the worst of these novels have been known to directly steal from other works. Depending on who you ask, romantasy is a springboard for supernatural smut with a little bit of genocidal murdering in the background.

I am, if you can believe it, less hard on romantasty than I was a few years ago because I try not to let the reading choices of others affect me. I’m sure I’ve enjoyed books that others would categorise as bad or boring simply because taste is subjective. However, what does affect me is the prominence of the genre’s impact on good writing.

As decent as romantasy books might be for what they promise—good escapism and better smut—some stinkers unfortunately monopolise the bestsellers list in a way that erodes the merit of their successors. An overuse of tropes, watered-down and questionably written political strifes, and an overwhelming degree of formulaic writing that got incredibly popular and incredibly tiring. The beauty of a well-written romantasy book exists in its ability to merge genres that have been pitted against each other for decades. If done well, it can explore intense and passionate relationships that struggle to survive or defy the odds of surviving under perilous circumstances. In fact, I believe that enemies-to-lovers can only be done well in a fantastical setting. This predication should make room for complex stories, and yet, the formula wins because the formula sells. Even in the case of non-genre writing like the literary sad girl, there is only room for a certain type of literary sad girl. The white, heroine chic has long since dominated Pulitzer Prize-winning lists because she is the most palatable form of female rage for the Western world.

Romantasy exists as a catalyst for uninspired writing. The genre itself has become overly commercialised to the point where you’re selling the same book over and over in a different shape with a different, but equally generic title. The demand for what works tends to trump the desire for art that layers these tropes and genres through good storytelling. Though I believe the future of reading should be made accessible at all stages, I question the value of regurgitating and popularising stories that disregard diverse characterisation and good writing.

The second arm of this publishing monolith is the confusing mess of legacy media.

If you look at Vogue US’s 2025 covers, there’s a noticeable dwindling in intrigue. From Winter 2025 to September 2025, the covers feature a lone celebrity, posing stationary against a colour-blocked backdrop. Of course, styling, lighting, and posing elevate what would otherwise be very boring cover images, but where it gets strange is from October 2025 towards December 2025. October’s cover stars are Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid. Both supermodels are seen holding each other intimately against the backdrop of an idyllic countryside escape, gazing into the barrel of the camera. All in all, it’s a forgettable cover at best, and at worst, it’s a glazing of the American West, a choice which feels unconsidered in a worsening political climate, but Vogue isn’t currently in the business of valuing its political integrity.

Where things get really weird, artistically, is the December cover starring Timothee Chalamet in what can only be described as “galaxy leggings but make it the whole page.”

This choice to me and many others was dumbfounding. Legacy media, over time, has taken a strange turn into levying big names for lacklustre concepts (the Hollywood Issue for Vanity Fair is still confusing me to this day7), and there’s hardly anything anyone can do about it because who’s going up against Vogue US?

In her essay, Is Vogue Embarrassing Now? Tori West writes, “Her [Chloe Malle’s] appointment is hardly aspirational for readers already exhausted by the industry’s relentless cycle of nepotism. Yes, Malle did spend eight years at the publication, most recently as Editor of Vogue.com, where she doubled its direct traffic to around 14.5 million monthly visitors, but those achievements don’t erase the broader issue. For budding journalists from marginalised backgrounds, it’s yet another reminder that positions of power still go to the well-connected, not entirely the most deserving, relatable or talented.”

Nepotism is boring, decidedly so. The lack of social or economic awareness that gradually trickles down from so high up makes it incredibly hard to engage with any work made by someone who wants you to feel like they understand. They understand passion, and they understand hunger, but in a context that has only ever propelled them forward. There is no panic in commodifying their art because art is a currency they can afford to stow away. Most people have to trade their art to feed themselves, and being hungry goes both ways. I don’t doubt the work someone like Chloe Malle or Taylor Swift, or Sarah J Mass had to do to succeed, but I wonder if succeeding will make the work any better.

Tori concludes that, “The Bezos Met Gala takeover signals something far more unsettling for the media industry, it’s brewing a culture where creative institutions and media no longer serve the public, but the whims of billionaires and the ultra-powerful.”

Thankfully, there’s a collective understanding that the West is not the titan of creativity we’ve been told it is. Vogue China still remains as my favourite iteration of the publication, and its 2025 covers have continuously reminded me that there’s a lot to be desired, still.

And so the hunger necessary for good art does not matter to someone like Taylor Swift. It does not matter to wealthy authors who have built careers on the stacks of books that, over time, seem to dip in quality or lose their magic because the author, or publishing house, or record label, demands wider margins. They demand reach and impression and engagement, no matter the audience, no matter the press. I am leaning into the extremes of it all because it seems that’s where we’re headed. Extremism is the only way for lost voices to find a path forward, and so I will be incredibly loud about the lack of willingness, the leniency in stress-testing a creative idea, a practice, or a concept simply because there is no real financial incentive to it. Money is not an issue for the overfed, and yet they grow more and more gluttonous.

I’ve had this thought over the past few weeks, considering the numerous examples of creativity, particularly in journalism, that need to be expressed entirely from the author's perspective. Writers starting substacks, musicians going independent. There is a sense of anticipation suffusing across my social media. There’s fear, of course, a genuine concern for the perverse novelty of how unpredictable people with power behave when they hold everything from our bills to our art hostage. There’s also some hope, I think. Whatever amount of it feels urgent and more necessary than ever now. This urge to disaffiliate from the culture of buying and selling.

This might be due to how I’ve curated my algorithm, but everyone is decentralising their art, or at least, making the effort to do so. It’s hard, of course, because there’s still money to be made, but the essence of creation lives in our desire to pour out our innermost feelings. What we want people to know or feel through our work transcends word counts. Story-length essays and hour-long videos that carry you across the river of slop into a new realm of understanding cannot be done if you are not hungry to create. The wait to satiate this kind of hunger is slow. It cannot be done with tools designed to optimise. There is nothing optimal about the human condition. Art is indelicate and nonconforming; it never works well under algorithmic pressure. The goal is to create, then sell, not the other way around. This conversation surrounding the commodification of art certainly did not begin with me, and I hope it does not end with you reading this essay.

The layman’s guilt of imposter syndrome.

There is a thought I often have when I apply for jobs that I am wasting my potential. I read the cover letters I’ve reshaped to fit hundreds of jobs over the years until I can decode the drone of jargon into a single line: “I am incredibly desperate for a job. Please hire me.”

I recognise that despite my years-long entanglement with joblessness, I remain in a position of privilege where I can apply for jobs I actually want to do 85% of the time. I don’t pay rent, and I don’t leave my house very often. That 15% is relegated to frantically searching for any work, regardless of its impact on my peace of mind.

I recently relapsed into an obsessive spiral of job searching. I’d wake up and check LinkedIn, use the bathroom and check LinkedIn, eat and check LinkedIn, check LinkedIn before I go to bed, so on and so forth. I turned job boards into my feed, curated with roles that satisfied the parts of my brain longing for a title I’d be proud to share and close enough to my skill set so that if I applied, imbuing my application with every prayer that existed, I would finally get a job.

The issue is that I would have periods of applying to so many jobs that the names or descriptions would lose their place in my memory, and then there’d be one job that I agonise over, which, famously, you’re not supposed to do. This obsession stops the scroll entirely, and I feel a sense of newness as I approach finality in the interview stages. This will be the one, I think, daydreaming about finally transitioning from the young adult purgatory between school and Adult Job™, of which I’ve waded through for five years now, into the era of my 20-somethings, where I have the flexibility to make poor decisions on the basis that I do it on my own dime. When the rejection comes, because it always has, I don’t just reenter the purgatory; I am relegated to the very beginning of this sequence, searching and searching, except I lose the ability to see myself as capable of finding an opportunity like the one I’d lost. I am no longer a writer or strategist. I am a fraud, a trickster, and I have been found out.

Coined originally as the Impostor Phenomenon by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, Impostor Syndrome describes a high-achieving individual who experiences a pervasive sense of self-doubt despite their success. According to Clance, “They are also pretty certain that, unless they go to gargantuan efforts to do so, success can not be repeated. They are afraid that next time, I will blow it.”

Success is a metric I’ve been socialised to calculate by external standards. Money, love, conventional signs of attractiveness, and fame; all of these things have been force-fed to me in spoonfuls by entertainment and media outlets that profit from my aspirational desires to covet those things. I am very much like other girls when I say I want to be pretty and successful, two things which still operate in congruence with each other. Yet, on an internal level, I can’t seem to marry these ideas to my own abilities. Money-wise, I am not successful. Love-wise, I am barely trying. In every external area I’ve been taught to seek success, I have failed in my attempts. This failure, in many ways, feels tied to me and the shape of my utility. With the dismal state of current society, I’m hesitant to consolidate my worthiness with these unstable metrics, but I would be remiss not to mention the leeches that are hard to peel off.

With my job as a writer, I succumb to the desire for external success often, and sometimes without shame. I wouldn’t hate the idea of publishing a bestseller, and I wouldn’t despise a well-paying job with great benefits and fulfilling work, but I am aware that these metrics don’t always exist in tandem with my internal understanding of success. Even if I were to publish a bestseller, a part of me would occasionally peek into that murky vat of negative attention, allowing the self-doubt to drag me into its depths, just for a few moments. These few moments can be, and often are, extremely detrimental to my immediate worldview. It colours the once hopeful belief that I am capable of success with splotches of disdain, dissatisfaction, overcompensation, the list goes on and on until whatever success I seemed to have is minuscule compared to what I don’t.

There are five known types of impostor syndrome:

• The Perfectionist: Sets impossibly high, all-or-nothing goals and experiences self-doubt when they fall short of them.

• The Superhero: Works harder and harder to compensate, often to the point of overworking and burnout.

• The Natural Genius: Judges their intelligence and competence by how easily and how fast they can achieve something, not by the effort they put in.

• The Soloist: Believes that asking for help or relying on others is a sign of weakness or fraudulence, and attempts to do everything on their own.

• The Expert: Measures their worth by the amount of information they know or can perform, feeling that they must know everything to be considered competent.

I am a confusing mixture of The Perfectionist, Soloist, and Expert, but these days I’ve been leaning towards the Expert’s way of thinking. In an era where demand for critical thinking and nuance conflicts with high frequencies of frictionless optimisation, I’m prone to pressuring myself to hustle for a deep thought once or twice. I see a trending topic and feel the urge to immediately comment on it. Thankfully, I’m getting better at asking myself why my input is necessary, but for many, it still exists as the only way to position themselves as a valuable voice in the current of noise.

Who holds us hostage in these cages? Who takes on the role of warden? Officers standing around the guilty party, you, who are not sure how they ended up being burdened with so much guilt for trying to succeed.

impostor syndrome as a systemic oppressive practice

I consider that impostor syndrome is both chisel and hammer in the evolution of popular culture. The hammer, so to speak, is a larger oppressive system, which acts as the obvious bad, and the chisel, delicate and precise, as the micro-aggressive acts we tend to ignore because it isn’t as obvious if you’re incurious—and a lot of people are deeply incurious. Black women are perhaps the greatest example of this.

Writer Janell Hazelwood argues that to impose impostor syndrome on Black women and women of colour is to immediately assume they have something to doubt. Now, in the long-standing history of oppression against Black women and women of colour, the indoctrinated belief that women are “lesser beings” is glaringly evident, and even now, the rhetoric shines just as bright.

This is the chisel and hammer. The delicate structure of “self-doubt”, where we coach ourselves to grow accustomed to being oppressed, works to replace real systemic isolation that runs deeper than not believing in yourself.

Sister, Outsider, an essay collection by writer and activist Audre Lorde, examines that an “Institutionalised rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”1

In some ways, like the ones Hazelwood mentions, these outsiders are amplified as mavericks and trailblazers who can connect with the surplus of outsiders. In others, they are what the system has always said they are: Deviants. Unmeritorious of the rewards bestowed upon those who epitomise the pinnacle of Western idealism. Even when Black women reach the top, the scrutiny intensifies because they are not supposed to be there. The imposition of doubt is not only internal, it is explicit and damning.

Hazelwood goes on to say that, "It’s as if we are being forced to look inward to ‘fix’ ourselves and adjust to compete. But the reality is, we’re capable, we’ve earned the degrees, and we’ve paid our dues, only to still face very real, gender- and race-based barriers to our ultimate success.”

Lorde examines the extreme scales upon which racism, sexism, ageism, elitism, heterosexism, and classism live as either insurmountable barriers or fallacies. But these barriers exist endemically, as a constant reminder of that difference which is shunned or violently embraced.

I have been studying morality and the feminist perspectives of the “self” in Western society, which has led to the argument I’m trying to make that impostor syndrome is not a metric any oppressed person can measure themselves on. The scale does not exist in equilibrium for us, and so the work needed to unlearn this “doubt” cannot be solely placed on the individual. Yet, the society we live in has been built expressly for the individual.2

Who is the imposter?

If I were to describe imposter syndrome as it stands—a feeling of inadequacy even in the face of success—and not as a construct of systemic pressure, I would not think of Black women. To me, the makeup of an impostor more closely resembles those people on TikTok who were stepping on their Birkin bags in an attempt to distress them as the Olsen twins once did, as opposed to, I don’t know, allowing this exorbitantly priced bag to naturally distress over time as a result of constant use. This attempt to dirty their golden spoons, the failure of it, tells me that we really should not give a fuck about what the ruling class defines as an impostor because they themselves are the impostors. To circumvent natural characterisation in favour of cheating your way into the appearance of character is very on brand for influencers and celebrities, especially in the case of poverty cosplay3. Everything from distressed designer jeans to scuffed sneakers that retail for one month’s rent in London, there is a desire from the top to cherry-pick the sensationalised aesthetic of poverty without any of the selfhood actualised from the perspective of those on the outside. Lorde states that where fear manifests in an economy that creates a surplus of outsiders, we have all been programmed to respond in one of three ways: “ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.”

The ruling class, when faced with their own sense of impostor syndrome, are prone to possessiveness. It is this possession that breeds a new age of “cool” across subcultures, from fashion to beauty to music to art. For the oppressed, impostor syndrome is a way of keeping us undetermined and falsely content with our roles as outsiders. Of course, this doesn’t take away from the fact of a larger system, as it shouldn’t. When faced with that delicate chisel, remember there is a hammer ever-present. Unfortunately, the whittling down of quality is a signature of the ruling class. Despite the many ways in which more interesting people have created art within these subcultures, it is still not interesting enough to liberate us from the clout-chasing trend hoppers. I might sound a little annoyed here, and it’s because I am. There is nothing interesting about stepping on an expensive bag to make it appear used. You look like a loser, actually.

I recently watched a video essay that described short-form content as a pay-to-play system, where those who can bombard the viewers with gross displays of wealth are the curators of novelty, meaning trends are first filtered through several layers of this trend-laden ragebait before they reach the likes of imitators, commentators, and admirers who know they will never achieve these things. Only the hungriest parts of their attention spans are being fed.

And yet, the onus is on me, and thousands of other marginalised people, to dig through this slop and come out still believing there is any good to success according to the Western ideal, when really, the level of success will not negate the amount of scrutiny, and in fact, it will only intensify the more skilled you are proven to be. I, personally, am learning to care less. It is not an easy task, as I’ve mentioned, and there are no six steps to overriding a system built centuries ago. Despite the systemic downplaying of our very existence, there is also the algorithmic change, the socioeconomic change, and the individual choice to preserve selfhood as the collective suffers. All of these things present issues that I hope we can inch towards changing with much courage, but I maintain that there is no greater impostor than the system itself.

The hand is so many things at once that in this chasm of ideas, you struggle to find the point of it. If you were a poet or a philosopher, you might be tasked with uncovering a smart, searing angle that other poets and philosophers will call daring and poignant someday in the future. The hand, however, a mass of bones and flesh and cartilage at the end of it all, is performing its function.

If we were to turn every normal, unnoticed function into a spectacle for the sake of producing a deep, thought-provoking moment, what would the future of normalcy look like? Much like the hand, I presume, working on all sides to prove its worth outside of picking things up, pushing buttons, and feeling texture. Much like the hand is the worth of an inanimate object. The journal, these leather-bound silos brimming with consciousness, become museums. A colonised artefact. What can the journal do that the mind cannot? Transcribe? Convey? It does the job of the mind in more detailed steps, except this way, through the narrow cracks in our digital day-to-day, we can share what doesn’t need to be shared.

It’s cool to be uncool now in the same way we’re becoming aware of the imitations living within our online walls. I covet a lot of the things I see online simply because another person has it, and really, if I were to ask myself what that thing would represent, it would be because I can’t seem to form my own person. My hands twitch at the sight of another set of hands, squirming right in front of me. I am a mimic. I want to live as a pastiche, but with social media, there is a desire to satirise the art of imitation when all of us are the sum of splintered parts.

When it comes down to it, there’s not enough perspective to go around. The essays you’ve bookmarked, the videos you watch, all say the same thing. The same modes of thought are recycled through many a think piece, and the only ideas worth dissecting are pushed into obscurity because it does not incite perverse lengths of spiritual violence. Something that negates your uproar for morality and ignites instead a taste for controversy and contention.

This essay was originally about how we need to stop forcing the desire to come across as critical thinkers, but along the way, I realised that this essay was becoming just that, a smokescreen created purely to spark flames across the dark cave that is anti-intellectualism. What I’m realising about myself is that the things I find cool and interesting now are quite literally the things I used to complain about. I used to be the type of person to downplay my intelligence for the sake of ‘humility’ when really I love being smart. I love to pretentiously languish over texts that are difficult and uncompromising in the act of holding my hand towards a conclusion because I have to work for that. The muscles in my head contract as they churn out thought, churn out truth. In the small worlds we occupy, there is not much work that has to be done for thinking. So this is no longer an essay about forcing the persona of being smart, but rather, who these personas belong to.

Pretentiousness is no longer the crime I used to know it as. Pretending seems to act as our default setting these days, and so the argument of authenticity over pretence is muddied with the semantics of what each concept is meant to argue. Are you more or less authentic for crying about something deeply personal online, or are you simply baring your soul in hopes that one person might understand? Are you more or less pretentious for disliking simplistic and flattened literature? Who is the arbiter of taste in both scenarios? Who do we trust with our desire for dissection?

In her essay, in defence of pretension, writes, “capitalism has turned us into selfish, contradictory beings. Why do we see the internet grouse at fiction readers, pointing to self-help books by men in grey business suits as the only reading that ‘counts’?”

This battle of authenticity is omnipresent; it lives within us and outside of us, across the spheres of influence that we turn to for inspiration, comfort, and confirmation. The bias isn’t lost on me; in fact, I recently went to a workshop with two behavioural scientists who named three types of bias:

• Present bias - the tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than wait for a larger future reward, in a trade-off situation.

• Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.

• Cognitive bias - the deviation from rational thought in judgment, leading to inaccurate perceptions, illogical interpretations, or flawed decisions.

These are perhaps the largest issues most people struggle with when it comes to their perceptions of authenticity, and the subsequent search for it in places where that might not be entirely possible.

I’m of the belief that there is no such thing as an original thought, only a unique perspective. We have been alive for long enough that most concepts yet to be discovered have followed a similar paradigm in the way they’re established or presented. Religion, Education, Marriage, Medicine, Law; all of the largest institutions and their offsprings have been teased and poked and prodded, perhaps not to their fullest, but with enough motion that we see their values, and more importantly, their flaws. The only issue is the lack of acknowledgement (See. Cognitive bias)

In a way, I think we’ve found ourselves suffering through a bit of a paradox. Some find no fortune in authenticity, and instead sell out their morals for the easiest path to wealth and success, whilst others are constantly in search of a deeper meaning behind subjects they’ve barely scratched the surface of. These deeper meanings are encased in short-form TikToks and video essays that shrink their quality whilst bloating the watch time, which again, might be answering my own question:

Take, for instance, Emerald Fennell’s new trailer for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights, coming out in February 2026. The consensus is that she’s leaning towards a more anachronistic approach with the cultural amalgamation of a horny love story between two actors with intense iPhone face, set in the 19th century, against the backdrop of a windswept Yorkshire moor and a CharliXCX soundtrack. I wouldn’t dislike this if there were not already a significant historical context missing from Fennell’s adaptation, which is the fact that Heathcliff, the main protagonist—and antagonist—is a brown man. Fennell’s Heathcliff is being played by Jacob Elordi, who is famously white.

I’m characteristically irate about this, for many reasons, but if we pull back and look at the main critique people have had for naysayers like me, the general idea is that we’re all being wimpy little Literature-obsessed babies. Now, I am paraphrasing, but I do find it interesting that this is meant to be some sort of insult when, honestly, I don’t take offence. I am obsessed with literature, and whilst I’m by no means a source material loyalist, it is maddening that Fennell took a character she knew she probably couldn’t understand, and did the least work possible to try; she changed his race.

“nobody understands the value of knowing things more than a working-class kid,” is a line from the same essay by Ayan, and as someone who did not go to university, it’s ringing true to me now more than ever that I cherish my snobbery due to how it’s being ripped from my hands in real time. I tend to feel strongly about the deeper meaning behind characters like Heathcliff and stories like Wuthering Heights because, despite Emily Brontë’s own failings with writing characters of colour, the opportunity to examine the work through a contemporary lens was right there, and it was not taken because there is no point in understanding further what does not affect you directly.

Side tangent: I think this is the central issue I find myself having with white people, particularly white women who don’t question their involvement in the largely racialised systems of entertainment that have formed over several decades. As Lani’s Lens puts it in her video essay, The Evolution of the Culture Vulture, “People do not care about racism when it gets in the way of their entertainment.” Why do you feel the need to use AAVE as a form of humour when, outside of social media, you never do? Why are Black Twitter memes always centring a Black woman existing at her most extreme? Why does your interrogation of racism end when you predominantly use Black media to entertain yourself?

The way we use critical thinking does not encourage enough self-interrogation into the ways our media and our humour and our thirst for authenticity have stemmed from larger systems, usually of oppression, and usually with a person of colour at the helm. This isn’t to say that you should politicise every aspect of your life, but I do wonder why the people who barely question the origins of their online personalities are the loudest in critiquing the descent into an eroded future.

The hustle for a deep thought requires much more than a firmness in your personal beliefs. It requires introspection, questioning the criteria you’ve used to share these beliefs and what the actions following must look like in order to stay honest. Honesty is not always doubling down. You might come across new information and change your thinking according to how that information strikes you. You might be right, you might be ignorant, but you must always be willing to question.

Despite how it sounds, I am still curious to watch the movie and marinate on its entirety, but I’m also aware of the bias I have walking into it. The point I’m trying to make is that we need to be more earnest about deep thinking. The surface-level dissection of online discourse does not enrich, it ensnares, and that is the sort of trap that becomes hard to untangle after a five-hour doom scroll. The hustle for a deep thought comes with many opinions being thrown into the ether with no real grip on the mind, past a quick session of wonderment, and then it’s back to being angry.

Anger seems to be what drives our love for critical thinking recently. There is always something to be angry about, and rightfully so, considering the political and economic state of the world right now, but there is no introspection alongside the anger. We’ve been primed for defence as a way to shield ourselves whilst also begging for an authenticity that requires some level of laying ourselves bare. As someone who mistook being angry about something with having a salient point to make, I am not here to criticise, only to question.

There is a lot of joy in being pretentious. Most recently, I’ve taken to reviewing the collections this fashion week season with the fervour of a dedicated journalist. I believe the reason I’m doing this is because, one, I’m ignited by the curiosity for understanding why things are the way they are, especially when it comes to silhouettes and styling choices made by some of these designers, but also because I’m manifesting a job in fashion. I’m actively working towards a career in beauty and fashion, and I’m putting into the world what I want to get from it. These choices I’m making this year are deeply intentional, and I don’t care to look cool or unbothered because I’m not. I’m pathetically in love with beautiful things, and it is my dream to tell the stories of people who make these beautiful things. I want to give myself and the better parts of my life to these stories, to learning, to curiosity.

The quick virality of complaining becomes a momentary cure for anti-intellectualism that, once worn off, leaves us worse than where we started. What is the point of thinking deeply if not to question? The anger itself is not an issue, but the things we’re quick to be angry about prove that time and time again, the quantity of information presented to us regresses our ability to reflect earnestly.

These days, I’m finding it easier to share and withhold as I please. There is no rush to post something unless I really feel that the five people who actively engage with my manic Instagram stories need to hear what I have to say on the state of New York Fashion Week. When I turned 23, I promised myself that a shift would take place. In some ways, it did, because I’m going out more and actively nurturing my curiosity as a hobby and a career choice. Learning has stepped back into the picture for me as I’ve also started a personal curriculum recently.

Each week, I dedicate one to two hours learning about the sociology of morality complexes, the history of French Erotica, the globalisation of architecture, and the history of linguistics and sociopragmatics. I find myself, for those few hours, completely enmeshed in these rabbit holes of academic papers and digitalised texts from the 1700s, surprised but positively overwhelmed by how much there is for me to learn. Much like the hand, I’m still aware of the time that slips through my fingers like sand, unwilling to let me catch up to the imaginary goalposts set in place by the world around me, but it’s all the more reason why I spend time being as earnest about all the things I want to gain from this one, fragile life.

The intellectualising to neutrality pipeline.

I spent the majority of my Covid-mandated solitude learning how to intellectualise my emotions. Instead of feeling them, I interacted with them, pushed them around like strange, foreign foods on my plate. Experiences tied to racism, colourism and misogyny were seen and engaged with as concepts to explore from a controlled position, things to survive and bypass rather than things to be felt and understood. I used to think that intellectualising meant that I was doing something right. I was looking in from the outside like an arbiter of my own morality.

This deprived me of any real beliefs or opinions. I created a mirage of a personality, the essence of self-efficacy. As a teenager, it was always easier to make the self-deprecating joke first, as a way to ensure that I was laughing along with everyone instead of being laughed at. It led me towards this path of disillusionment, and now, in my early twenties, and as I continue to age every second, I am feeling first and thinking later. Regressing, even.

I spent five years making myself the joke and another five intellectualising the aftermath. What I’m left with is a hollow sense of self and a motley crew of emotions that take odd shapes inside my body. Twitching fingers, stuttering thoughts, quick and harsh tones that I’m too prideful to take back. I can’t seem to intellectualise as well as I used to, perhaps because the well with no bottom is finally brimming.

Though the dredges of internalised misogyny and low racial self-esteem have finally filtered through my system, along with these new uncontrollable emotions, follows a particular affinity for strong opinions. The positive I’ve gained from this is that these strong opinions are sandwiched between an almost ‘philosophical empathy’, as Khadija Mbowe puts it in her video about Bonnie Blue’s (almost) petting zoo. I am used to looking from the outside in, and so often, I find myself wanting to know what an ethically morose person was thinking right before they committed an act.

Sometimes I wonder if Bonnie Blue hates herself despite knowing that I don’t really respect her. Sometimes I wonder if Andrew Tate knows at what age the loserdom will compound enough for him to regret becoming a red-pilled MLM slinger, even though I most definitely don’t respect him. There are many levels to the crusade of forming a self. The self is comprised of many things, and for a long while, I did what Merleau Ponty taught against;

If I were to describe to you how most of my opinions formed throughout secondary school, I would fail miserably because there was no real foundation, only a hodgepodge of pressured thoughts sifting through my inner circles. Everyone held pretty much the same opinions, and when someone didn’t, the fear of being ostracised was enough to have a change of heart. The modern concept of ‘having no original thought’ is, of course, not as modern as we’d expect, but social media makes it incredibly easy to muddy the origins of your own beliefs. Do you form a belief in a silo? Can an opinion or belief change based on new information? Should it? And how often? If too often, is it fair to assume that you are assimilating by way of craving likability?

I fell into that last bracket quite often because it had only been the opinions of others that I found myself latching onto—I use passive language there for a reason. These opinions seemed to occur to me in lieu of forming my own based on perspective or self-belief. I held an opinion because it was popular, not because it made sense for my values. Simple as that. Neutrality is born by way of many things, but ultimately it leads to a central deciding factor: A desire to be diplomatic. Wanting to be accepted by a certain subculture even when, to your core, a contradiction lies dormant.

Online neutrality and parasocialism

My hesitancy to hold a firm opinion on anything, of course, stemmed from this, leading further down the ethical quagmire of being liked. I don’t want to be disliked for having too strong an opinion that somehow indicates pride, apathy, or, for those who like a stronger kick to their online vernacular, narcissism. There’s a fear in seeing journalists and writers and people who’ve dedicated themselves to true expressions of creativity suffer through the added backlash of online paracosialism.

I’ve partaken in a lot of Love Island discourse this year, unfortunately for my peace of mind, but it has somehow strengthened my ability to hold firm on an opinion without teetering on the edge of mindless neutrality. For me, neutrality in the context of discourse is what comes after you’ve talked yourself into circles with losers on the other side of a glaring screen about who’s right or wrong. At some point, I wave the white flag and cross over to the camp of IDGAF in hopes of regaining my sanity, and sometimes licking my wounds in secrecy. But being liked is not a goal. Being liked often has its own tipping scale, and depending on who you talk to, there are immeasurable requirements for likability, especially if you’re in the public eye.

Ocean Vuong is someone who comes to mind. In the past few months, I’ve come across anti-fans on Reddit who refer to him affectionately as a ‘charlatan’ for his ‘cringe’ and ‘overly earnest’ writing. I haven’t gotten around to his work, but I know that I like the way he speaks. The way he articulates himself in slow and considered bouts of speech is pleasing. I had a coworker who spoke the same. I could practically see the words forming at the base of his throat before they came out.

Perhaps I can find a way to separate the art from the artist if I do get around to his writing and find it cringe and overly earnest as well, but the point I’m trying to make is that it is hard to be liked, and it is hard to be liked by everyone. For a very long time, I could not wrap my head around this because I’d lived primarily in the silos of thought cultivated around me and in some ways by me. I am a very imaginative person, and I’ve had arguments and confrontations with myself to mimic how I would deal with them in real life. I would give myself thoughts and opinions that are honest and reflective, knowing somewhere in the recesses of my mind that these hold the weight of an unplugged bucket. All of it will come seeping out if faced with real conflict.

@ughennieI would say I’m shocked but oh well #fyp #loveislandusa #loveislandreunion #loveislandseason7

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The way I’ve remedied this is with social media (don’t judge me for my vices, I’m a growing girl). In indulging in other spheres of parasocialism where I can deeply enmesh myself into one camp or the other, I have no choice but to be honest with myself. This outlet was Love Island USA S7. I don’t like Huda, as a matter of fact, I think she’s done deplorable things on that show. I am also aware that Huda is one of many reality TV pawns that are used and discarded when the vitriol for and against her is no longer profitable. I empathise with the ways the women on this season have gotten far worse criticism than the men, who, by way, are comprised of an illuminating lineup of the intensifying conservatism in America.

In the face of many distasteful opinions about my D1 ship, Nicolandria, I continue to make the same arguments again and again until they grow in credibility and double in resistance. I am unabashedly in support of these two people who don’t know me, and I have never been more spiteful than when dealing with those who do not agree with me.

Still, a balance must be struck. To avoid a full-blown case of parasocialism, whilst also maintaining a sense of fortitude in my beliefs, I step back and look from the outside in. What is it about this relationship that I like? Do the individuals involved in this ship have flaws that are irredeemable for me? What are my limits for their behaviour? What can I defend? What can I criticise?

It may sound simple, but answering these questions when you’re steeped in fandom culture is very difficult. Judging or critiquing people you like, especially within groups and spaces of people who also like them, is a risky play. You might get jumped (digitally, through the use of hateful speech and funny gifs) or you may get a sister in arms. Either way, you will piss some people off by standing on your beliefs, no matter how the pendulum swings.

In response to a comment about how Ocean Vuong “basically turned his own life into a spectacle”, another Redditor replied as follows:

“I mean, is this not the defining cultural practice of our age? The personal brand as self, 'content creation' as art and actualisation, letsplays and unboxings and 'boomers react to skibbidi toilet' - his popularity is the least surprising thing about him.”

Another responded to the response by saying, “It’s very common to fuse mythos and writing.”

I remember a night on the way home from work, I was at the bus stop, waiting for the 205 to Liverpool Street, where I’d get on a Greater Anglia train and watch the world around me dim. The apartment lights and the large glare of the ABBA Arena lights and all the lights of London fusing and disappearing all at once as we left the city and slipped into the countryside. I thought of this before I’d even gotten on the train, and how it made me sad to leave. Somewhere in my notes app right now is a poem about how I was feeling that night, and it went unfinished because I couldn’t find words pretty enough to describe the simplicity of an unsolvable emotion. I couldn’t make my sadness striking enough, so I didn’t try. This is the experience I face often as a writer, in an attempt to merge all my little worlds together in hopes that something poignant and memorable feeds into wider culture. I want attention. I think most people want attention, but I’m unsure if I have the strength to receive it from all sides.

Morality complexes and finding self-belief.

I think at a certain point, we all find ourselves in the crosshairs of moral complexity. As much as I enjoy reading about complex characters and rooting for unlikable women and abusive vampires (AMC’s IWTV, you will always be loved by me), there is a difficulty in accepting that same complexity in people who resemble too much of our own experiences.

In her video, “The Internet’s Evilest Lesbians: Revisiting Anna Campbell”, YouTuber Bittnia recalls an interaction she had on Reddit with someone she considered to have a morality complex. “Not using Twitter doesn’t make you inherently better than me or more ethical. Opting out in many ways is a privilege.” Bittnia recognises the parasocialism in asking about a celebrity’s sexual orientation, given the discourse it’s spawned in the past, but she also makes note of the fact that people are quick to assign you into a category of moral good or moral bad for the mere act of using an app like Twitter, which Bittnia goes on to admit is, “right wing leaning, fasiscm-curious, and aggressively algorithmic.” The nuance here is that an app like Twitter and spaces similar to it, despite their issues, are platforms that, when on the correct side, provide the community and mutual aid that queer left-leaning people need. “That kind of representation hits different when it’s so rare.”

In ’s video about the spectacle of cheating, she covers the topic of cheating as grounds for public humiliation with cases like Coldplay concert gate, Ariana Grande and the SpongeBob Man, Ned Fulmer’s brand as the ‘I love my wife’ guy, and even Jojo Siwa’s recent scandal where she cheated on her partner Kath Ebbs, which adds another layer of complexity because the dynamic of Siwa and Ebbs’ relationship isn’t tranditionally patricarchal.

Nevertheless, the concept of scrutinising an act like cheating on a public scale, Le suggests, is always placed into categories based on the individual experiences of the audience. She goes on to point out that on both sides of the political spectrum, there is a shared desire to uphold moral goodness, or as I’d put it, moral righteousness. Conservatives are historically obsessed with traditional and religious ideas of morality, whereas Liberals, though ‘less overtly violent’, feel an urgency to align with goodness and cast away evil, where cancel culture is involved. Nuance is left out of discussions of cheating, oftentimes because the act alone is repulsive enough to unsubscribe from trying to justify or shift blame. But is there reform for cheaters? In thinking about this myself, I wavered on my conclusion.

I want to say yes, perhaps for the overarching idea that grace can be awarded to most people, but also, my knee-jerk response was no. In the video, Le also touches on the ‘personal being political’, a slogan coined by Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay of a similar name, which concludes that women’s personal struggles are not isolated, but rather illuminate the systematic oppression perpetuated by larger patriarchal powers.

Some of the comments under Le’s video highlight the financial and public loss a woman faces if cheated on by a man, and on the other side, the aggravated speculation a woman would face if she were the cheater. In the case of Ned Fulmer and Coldplay concert gate, the issue of abusing power was also called into question, with the women in both situations working for the men and still walking away with worse scrutiny than the cheating husbands. Either way, the consensus is that women often stand to lose more on the subject of cheating, no matter which side they fall on. I imagine this only skims the surface of the individual opinions that make up the culmination of an audience perspective.

Our desire for moral good and moral bad to be neatly defined gets in the way of progress. There can be no singular truth in all circumstances, but because some self-beliefs border on intolerance, discourse is reduced to the same arguments of who is right and who is wrong. The way we ordain and absolve guilt and blame from others is very indicative of a desire for moral righteousness over moral good. It is a cry for a sheep-like mentality over nuance, and unfortunately, the one person that has been mistreated the most in the age of the internet is nuance herself.

I really suggest Mina’s video on this because it asks you to put aside your own implicit bias and assess the personal and political relationships we have with applying moral righteousness to people we don’t know.

But again, it calls into question our readiness to question. If we, already prepared with a legion of arguments, entertain discourse for the sake of being right or being vindicated in our opinions, then what is the right course of action when forming and upholding self-belief?

The balance I spoke about earlier is the chosen course of action for me. Forming a sort of hypothesis, researching, ideating, informing, and defending. Beliefs are an ever-evolving thing. Values are the pillars that dictate how you go about forming those beliefs, be it through kindness, empathy, intolerance, or justice. I personally choose kindness and empathy, or at least I try to, and it works out how you’d expect. The moments of ego and wounded pride are nursed as real feelings, not just things to be ignored as unfelt strangers to my system. When I can laugh about it, I widen my perspective. I regroup. I might be more careful with my defence, but still, the belief stands. It holds up against the obstacle of neutrality. I find that when you’re able to cultivate nuance as a worldview and not just a cultural tool, it allows for more than just conversation. You become nuanced in your decision-making, in your extensions of grace, and in how the world glows.

I am also thinking about how much longer I have left to nurture my ways of thinking. How many more emotions will plague me with a frightening sense of mortality, and how I will eventually survive that. But I do find myself a little more open to living fully as someone who experiences and nurtures the resistance, the care, and the kindness the world has to offer. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way to intellectualise that too.

The essence of a good slow burn is in the pacing of tension—the bouts of affection coupled with ample enough distance. The magnetism between two people always in the right place at the wrong time, trying always to find their way back to each other. In Love Island, the relationship with the most buzz has undoubtedly been Nicolandria, the romance that began as a crackship and ended with the pair as runner-ups in the Love Island USA finale.

Nic and Olandria’s story started quite literally in the first episode, but their path to each other took a while to fully form. A quick TL;DR on their journey: they began coupled up with different people—Nic with Cierra, Olandria’s close friend, and Olandria with Taylor, Nic’s close friend. You can imagine why they decided not to pursue a relationship whilst these two were still in the picture. But even so, Nic put himself out there and admitted to his initial and ongoing attraction to Olandria later on in the season. They were a couple for only one day, so, in the spirit of Love Island, they explored. The Soul Ties Kiss™ was thus born, and stans across the globe cried, screamed and threw up at the numerous edits born out of it. Then, they friend-zoned each other, and for a week, we hardly saw them interact. Before they coupled up, we’d been living off of glances and touches and challenge kisses, but finally we had a meal. Hearty, filling, and memorable. Even the narrator Ian Sterling noted that moment in Soul Ties as an iconic piece of Love Island history.

Going back to the land of crumbs was difficult, but Nicolandria Stans are nothing if not persistent, so we trudged along. We walked until our legs grew weary and the sound of romance was being washed away by anti blackness and internet discourse.

Then, Cierra was removed from the show, and Nic and Olandria coupled up once again, but this time was different. Taylor was long out of the picture, and Nic was without a connection, so the only sensible thing to do was to couple up.

This is where the allegations of their relationship being forced come in, and it’s not entirely dismissible. It was unlikely that Olandria would pick Zak over Nic, someone who has opposed his closest friends just to save her from being dumped, and so yes, they were in fact put in the right place at the right time, but ‘forced’ is not the word I’d use to describe them.

Think of it this way: Nic and Olandria had already been coupled up once after the Casa and Villa dumping. They were given the chance to reenter the villa as a couple, an option that was clearly created for them to explore, and still, they called it off. So what, then, made Olandria decide to tell Nic the second time around that she was open to exploring their connection again?

She tells Huda in the episode following the recoupling with Nic that she’s been attracted to him. She kissed him in episode one, and they continued to gravitate to each other in kissing challenges, which Amaya also pointed out in the episode. To many, this episode felt like it was the second part of episodes 21 + 22, where we saw the potential of their relationship from Nic’s perspective, but episode 30 + 31 was Olandria making it known that she likes Nic as well.

Their story appeals to so many people, particularly romance readers and Wattpad veterans alike, because of the way it’s been structured through many beloved tropes: friends to lovers, forced proximity, unrequited love, and second chance romance. From the beginning, most people noticed Nic’s clear attraction to Olandria, almost as if we were reading a novel from his POV, and then suddenly the narration switches to Olandria in the later episodes, and we get a clear sense of how she feels about him.

The recoupling does not immediately solidify them as a romantic couple, but the seeds of this love plant, as Nic so aptly puts it, have been sown weeks prior.

From the moment they couple up, we see their feelings for each other surpass physical attraction and enter the awkward and shy stages of the Friends to Lovers arc. They have the banter and chemistry on lock, but what follows thereafter is tentative and blooming. In episode 31, they care for a (fake) child, Marcel, whose lore runs deep, and according to Nic, this is where their feelings began taking a romantic shape as they figured out their compatibility in regards to parenthood. They met each other’s moms in episode 34, both of whom were wholeheartedly supportive of their relationship, and they themselves continuously assured each other and those around them that this was growing into romance. It was slow, it was intentional, and it was a wonderful way to end out a show that had been missing its titular concept all season.

Nic and Olandria’s dynamic speaks to the nature of two people truly taking their time to know each other. Both have shown their intentionality in different ways; Olandria saw through her situation with Taylor until the very end and remained ‘fiercely loyal’ even when her loyalty wasn’t respected. Nic, though a little messy, never led Cierra on. Despite liking Olandria the entire time, he respected Cierra’s feelings as best as he could, given the context of how the show had been operating thus far, and when it came to Olandria, his honesty towards her was clear from the moment he realised they’d be coupling up. He showed her almost immediately how much he cared for her from his actions to his words.

This is what I loved the most when it came to their relationship. For a short while, we got a real show of genuine attraction and the potential for love in two people who were vulnerable and dependent on each other. The episodes are immensely popular for a reason. Aside from the Soul Ties Kiss, watching Nic and Olandria interact as ‘friends’ in a couple who clearly wanted each other this whole time was like doing a line.

The main fallout was in episode 22 where they friend-zoned each other, but my theory is that Nic noticed how often Olandria brought up Taylor and Cierra, and felt it best to just stay friends whilst they figure out their respective couples. People have used this moment as the ‘gotcha’ that proves Nic and Olandria’s strictly platonic relationship but it’s almost painfully clear what the real reason is; despite liking each other, Olandria was still working through her situation with Taylor, and Cierra was in casa amor, thinking she’d just lost a close friend, and waiting to get back to Nic. If they’d coupled up, it would have been a shit show, considering how the black women have been treated thus far for putting themselves and their principles first. It wasn’t just about friendship. It was also about timing.

I’ve also relearnt through this season’s discourse that people have very flighty beliefs simply for the sake of discourse. On one hand, there were opinions surrounding how Nic and Olandria didn’t even like each other and were coasting through to the finals in a friendship couple, and on the other were claims that Nic only wanted to sleep with Olandria, and that it was purely sexual.

This dismissal of real feelings that exist within the context of the couple’s individual and conjoined dynamic is crazy to me, perhaps because of my laser focus on said context. Olandria made it clear several times that she prefers a slow burn, friends-to-lovers type of relationship. Nic expressed his desire early on to take care of someone, and that he prefers taking it slow with someone he really likes. With Olandria, Nic valued this slowness over whirlwind physicality, something many have already pointed out as the strangest part of the season. This obsession with lust, or at least, physical intimacy as the only real show of feelings, has irritated me deeply, especially as a slow-burn girly myself.

To insinuate that their relationship is forced simply because of how little they touch each other or kiss outside of challenges takes away from the smaller moments; the hand holding, Olandria never walking down a flight of stairs unassisted, Nic making her breakfast, laying out her clothes, exchanging jewellery, the makeup on his clothes and face, and Nic’s consistency in speaking about Olandria with intention and a sweetness that can only be described as love. Their moments are small and often cut out of episodes entirely, but as someone who’s paid attention to what’s being inferred, I’ve seen it from the beginning.

Life Post Villa and the obsession with humbling Black women.

There’s a trend I, Nicolandria stans and casual fans alike are #noticing, where there seems to be an almost perverse excitement to disprove the relationship between Nic and Olandria. You can dislike their pairing, and shit, you can ignore it all altogether, but what fascinates me is the vitriolic anger with which people—mostly online and mostly irrelevant to their actual private relationship—are taking imaginary bets on how their relationship will ‘inevitably’ end. Along with this is the nature of relationships where Black women are loved on loudly, specifically by men, we’re told we can’t pull.

Nic is a hot white man who complements Olandria both physically and emotionally. At first, scenes of them together were picked apart with a whimsical sense of delusion as fans goaded on the crackship. I joined in on this, of course, because I love love. Then their relationship expanded, and the delusion was no longer just that. Their love story that used to live primarily through X's ‘walk with me’ threads and TikTok edits proclaiming ‘Nicolandria in Five’ was now real, live and direct on the screen. This was truly a bonding moment between me and the thousands of other Nicolandria stans that never thought the day would come, but it seems as though there is a collective desire to watch hot people pine for each other in awkward and endearing ways. Unfortunately, however, some people can’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept of a conventionally attractive white man being the one to diligently pursue a woman like Olandria.

Olandria Carthen is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. Sharp cheekbones, a gorgeous posture, beautiful brown eyes and a wonderful smile. I truly feel like she lights up any room she walks in, and as per the raving reviews of the islanders she spent weeks with, the sentiment stands firm that Olandria is a lovely person. So why, then, is it difficult for people to believe that Nic likes her romantically?

Since they’ve left the villa, Nic and Olandria have continued on the path they laid together in the final week of the season; a slow and tentative stroll into the future of their relationship, whatever that looks like. The issue some parasocial fans, or undercover haters, seem to have is that this is not enough, apparently. The couple that only got together 30 episodes into a 36-episode season is taking it too slow for their connection to be considered romantic, as though their history of friendship and loyalty to each other means nothing.

People especially nitpick Nic’s actions when it comes to his feelings for Olandria. There was speculation on him saying that they could be ‘lovers, best friends or partners’ in his final speech, instead of just ‘lovers’ or ‘partners’, and now, post villa, there’s a constant slew of new opinions on how Nic is eventually going to leave Olandria for a skinny blonde white woman.

This desire to determine the downfall of their relationship by the standard of a white man leaving a black woman sours in the mouth when you realise that it’s really just an obsession to humble said black woman.

Throughout the season, Chelley and Olandria have been under fire for actions they took in the villa that are disproportionate to the amount of hatred they’re still getting. The fire has now been stoked way past online discourse and into the social posts of brands like Buzzfeed Tasty and Time Magazine, and influencers and podcast hosts who seem to only have a problem when it comes to these two women. In every podcast or interview I’ve seen, Olandria and Chelley’s names are in the mouths of people who would smile in their faces when it really comes down to it. Taking part in the discourse this season has been draining, but it has also been a reminder that you deserve to be loved at your own pace, regardless of outside pressure.

In my last Love Island essay, I noted that Olandria’s desire to control her emotions and stay ahead of her feelings likely stems from her role as the eldest daughter, and Nic, both in the show and in recent interviews, mentions how empowering and pleasantly surprising it is to watch her walls slowly come down. During their final date, Nic and Olandria receive letters from their respective family members, and they both cry in each other’s arms. The show of not just affection, but real vulnerability is what we as fans of their relationship have been waiting for.

A lot of the romantic connections on past and current seasons of Love Island can sometimes boil down to telling the audience the dynamic of a couple’s relationship rather than showing the things that make them click so well. Here we can see their love for their families drawing them closer together, making it easier to envision their relationship really flourishing with the knowledge that their families do support them. I truly do wonder how people miss these key moments of their relationship when it has seemed so clear to me and thousands of other people that Nic is the type of person Olandria deserves; someone kind, someone empathetic and strong enough to handle things under pressure, and above all someone capable of meeting her where she’s at.

Because of this slowness, many people continue to believe their relationship has been faked for the purpose of getting the 100K prize money. This does not make any sense to me, considering this very intentionality they’ve chosen a week before the show ends, but once again, the intentions of the islanders are second to the assumed intentions that the audience derives.

I’ve said before that the audience participation has been the worst part of this season, especially since it seems like throughout this epidemic of anti-intellectualism lives another branch of forgoing nuance and basic empathy. People are constantly inserting themselves into the minds of certain islanders without any regard for their ability to make up for mistakes. Despite not liking certain people, there is still a line to be drawn, especially now that the show has wrapped and some islanders are taking their time with integrating back into the public eye. This doesn’t always mean something, but again, the lack of nuance means an influx of baseless assumptions.

With Nic and Olandria, this weird need to see a black woman be humbled stems from the fact that Olandria did not have to struggle to be with Nic. Whilst they both were attracted to each other in the beginning, Nic pined for Olandria throughout the entire show. In his final speech, he says, quite beautifully, that, “We began this journey deeply involved with other connections, but I always was your secret admirer.”

Some might say Nic only enjoys the chase, a sentiment he also shared at the beginning of the show, but in my eyes, his desire for Olandria evolved the more he got to know her as a friend, and then as a lover.

The mass speculations bother me only because of how centred it is on Nic and Olandria’s relationship being forced in the last week of the show, when there have been clear signs of attraction since the beginning. The four final couples were created after Casa Amor, and more than two of those couples only recoupled at the same time as Nic and Olandria, but because of their immediate physical connections, they were deemed more genuine.

This logic, though flawed, paints a clearer image of the state of dating for Gen Z. Moral panic has pushed more people into a puritanical way of thinking, but at the same time, we have never been more sexually charged. Brainrot has extended to extreme ends of physicality like sex but never sensuality, and overall, there’s a large percentage of people engaging with sexual content yet hardly pursuing it in real life, making it harder to spot when a genuine relationship forms at a natural pace on a show like Love Island, where instant gratification is rewarded with more screen time.

The obsession with wanting to police every decision these people make is not new, but it has taken on a unique and all the same familiar shape with the addition of Nic and Olandria being an interracial couple. Despite the jokes of their ‘swirlship’ being just that, a joke, the people who don’t like their relationship make it a point to note that Nic’s type isn’t usually Olandria, a dark skinned black woman with non-Eurocentric features. This, coupled with the fact that Nic is the one to initiate most of their romantic interactions, has ruffled feathers in a majority of public takes on their relationship, in and out of the villa. Regardless, Nic stands ten toes down behind Olandria, and the corners he’s being backed into don’t deter him from continuing to let everyone know that he really likes this woman and she really likes him.

Nic and Olandria will probably continue to be scrutinised under the bright white lights of adoring fans and drooling dissenters waiting for the other shoe to drop but I hope, and I truly do hope, that their relationship maintains the same magic it has throughout the show, and whether as friends or as lovers, it’s clear that the everlasting relationship Olandria hoped to have will prevail in the end.

Love Island USA S7 started airing this June, and I tuned in for the first few episodes as audiences were tapping into the tenth and eleventh episodes. Safe to say I was a little behind, so after a few episodes and the SparkNotes nature of TikTok, I didn’t really need to watch these people interact with each other for an hour. I’ll just watch a debrief.

I got into this habit and quickly familiarised myself with the consensus at the time; Huda was insane, Jeremiah was a love bomber, and Ace was Tyrique Hyde from Love Island UK S10 in a different font. These opinions swayed me because I’d absorbed the popular opinions as my own, along with many edited clips; secondary research, if you will. The most important part of these opinions focused on Huda, and her less than savoury behaviour towards the new bombshells and her couple, Jeremiah.

The think pieces on Huda were pretty black and white, a narrative that has unfortunately continued to haunt the show until now. Huda’s behaviour is generally perceived as manipulative and, in some extreme cases, abusive, where her friends have to safeguard any woman who walks into the villa intending to even breathe near Jeremiah.

For me, there was an immediate dislike of Huda because I know a Huda. I’ve seen some of Huda’s behaviours in my past self: A quickness to anger, a lack of discernment in moments of emotional outbursts, and overall a desire, conscious or subconscious, to hurt someone. Airing out the fact that Jeremiah wasn’t attracted to Iris was for no other reason than to hurt Iris.

Because I didn’t watch those episodes— A good thing in hindsight because I would not have been able to finish it—my opinion of Huda lived within the silo of TikTok think pieces and comment sections that varied from well thought-out points to critically obtuse observations of Huda as a mother, Huda as a friend, and Huda as a person.

Huda strikes me as one end of an emotionally stunted spectrum; at the beginning of the show, we get the sense that Huda had to grow up very quickly, which doesn’t come as a shock. Huda presents herself as a fun, charismatic, and emotionally mature person in the beginning, but as the show goes on and she meets and couples up with Jeremiah, her bandwidth for emotional maturity starts to unfurl.

Huda, from the moment a bombshell comes in with interest in Jeremiah, calls them a bitch. She calls Amaya a bitch and she calls Iris fake, a ‘escape goat’, for Jeremiah, and as for Jeremiah himself she calls him out his name several times. You get the picture.

Huda does not know how to handle her anger with grace or maturity. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone to because of the nature of anger itself, but it doesn’t escape me that she takes several digs at the women around Jeremiah. It’s very disturbing to watch her speak out of turn time and time again, only for one of her friends—usually Olandria, but we’ll get to her later—to calm her down. For a week or so, this cycle continues until Jeremiah is eventually dumped from the island, and thus begins Huda’s redemption arc.

Now again, I dipped in and out of watching the actual show, so my opinions on Huda were largely based on secondary thoughts from people who had watched the actual episodes, so imagine my surprise when, only a few episodes after Huda’s crash out(s), I see comments of people saying she’s grown.

This wasn’t as prevalent as it is now in the aftermath of the Chelley/Olandria Mean Girl debacle, but it was simmering underneath all the recouplings and more and more people getting pushed in and out of the villa during Casa Amor. This was the main thing I noticed: Huda was being given a redemption arc by the producers.

I can’t say for sure that this was the intention all along but it’s clear that in the absence of Jeremiah, ‘Hurricane Huda’ is no longer the form of entertainment the producers want—and in my opinion, she never was, watching someone behave like that is quite terrifying—so they had to flip the switch and redeem her in the eyes of the public.

Now I’d like you to imagine, as one of Huda’s friends, her closest in the villa in fact, having to deal with the fallout of her meltdown. Imagine spending twenty-four hours a day with a person who has proven herself to be incapable of regulating her emotions. No space or separation to collect your thoughts, essentially being on call just in case she crashes out again. It’s gonna take a fucking toll, isn’t it?

Enter: Olandria Carthen. Huda and Olandria were the first to enter the villa along with Chelley, and since then it seems like their relationship has only grown, but Olandria and Huda’s in particular formed a new spine as the show went on.

For a lot of Huda’s meltdowns, Olandria was front and centre in the aftermath, picking her up and letting her down gently. Many people referred to Olandria as the villa therapist, as Huda’s mom, and more recently, she’s been described by Jeremiah as the ‘soul of the villa.’ So you can also imagine the shock and surprise when Olandria confronts Huda about kissing Chris, a man both Huda and Chelley were getting to know, in a challenge where all the islanders are present.

In my opinion, I don’t think bringing this kiss up was entirely necessary because Huda was in a couple with him, but I can see why Olandria did it; from the moment Huda set a precedent with all the girls about ‘sisterhood’, there was a shift in the usual participation of Love Island contestants. Instead of exploring connections with other OG islanders and stepping on toes in the name of love, the OG islanders played it safe, and that was in part because of how Huda conditioned them.

As I mentioned, Huda’s behaviour was rough on everybody, bombshells and OG islanders alike. For the bombshells, there was a feeling of treading on very thin ice when getting to know Jeremiah, and for the OG girls, there was the subconscious signal that Jeremiah was off-limits. Huda would talk shit about a bombshell to the OG girls, and turn around to then thank the OG girls for sticking to ‘girl code’ and respecting the boundaries she set with Jeremiah. It was conditioning, no matter what you want to call it.

Olandria did to Huda what Huda did to Iris and Jeremiah; she aired out other people’s business, and it was messy! Evidently so, because the aftermath of this birthed, or rather affirmed, this narrative of Chelly, Olandria, and Cierra being ‘mean girls’ and bullying Huda.

The carnage this created was supermassive, but not in the show. From TikTok to Instagram to Twitter, there wasn’t a corner of the internet that went without the polarising opinions on whether or not Huda was getting ganged up on by ‘The Mean Girls’. The flack was especially targeted towards Chelley and Olandria because of their closeness to Huda. You would think there would be more analysis on why they confronted her as her two closest friends in the villa, but no, the internet proved once again that women cannot be humans; they must be caricatures.

A lot of the opinions in favour of Huda were vehemently against Chelley and Olandria, and, as many TikTok users have pointed out, there seems to be a general air of amnesia when it comes to Huda vs. The ‘Mean Girls’.

Huda’s behaviour caused this reaction, undoubtedly, and it was likely made worse by the girls being in such proximity to her despite Huda apologising. The main argument people use to defend Huda is that she’s changed and taken accountability for the way she behaved a few episodes ago. I personally don’t see how that’s possible given the time frame, but for the sake of nuance, let’s say she has, or rather, she’s in the process of growing. Why do Olandria and Chelley have to immediately forgive her? Living with someone who has shown a pattern of unpredictable emotional behaviours without a space of your own to retreat to is heavy, and it would not surprise me if Chelley and Olandria are simply drained.

Do I think they handled the Standing on Business Challenge well? Not really. Do I think they should’ve pulled Huda on her behaviour earlier? Maybe. Do I think they’re mean girls? Absolutely not.

I’ll spare you the rant about racial politics when it comes to Black women in dating shows, but know that it is, in fact, about race.

The grace that has been given to Huda by her fans has not extended to Chelley or Olandria, and instead, I’ve seen too many comments about how they’re just jealous of Huda and how they’ve been mean girls since the beginning—even though they saved Huda from elimination twice but I’ll come back to that—and that overall, they’re just nasty nasty girls that deserve all the hate they’re getting.

This is where the noise of audience participation starts to irk me. What inspired me to write this essay was a TikTok by user @asinderellastory about how the audience that’s calling these women mean girls are partaking in their own unhealthy bouts of bullying themselves. Olandria and Chelley’s Instagram handlers have since reopened their Instagram comments sections, but I’m sure you can tell why they closed them in the first place.

My main issue with all the discourse coming off the back of the Standing On Business challenge is that no nuance or grace is being given to Chelley and Olandria. I’m going to talk particularly about Olandria because I find her relationship with Huda to be fascinating and honestly very real in the sea of performative relationships this season has birthed.

I relate to Olandria in a lot of ways. I’ve never been in a serious relationship, and although I’m not the eldest daughter, there are still expectations I feel obligated to uphold because of the way I’ve been raised and the way society will inevitably treat me. Growth is a luxury, but optimisation is a necessity. For survival, you must craft the image best suited to all scenarios and come out on top as unaffected as possible. She mentions, in an episode after the recoupling, when Taylor chose another woman over her, that in the real world she’d cut him off quickly, but in the villa she has to see him and be reminded of her feelings. I feel that, in a lot of ways, Olandria is scared of stepping outside preconceived obligations to explore and be honest about how she really feels.

Olandria’s way of thinking is very similar to mine. I find it hard to cry in front of others, not necessarily because of weakness, but because I’m terrified that I won’t be able to control it. I’ve seen people say that Olandria is trying too hard to be unbothered, and I can kind of see that, but for the most part, I think she’s trying to be genuine with the knowledge that she is a dark-skinned Black woman who will be judged regardless of what she does.

In episode two or three, Cierra comes in as a bombshell, and Olandria’s couple, Taylor, stands up to make it known that he wants to explore a connection with Cierra. Most of the men stand up for Cierra, except Jeremiah, of course, and Huda takes this chance to comment on how the girls deserve real men. Olandria tells her to cool it, as she should, because girl now is not the time, and Huda starts crying a little while later. In her confessional, after finding out that Huda cried because of her, Olandria felt immediately remorseful at the thought of making her cry. She explains herself and apologises, and all is well.

For most of their conflicts, Huda and Olandria don’t take very long in hashing out their issues, which is one of the things I like about their dynamic.

My sister and I are deeply avoidant people, but I lean more into confrontation despite being terrified of it. Yes, I do contain multitudes. Then, after a while, one of us will crack a joke, and once the air is no longer tense, we talk about the issue.

Huda strikes me as a little sister to Olandria, which makes sense because Olandria is quite the opposite of her in how she handles conflict. In a recent episode, Olandria throws a little shade at Huda for her tendency to crash out instead of talking through things, which people obviously interpreted as nasty mean girl hullabaloo, but to me it seemed more like they’ve talked about Huda’s behaviour before and it’s something they can joke about now.

When people talk about complexity in female friendships across media, there’s never a firm definition of what a complex relationship between women looks like. Complexity in itself has several layers, and how we define a situation’s complexity is all about perspective. From Huda’s perspective, she’s assertive and brash and quick to anger. From Olandria’s perspective, she’s overly patient and kind of avoidant when it comes to her own feelings. I’m not gonna put too much of Taylor in this, but that man led her on and ruined her experience, and I stand on that.

In both perspectives, there’s a level of emotional stuntedness on different ends of the spectrum, but who we give grace to despite these complexities has become glaringly obvious.

Huda is now the people’s princess (bar Amaya Papaya, our sensitive gangsta), and Olandria is the nasty mean girl who’s delusional about her relationship with Taylor. This selective giving and taking of empathy is what I’ve been floored by time and time again as I’ve watched the discourse unfold. For every critical and empathetic take are five more that seem to possess no reason for existing other than to put one woman down in favour of another.

I’ve made it clear that for most of what we’ve seen, Olandria has given herself fully to the role of being Huda’s confidant, and the times she messes up are the ones people decide to latch onto. You don’t have to like Olandria, and shit you don’t have to like either of them really, but much like the ‘it’s not that deep’ discourse I think we’ve lost the ability to see these people as fully actualised beings instead of character’s that we poke and prod for our own entertainment. I don’t want to stand on any sort of moral high ground as though I’ve never participated in this kind of behaviour, but the way it’s manifested in the last few days because of Olandria is gross and frankly, lame.

Olandria is, like I said, on the end of the emotionally stunted spectrum where stoicism is seen as grace. I think she does have grace—I ride for my Bama Barbie—and I think she is a genuine person, but as a fellow dark-skinned Black woman, I see where she puts herself on the line for people and tries to mask her disappointment when it isn’t reciprocated.

Huda can crash out and redeem herself in a matter of a few days because the majority of her defenders are teenagers and young women who see themselves in her. They feel her anger and her frustration and believe that she’s a victim because they have once been victims. Much is the same for Olandria because most Black women can relate to shoving themselves in boxes for the sake of being palatable and agreeable, and subsequently feeling resentment for the person who stuffed them into that box, even if that person is yourself.

I can see why people like Huda, and I can see why people like Olandria. What I can’t see is the endless charge marching towards the narrative that Olandria has never liked Huda. Of all the girls, I would say that Olandria has stood behind Huda the most, even when she shouldn’t have, and even when the audience called her and the other girls stupid for saving Huda. This is the selective memory loss coming into play, choosing to ignore the fact that regardless of the arguments they have, Huda and Olandria’s relationship has withstood their conflicts because they want to work it out.

@asinderellastory makes a point in her video that ‘the audience position themselves as the morally superior arbiters of right and wrong’ and this is clear in many such cases; the people who judge Olandria for not being able to see Taylor’s non-verbal cues as easily as we the audience do, the people who believe Chelley is simply jealous of Huda instead of frustrated with her inability to stand by the rules she set up, and the people coming after anyone that doesn’t like Huda because they just support the ‘mean girls’. I’ve heard the term mean girls thrown around like dice too often recently, and despite Olandria and Chelly making up with Huda all in the first thirty minutes of the most recent episode, they’re still nasty people who don’t take accountability. Do you see what I mean?

I’ve seen a few takes on my fyp surrounding the state of audience participation for shows like Love Island, and I’ve agreed with most of them. The worst part of this season isn’t the cast, it’s the audience and the obsession with putting people into a ‘narrative cohesion’, as @sinderellastory calls it, that works for them. This season has its problems, don’t get me wrong, but the state of social surveillance and the dreadfully looming political climate in America make it hard to get involved without seeing parallels between real-world politics and villa politics that random people on the internet are making up.

At the end of it, what I know for sure is that reality TV, whilst still heavily prevalent in our current society, has a lot of kinks to work out behind the scenes, and it can start by putting in place better online safeguarding for contestants on these shows so that they aren’t exposed to such intensely polarising opinions on their characters. For people like Huda and Olandria, reality TV will always seek to use them as props and punching bags where necessary for entertainment, because that is the goal for these shows, regardless of the real relationships they form, the message still stands. Empathy does not always entertain, if it does at all.

Disclaimer: I use ‘Africa/African’ loosely to describe the cultural impact of religion on Black Africans. I am Nigerian, so my opinions stem from being raised in Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Happy reading! <3

There is no way to fully describe the nature of watching a person froth at the mouth in front of you during a church service. Ephemeral, maybe. Terrifying, most definitely. You are knocked back into multiple bodies by the force of their own, a supposed spiritual power possessing them as they scream and seize up, wailing. You might close your eyes because it is startling to watch, to hear, akin to the screaming you’ve heard in horror movies. You aren’t allowed to watch those, but this is a spiritual awakening. This, you must see.

The wailing becomes disembodied, and for the nights following, you dream of a mouth hinged open, drool tugging down on open lips, its jaw melting into negative space. Terror in the spiritual sense, having no control over the physical body.

My first time seeing this sort of thing was in the thick of COVID. I’m sure I’ve seen more at a younger age, but I repress those memories. This one stuck because it was the kind of church that spoke in fire, willing you to give in, and I’d worried every Sunday that I would have no control over what happened to me if I too seized up.

I imagine my body erupting in flames, consumed by its desire to die at the sight of Christ. Song lyrics proclaim that “we burn for you, Jesus”, but I have never once thought to sacrifice myself for an entity I have never seen.

Whenever I think about people succumbing to this force of divinity, I’m ambivalent to the fact that it is an urged form of worship. Intensity is a current necessity for our world, for us to create and love, but it takes a turn when spirits are involved. It’s all so very confusing and somehow an immovable truth that I can’t seem to pick a side. The concept of spirits has never been explained to me, though I don’t think I’d be willing to listen, considering how it’s often explained. When I was younger, the question of spirits and souls was divine and holy, but I dreaded the idea of seeing them. They were indistinguishable from ghosts and ghouls, creatures lurking. I never thought to question this because, like ghosts and ghouls, there was an air natural belief in one opposed to the other. You should know that ghouls and ghosts are bad, in the same way you should know spirits and souls are good. The questions had been answered already. My faith was preordained from birth.

Religion is not something I can dissect with full confidence because it requires too much nuance that I admit I’m not capable of. What I do know, however, is that many religious modes of thought, like the ghouls and souls, are often paired closely with fear. In one case, we have religious excellence and its lack of separation from Black excellence. Where one goes, the other seems to follow.

To disclaim, I don’t mean Black excellence in a prosaic sense. I think there are many excellent Black people, too many to count, in fact. But I’d like to discuss the thinking behind Black excellence, the way, as a concept, it has morphed into a means of controlling and manipulating our ability to discern ourselves from hive thinking in a majorly capitalistic society, much like the way religious figures believe your faith binds you to a singular way of thinking. First, I’ll start with the African Prodigy.

Perfection in the African sense is steeped in all things religion and colonialism, which, if you look closely enough, you’ll see that those two things are forever married. I’ll whittle it down for you, though. I imagine most African children have grown up in households where they share beds with a Western Dream, pruning the weeds of individual desire off their bodies when a father says,

“Tighten up! How will you uphold your household without a bloody job?”

Or when a mother says,

“Omolara! Will your husband find you like this? Focusing on a nonsensical career?”

One praises the endless hunger for work, and another degrades it. Either way, the goal is to be able to present an expectation long established and uphold it, no matter what the individual wants. This is where excellence, the tradition of it, shows its hand. Our society likes to juggle around the gendered expectations of a household. A woman takes care of her home, and a man provides for his family. If you have ever stepped into a devout Christian household, specifically a Black one, these roles play out like prophecy, with feet sinking into sand they believe is strong enough to hold up what is already crumbling, in a trance, guiding you through the image of a broken home with pulsing walls.

Excellence is what lives in those walls. A desire to be seen as, if not to actually be, excellent. A pipe finally snaps and drips its contents onto your head. Nobody else wants to acknowledge it. The dripping. Your eyes twitch because of course they do. You never know when the next drip is coming. How big it’ll be, or if you’ll ever escape it. This determination to ignore what doesn’t work leaves a strain, tension that can’t be relieved unless one day you decide you won’t live like that anymore. Perhaps you finally speak up, you call out the pipes, the cracks, the stains. You finally make everyone around you notice, and you say your goodbyes. Then the ridicule comes. “You can’t handle a little rain? What will you do when it pours? Fine! Go and stay gone!”

All this to say that noticing a flaw within both contexts of religion and Blackness— the way Blackness has been weaponised— is easy to do once the fog clears. The issue is that the trauma still follows.

African perceptions of God are not lost on me, and they never will be. The fear mongering, the acute obsession with guilt tripping, the drip-fed affection. I’ve said many times that when some people describe their relationships with Christianity, it often sounds like an abusive relationship.

Don’t get me wrong. People can be as devoted to Christ as they want to. As mother Broski has said once, “I admire the faithful.”

It is good to believe in something better. I do believe in something better. I don’t think I would be alive if I didn’t. My idea of spirits and souls has evolved, but I still question religion as intently as I used to, if not more so now, because I have separated my ability to think about it as both a man-made institution and a mode of worship. Even as I say this, a part of me wants to believe what I’ve been told. It might be easier. It’ll be less affronting. I recently finished Assembly by Natasha Brown, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it for the past few days. A lot of heavy concepts in a sleek, one hundred or so words, but the same idea of assimilating is explored through this excerpt:

This comes as the protagonist is staying with her rich boyfriend’s family. They’re setting up for a party, and this protagonist, a nameless Black woman, surveys their wealth with a watchful, sterile eye, though in truth she’s the one being watched. The story follows her as she decides to finally do what she wants after climbing the corporate ladder of a bank despite the many obstacles, past and present. She looks back on the history of British Colonialism and the onus on Black people to be the ones who fit into British society. Black excellence is no longer aspirational. It is an expectation.

There is fear in questioning a pre-established belief, especially one built through centuries of systemic control. In the same way, I also believe that, as forgiving as religion claims to be, there is a fear that even when you are in it, you still can’t give enough. Not doing enough or believing enough. To question God’s plan is to be an unbeliever, and the language that’s used to paint you in this way is always so demeaning. I’ll expand on this later.

A mini derailment: I’m watching a lot of anti-MLM content these days because I find MLMs to be abhorrent cults. In a video I watched recently, a woman—driving in her car and filming from her phone in her lap, mind you—insinuated that Jesus recruited her into an MLM. She mentions how her life before the MLM was unworthy, she lost her faith, she kept asking ‘why God, why’, and she considered herself to be ‘playing the victim’ in her time of genuine need. This baffled me because she was a victim. Of homelessness, of a failed system, and of the people who convinced her that she wasn’t doing enough. Now, she’s in an MLM, and if you know how an MLM works, you know that she’ll make an income quicker gambling than she will at the bottom of this pyramid (disclaimer: PLEASE do not gamble omg).

This is how most MLMs operate. They target vulnerable individuals and warp their way of thinking with widely exposed cult tactics under the smokescreen of ‘mindset training.’ It’s vile, it’s exploitative, and it extends way past MLMs.

The other side of this is the obsession with hustle culture in MLMs. Much like hustle culture in any other context, you’re trained to work for barely any rewards and believe your life is changing with every Instagram reel you post. I have many thoughts on MLMs, but I digress.

As much as people have judged younger generations for their lack of direction, there aren’t many solutions that don’t require a total acquiescence to capitalism or a desire to excel by way of forgoing your humanity. A need for time freedom is, ironically, what people in MLMs paint as one of its benefits, but as soon as you’re in the MLM, you find your time being stretched thin, very unlike the soft urgency for a better life you were initially promised.

This, concerning religion, always makes me think of the way God is portrayed through predatory churches. You’re drawn in with the promise of safety, of kindness, of care. But once you’re in, the requirements become heavier, the requests become obligations, and suddenly you’re forced into giving much of yourself to the culture of religion rather than an actualised belief in God. You’ll find that this is often the case in Nigerian Pentecostalism; the culture of religion is the thing that’s worshipped instead of God, or rather, their image of God is the culture. And there is no questioning culture.

I’m sometimes self-conscious of my spirituality because it doesn’t look like the arduous devotion Christians give to God, because sometimes, my God looks different.

Sometimes, I imagine God as a child. Probably wise but carefree, the way most children are. I talked about this in another essay, about children being the purest form of human life, and I still believe that, which is why it makes sense to me that God would be in this form. I’m aware of how silly this might sound, but humour me. He’s eating a lollipop, sugary streaks of red, probably a berry flavour, staining his tongue and cheek. In this imagining, God is a human child, open to everyone who is trying to be a good person.

Now, despite humans never having seen God before, there are a lot of drastic opinions about his physical appearance. Blue-eyed Aryan Jesus on stained glass is an interpretation I can never fully erase from my head, perhaps as a metaphor for religious trauma, but I digress. Looking behind that image means realising that we can’t all have the same interpretations of God, but in African Christianity, and I speak specifically to the culture of Christianity rather than a true belief in Christ, there is still a sense that this trauma still lives and breathes.

Like a lot of historians will tell you, depictions of God brought by white colonisers were used quite explicitly to brainwash Black people into believing that their enslavers were human conduits of God. Now, I am not a historian, but the effects of this have been lasting and entirely damaging to the spirituality of Black individuals in and out of Africa. The same goes for Black excellence; whose excellence are we chasing? What does this excellence look like in a capitalistic society?

As part of their R29Unbothered series, a collection of pieces supporting and championing Black people in media, a 2022 Refinery29 article explored what this excellence looked like. “Being excellent meant ascribing to a certain set of rules — British ones, passed on to him through literal colonisation — and achieving tangible, braggable things like newspaper clippings he could send back home to his siblings, trophies we could put on a mantle, papers with A+s written in red, and professions he could say with pride: doctor, lawyer, engineer.”

Our meritocracy is ruled by Western Ideals, and for a lot of Black people living in this part of the world, we’ve never known any different. As for religion, the same applies, where the abusive ideations surrounding religious thought are passed from household to household, man to woman, woman to child. The freedom of thought in both contexts looks like Black sheeping yourself into a corner no one else wants to covet.

Previous methods of endlessly striving for approval have ruined the perception of excellence and merit for a lot of Black people, but your aliveness is excellent. Your dedication to the people you love is excellence. A patriarchal and religiously abusive household is nothing to be proud of because it hurts us all in the end. Who survives on one struggling back? One arm or one leg? Should we resort to eating each other until the blame subsides?

I think that in all the worst things capitalism has done, demonising a desire to walk at your own pace has been the worst for me. I have never known how to relax. My body is revolting against my watchful nature, and still, I’m pushing towards another thing. Another goal that fulfils me for a second before dispersing.

Nowadays, I am loud in my mediocrity. I’m trying to create with intention, even if that intention is to be a little silly. I believe the fact of relaxing is resistance. I’m sure you’ve heard that enough times now, but really, is it a crime not to strive for the best and most righteous option at all times? Despite the mentality of working twice as hard, I still desire a pace I can manage. I’m capable of creating something beautiful and unforgettable, but I am also trying to eat. I am trying to make a living. Balancing both is not impossible, but it also cannot demand so much of me when I am already trying to just get by.

It would be a lie to say that there isn’t one competitive bone in my body, but I will say that if it came down to it, I would lose for the sake of peace. As I type this, I’m sensing that it might just be an untapped fear of conflict, which also contradicts my desire to argue with everyone. I sometimes talk as though I know everything there is to know, and yet I’m terrified of true, discomforting contemplation. One of my fears when it comes to religion is that I cannot distinguish the voice of God and the voice of myself; an angry, disembodied mouth preying on my anxieties. Fundie christians would call me insane and God would call me— well, I don’t really know what he would say.

I am not built to persevere through a system as galvanising as religion. The fact of its permeation, seeping into the skin and through your soul like some sort of osmosis, does not sit well with me when it has been used so flippantly by dictators and rulers who adorn their white skin with white robes. It’s hard to see any goodness religion can bring when the amount of bad is lying beneath the rubble of cities and towns flattened in the name of God. I fear that kind of power, and yet in my culture as an African, I’m meant to revere it.

I’ve come across a lot of TikToks recently by Black people admitting to either leaving the church and their subsequent religion, or sitting somewhere in the middle, believing in a higher power without committing oneself to the culture of it.

I am also mediocre in this way, too. I don’t pray enough, I barely read my bible, and I don’t like churches. The latter is the worst of it. The wailing, the chanting, the spiritual disembodiment trapping me between pews. I keep my eyes shut all the way. I can’t look at anyone otherwise, I’d turn into dust. Then we leave, we do something else, occupy ourselves with the rest of eternity.

I’ve also had this thought about the balance of giving and taking in Christianity, especially when it comes to love. The bible says wives must submit to their husbands, and husbands must love their wives as God loved the church. Submission is tangible, is agreeable, is quantifiable. What measure of love can a human man give to his wife as God gave to the church? Unconditional love? Are human beings capable of that?

This isn’t a diatribe about how humans are naturally evil and we’re all doomed to hell, or about how submission is right (I understand what it’s trying to say, but the verbiage feels very gross), but I do wonder how it’s even remotely possible to conjure up those feelings.

One of the symptoms of scrupulosity has to do with this immeasurable love. It questions whether we as humans are even capable of such a supermassive feeling. I think we aren’t because the human condition is just that, a condition. But we can try. We can try and try again until we bleed out of our eyes, but will we ever love as God loved the church? Let’s say the answer is no. What then? Do we do what we can? Do we feel guilty for not being enough? Or do we create our own measures of love, good or bad?

Even now, I can’t quantify this because I’d get a headache trying to wrap my head around the concept. I am a jealous and mean person sometimes. I am irritable and conditional. I get annoyed at the silliest things. Sometimes I wonder if I can ever truly be loved when I am like this. Like a church, standing on one shaking plank of wood, whilst a man of God stares at me with contempt, wondering why his love is not enough.

With this in mind, I am also wondering why it is so hard to call myself a Christian. I’ve applied to several jobs in the past few months and found my finger hovering over the mouse of my laptop when I’m asked about my religion.

Just don’t answer. Or maybe do. You need this. No one’s looking anyway, you’re fine. But God can see anything, can’t he?

I have decided not to label it. Somewhere in between agnostic, spiritual, and Christian is where I reside. I believe in God, and it is difficult to begin to tell you why, but I can tell you that you don’t have to. The structural integrity of religion as a system does not and should not hold weight on your personal beliefs. Like most other things in this world, two truths can exist at the same time. My belief does not make yours, and your righteousness does not fuel my own.

Robert Valley’s style of animation continues to be the most distinct art style I’ve seen in a while, and Zima Blue was my introduction to his work. I then watched Ice, another episode from the Love, Death and Robots anthology, and decided then that I’d watch whatever he made. For some his art style is ugly but for me it is charming. It frames the worlds of his stories in sharp lines and stretched angles, and his characters are always given an opposing eye, either from the viewer or from the other characters.

I saw someone on the Love, Death, and Robots subreddit refer to the style of Zima Blue as ‘technoir’.

The technological advancement of Blade Runner’s dystopian Los Angles and the seedy and bleak near future of The Terminator fuse together to make Zima Blue, an admittedly more vibrant display in the episode than in the book of the same name.

Zima Blue is a colour that is incomparable to both the sea and the sky, as the narrator says. ‘Zima Blue is a precise thing’. The colour is found mostly in Zima’s paintings but occasionally you see it on his hands and on his face, as though a constant reminder of his past which at this point in the story is unknown. This was the first thing that drew me to the story; the intensity of colours. Some parts are grey and bleak, and others are sharply contrasted between shadow and light.

In Zima Blue, a renowned artist known for his endless search for true meaning builds his reputation through spectacle. In the short story by Alastair Reynolds, Zima describes his work as ‘huge and soulless’ much like Zima in Valley’s animation, who seems to have accepted the value of his work as a part of him long retired.

Zima invites a journalist he’s rejected many times to tell the story of his past and present work, including his final piece, though this finality is only that to everyone but him. Zima’s final work is located in a pool where he submerges his mechanical body and begins to disassemble himself, until finally he is a ‘crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself.’ Zima, it turns out, was just that. A cleaning bot designed to scrub the walls of a pool tiled entirely in Zima Blue.

It’s a story like this that I truly find unforgettable. What the short story did well was only enhanced by Valley’s adaptation. A silo of one man’s experience that feels all the more real when you turn your eyes to the world just outside. Zima’s final performance was his own ego death, leaving behind the burgeoning desire for greatness in lieu of simplicity. “It was all I knew. All I needed to know.”

The idea is quite simple. Technology’s desire for advancement created a fully conscious being that can barely distinguish itself from its human counterparts. Because of this, its search for fulfilment becomes grander and grander until there is nowhere left to go but to the beginning.

As someone who doesn’t care to understand AI, this was the thing that did it for me. Wrapped in grainy shadows and bright, contrasting colours was the true harm of giving too much power to things that don’t need it. Robots, and technology in general, have proven to be in the wrong hand time and time again, and though I don’t know much about it I can empathise with the fear of dissatisfaction that Zima feels.

The constant search for purpose and true happiness, how those things are often in opposition to capitalism and mainstream society. At the end of Reynolds’ short story, Carrie, the journalist, admits that she still visits Zima’s home long after he’s returned to his original form, as do others who ‘feel that the artist has something else in store… one last surprise.” In Valley’s adaptation, the onlookers at Zima’s final show are worried, aghast as he shuts down the brain that gave him unimaginable wealth and fame.

I try not to think too hard about these cosmic crises because as you can imagine, the spiral into existentialism is not very fun. Recently though I’ve been exploring what freedom would look like if given the chance to access it. Is it freedom in money? In death? In fame? In love? I’ve seen many theories say that Zima returning to the pool is him finding freedom in his childhood, where he sheds the intensity of complex human emotions for the simple joy of a task well done. I do agree to some length. I think children are the most innocent forms of life we have, and I have many opinions on bad parenting, which also plays a part in Zima’s evolution.

Zima is created by a young woman who fills her home with robots, but comes to favour him. She continues developing him until his brain evolves far past the capabilities of a cleaning bot. When the woman dies, Zima is passed down through generations of people that continue to modify him until he is a fully formed being. Children are often the sum of their parents and those around them, so I would agree that the simplicity of childhood might be a factor. But I also think this theory disregards the complexity of Zima’s wants.

Zima has been alive for over a century. He has experienced the breadth of humanity there is and does not want to explore it any further. He no longer wants to convene with the cosmos to satiate his curiosity. He wants to go back to the singular purpose that he was made for. The job of a human being takes on many forms throughout a lifetime, and none of those have appealed to him, nor do we know if they ever did. Where the theory of childlike simplicity might work, his desire for regulation does not. A child would not want to be stuck cleaning a pool all day.

I don’t think we’ll all get enslaved by fully conscious robot humanoids (I’m looking at you I, Robot), but I do think the prevalence of AI being so deeply ingrained in popular culture will drive us back into ourselves inevitably. Already the rise of turning to offline means of connecting with others is showing how limited AI can truly bring people together, if it even does at all.

Stuck in my tooth is the weight of your palm against my cheek, my mouth held open for inspection. A rotten tooth here, exposed gums there. It’s a cave only you are likely to explore and so I let you because you know best. Know that I hate toothaches, the pulsing tenderness of flesh in my mouth, the grinding of teeth I keep up to scratch that itch. God it’s so fucking itchy. Or—no, is itchy the word? the same sentiment is wilted around you, and I keep a vial of your essence in my underwear drawer. My mother thinks I’m to bewitch you, she says “oh leave that poor man alone! He’s just your dentist. Don’t make it odd.”

I laugh, cup my hands to cover my mouth as though she’ll see the truth between my teeth. The truth is that you started this. You came up to me, shining 32 bulbs in my eyes I couldn’t help but be blinded by your beauty. I’ve never called a man beautiful before but I think you fit the bill. You took my hand gently and led me into this private room, a chair like the pullout couch my father’s ghost still dents. You worked in my mouth like a man on a mission and I felt sensitive to the touch. I felt your fingers prob in softly and for a perverse moment I wish the gloves were off. I wish you applied the pressure I’ve needed all this time, the right amount of pressing necessary to dull the ache. No such luck. You peeled the gloves off and I looked at your hands, bare, probably tastes like rubber, the weight of them still hanging on my lips. I drooled onto my hand and wiped it before you turned and blinded me once again.

The walk home was as long as it was an intentionally languid stroll around your office, where I could see you in the window but you couldn’t see me. It had only been twenty two minutes and you already had a new patient. I wondered if it’s a woman but it wouldn’t upset me if it was. I’m very understanding, I would do the work to understand you.

When I got home I locked myself in the bathroom and stuck my hand in my mouth, exactly where your fingers were. I drooled freely into the sink and a little on my shirt. I closed my eyes, moaning as I remember the fullness of your hand in my mouth. I touched myself as I recounted the feeling, the heat, the pressure. I imagined biting down on thick skin with my corroded tooth. I cum, unceremoniously, into my underwear.

The next time I saw you, you told me to rinse my mouth with water after every meal. It was an instruction, one I took delight in obeying. After my oatmeal, I rinsed. After my chicken salad, I rinsed, After my bowl of cereal, I rinsed. The process is monotonous and special in that fact. I make an effort these days to chew haphazardly, only to have food stuck in my teeth. I smile when, after my dinner of milk and cookies, there is a crumb lodged firmly in my cavity.

In rinsing I am reminded of you, of your care, how you prescribe to me remedies with a firm, lectured tone. I yearn for it, for the control that comes with your touch. The weight in my mouth is always a painful reminder that I cannot have you just yet.

I use my savings to book a root canal. I ask the lady at the front desk if you are available to do it, she says no. I’m insistent that it needs to be you, that I’m deathly afraid of dentists, and you have shown me comfort. The woman looks conflicted, perhaps confused as to why I, a grown woman, need so badly to be coddled. My mother looks at me the same way when it comes to you. She sees the dependance as a generational dance sewn into the fabric of our family. But she has never once tried to stop me. She loves me too much. The lady gives in, says that you are only available for removals. I pay immediately.

I’ve watched these tooth removal videos enough that I commit the steps to memory. Anaesthesia, drill the cavity in half, pull until it gives. In its simplest terms it seemed an easy procedure, no need to be scared. With you there I would have less of a reason to be scared, knowing your softness, your kindness.

I sometimes drag my tongue across the hole where a healthy tooth should be. When I do this I miss you the most, hoping to rupture the blood clot. You be mad at me for doing that, wouldn’t you? I don’t know if I could stand you hating me.

I have the tooth removal booked for today at twelve. I wake up at seven and prep myself. I gather my hair several times before dropping it. You’d like it like that, I think. I pick an outfit that shows my skin, dimpled and darkened with bruises I don’t remember getting. I think I was born bruised. My socks are still wet, I didn’t dry them early enough. I walk to the dentist with my satchel full to the brim with books I think you’d like. Science fiction, horror, action, self help. I add a romance book as well, just in case you surprise me.

In the waiting room I read the romance book and wait for my name to be called. When it is I temper my excitement. Social cues are easy enough to catch when everyone looks at you like you’re crazy.

In the room, you ask me to breathe with you. Seven seconds in. Seven seconds out. I ask why seven, and your mouth splits open in a grin. I hope you’ll drool on me.

“My mum counts to seven. I’ve just never questioned it.”

She’s alive, ever-present. I don’t see her as a threat, in fact I see her as a challenge. I need to prove to you that I’m worthy.

Your assistant injects something into the inside of my right cheek and I squirm. My eyes sting at pain, the pressure slowly building as my nerves give way.

I sit in silence and watch the both of you gather tools. Clamps, sharp metals, gauze. I stare at the gauze like it is a piece of meat. I need to bite down on something.

Your hand enters my mouth and a certain dread fills me. You’re searching me, so intimately. Did I brush my teeth properly this morning? Does my mouth smell?

You speak low and warn me of the forthcoming pressure as you split my tooth in half. I laugh, surprised, overwhelmed. The metal grates against enamel, breaking open something solid in my mouth. What a sacred place, explored only by those you love.

The grating subsides, then comes the tugging. A warm, shuddering bliss as the itch in my nerves rejoice. I have dreamt of this for a year. Yanking the tooth from its root like ripping off dead skin, the pulsing flesh underneath. I am still laughing because this is so strange and so delightful. The tooth is out after a minute of pulling and you ask me if I want to take a look. A small cream coloured lump is covered in blood in a tray to the side. I forget that I bleed sometimes.

The gauze fills the toothless space and I am at peace. The assistant says a bunch of words amounting to ‘further pain” and ‘call us if you have any questions or issues”. You nod along, and I wonder how many women you’ve searched like this.

Doesn’t matter. The softness I feel in this moment triumphs over my suspicions. I float off the chair and down the stairs. The lady at the front desk is staring at me with concern but I read it as love. She knows what we share. Soon enough you will know too.

Upon meeting the film’s protagonist, Frida, Kravitz’s directorial vision opens up to you. Frida is a young woman with a struggling nail tech business, barely cracking a hundred followers on Instagram. She’s doom scrolling on the toilet, tapping mindlessly at the screen with her gecko-printed thumbnail. She sees a post of Slater King, CEO of King Tech, apologising for a nondescript abuse of power. He’s going to therapy, so it’s completely fine. All’s forgotten.

Frida works for a catering company that is conveniently catering a King Tech event. Her boss reprimands her for being late and tells her to smile. A little while after, she and her roommate Jess put on beautiful dresses to blend into the crowd of wealthy white people, and we get our first glimpse into Frida’s way of thinking. “My mother always told me that success is the best revenge.”

Throughout the film, Frida lives true to this hustle culture belief, working smart to place herself within the purview of Slater King. It works, of course, because this wouldn’t be a film if it didn’t. Slater is immediately obsessed with her, staring into her soul every two seconds. When it seems as though they’re about to part for the night, presumably for the rest of their lives as Jess says “another one for the memoir”, Slater runs back to Frida, awkwardly asking if she and Jess would like to join him and his group of friends— curiously made up of men he knows and women he’d only met recently — on his island.

This kind of film is doing its rounds these days, where outsider joins insider and inevitably confronts the hungry ego desire to be among the insiders. This Ripley-esque and Saltburnian concept has lived on for far longer, of course, but Blink Twice adds to this genre the subversive tale of rape revenge.

Yhara Zayd begins her video “blink twice's ending did not work for me” with a ten-minute exploration of the genre’s predecessors; The Story of Temple Drake is the first film she analyses, with an eponymous main character who’s considered ‘fast’, a term often used by adults to describe young black girls they deem too sexual. Temple Drake is framed to be morally reprehensible, and when she’s put into sex slavery, it’s presented as a natural consequence of what happens to ‘fast’ women.

Yhara Zayd’s video was succinct in denoting what failed in Blink Twice. I agree that the lack of sensationalised rape scenes was appreciated despite the film’s bleak ending. I can also see why the ending is disliked for its bleakness, its lack of proper justice, but that’s what I’m here to talk about: the kind of ending rape revenge story needs.

In some cases, people do find the ending gratifying. Frida took control over her abuser and climbed the social ladder. It comes off as triumphant; during the last scene, the score swells as Frida catches the man who raped her, all the while sitting next to her new husband, Slater King, who orchestrated the entire ordeal but now remembers nothing. Frida is in control. From what we see, at least.

Temple Drake was a white woman, but I’m looking at this from the lens of a black woman growing up in a society that labelled her from girlhood as a conduit of sexual violence.

When films centre the women getting revenge for what’s been done to them, there’s a subconscious air of girl-bossery. During a turning point in Blink Twice, where Frida and Sarah decide to finish off the rest of the men, I’m That Girl by Beyoncé plays. The scene slows down, revels in the thought of their victory, their intent to fuck these men up, disrespectfully.

It’s a feel-good moment, not in the romantic, serene sort of way, but with a foresight into the punishing retribution that these kinds of films have sought to evoke.

Throughout Yhara’s analysis, the issue that keeps presenting itself with rape revenge films is how these acts of revenge or even the rape itself, are framed. In some stories, like The Story of Temple Drake, the rape is the revenge. Against women unwilling to be tethered to the men in their lives, as an act of taming them.

Measuring victimhood is a popular discussion that comes up often when women are not perfect victims.

Women who use their trauma to further their careers, women who don’t speak up about abusers, women who do, to what extent a woman was abused, whether or not it was her fault. There is hardly any room for empathy. Frida likely does not care for victimhood at the end because victimhood does not care for her.

You don’t have to empathise with Frida; in fact, she is a horrible person. But how does one become a horrible person? How do we measure what’s been done to the victim and what the victim does to others?

Justice is never owed to women unless we take it ourselves, which is why the rape revenge genre, though flawed, evolved into centring the lives of the women who were assaulted rather than the men in their orbit seeking revenge on their behalf. Frida says quite aptly that even if they were to call the police, ask them to ‘come on guys, believe women!’ and report what all the men are doing, she is a woman. She is black, and she chose to set foot on that island.

Black women are often asked to have compassion whilst seeking justice, to empathise with their abusers. As we know, there is no perfect victim. Processing trauma is a privilege. Therapy is a privilege. Forgetting is a gift.

The twist comes through a series of hazy flashbacks, and we realise, along with Frida, that she has been on the island before. A year ago, puckering her lips in the eye of a camera, having a great time. It was confusing to see her going through the same thing again after knowing what would happen to her. But she didn’t know. She was drugged, she forgot, and she did it all over again.

Though the arguments on Frida’s decision to use the desideria on Slater have been called “girl power-esque”, it removes somewhat the perspective of a Black woman trying to survive and sometimes doing it at the detriment of themselves or those around them.

The only piece of Frida’s past we learn of is her mother’s words, seeing clearly that Frida lives by them. It’s difficult to assume here that she would do the right thing, as though she ever cared about the right thing. She calls therapy bullshit, something we can assume isn’t readily available to her, whilst Slater’s therapist comes to him on the island. She accepts an invitation to an island with other people wanting to be seen in proximity to a man with money and power. Frida drugs Slater with the same perfume she was drugged with. Everything she’s done from the beginning was for her own success.

Deliberate forgetfulness is a running theme. Choosing not to speak out or do anything to help, like Lucas, choosing to stay silent when he sees the women being abused. Though this is where the writers missed the mark, because he’s also a victim of being drugged by the men. Lucas was established as the next Slater King, but he wasn’t as willing to assault these women. He also didn’t do anything. He didn’t run, didn’t call the police. He was also drugged, and the cycle continued, though I’m not sure what the cycle was trying to present.

Some parts of this movie didn’t work for me. The Lucas subplot, for one. Jess dying and being forgotten (though you could say that was the point). But overall, I thought it was well done. I understood Frida even when I didn’t like her, which is more than we can say for most Black women.

Frida did not get a happy ending. Like many films where the internet prescribes endings like Midsommar or Pearl as a girl boss win, the ending is comprised of two layers. An obvious win, and a terrible loss. The decision to continue a pattern was not a win for Frida. Even for the sake of forgetting, it does not take away what happened. Like the snake venom, there are always going to be painful reminders. What you’ve done now controls you.

I imagine a writer picking a topic they learnt about two days ago. They see certain words filter in and out of their timeline’s consciousness, words like “wunderkind” and “tastemakers” and “the cultural experience” becoming the go-to triggers in teasing excerpts for the writer’s longer scroll of pixelated letters that amount to—wait, what did it amount to? These words have little to no impact on the writer because they’re working through years of unresolved trauma in the medium of a 3500 word essay but for some unknowable reason, a reason not at all pertaining to their hunger for being seen by other literary peers, they drop all their current projects as though the words themselves are burning holes through their hands. No one wants to read your heartfelt piece of shit. Write something relevant or we’ll shelve you. 

Attention is described so often as a negative thing when really it’s part and parcel of the human experience. We allocate accordingly to the things required to survive; the health of your teeth, your child (if you have one of those), taking the time out of your day to read a book you’ve yet to finish, or watch a movie you’ve been meaning to see. If those things aren’t shamed for needing attention, then why are we? 

The assumption stems from this belief that once you’re old enough, the only attention owed to you is by the people you can pay. This irony is quite clear once you consider almost all the arguments leading with this are started simply for the sake of attention. Twitter bots are baiting you in with tweets about friendships being transactional, podcasts are reeling you in with 50/50 relationship debates, and worst of all, content is now king. I do believe there’s beauty in being able to foster a connection through content, being able to create and curate space for a world of interests. That’s cool! No harm there. But content, like I mentioned, is tailored to finding the easiest way to make people argue.

Attention is not an absolute and instead we have to fight tooth and nail for it to truly stick, a point emphasised further by the beauty that is brainrot. We’re encouraged to use as little brain power as possible when consuming content, forgoing any sort of intellectual conversation for an iota of clout or buzz, a tactic that even films are adopting, creating ideas rather than fleshed out movies.

It’s unfortunate that in the age of the internet’s most prosperous time of technology, it’s being used to dumb down anyone that’s a little bit willing to participate in rage bait content. But outside of that, outside of the buzzwords and the ai bots, are the people made of flesh and bones doing the exact same thing.

If we think back to the first resurgence of the TikTok it girl, the list is very white and very rich. You can imagine me, entering my supposedly roaring 20s realising that once again, I am not the standard. Although now, most of my timelines consist of black women and brainrot; the perfect combination. But the thing about algorithms is that they love to show you shit you didn’t ask to see. What’s worse is that they’ll push the content of whiter, skinner women to boost followings, whilst the content of a less “socially desirable” person doing the exact same thing is pushed only to garner reproachable comments. The same can be said for people of colour and the lack of moderation for racism, anti semitism, but curiously, a black man stating his blackness is deemed as“inappropriate”.

I’ve made my peace with not being the standard (kind of) But regardless it’s difficult to ignore that even the algorithm is working against you. Pretty politics have shown us time and time again that there’s always going to be a limit for people who are not the standard, especially women. I’d seen this all throughout my childhood and you can imagine the harm a teenage girl brings upon herself to fit in. You can also imagine the bitterness. 

In my teenage years I was a raging pick me. Boys I liked never liked me and, as both a fortunate and unfortunate experience, I went to predominantly white schools. The process of reattaching your self worth once it’s stripped away is tasking, especially because I was blaming other girls around me instead of the boys. As though any girl had a choice of being desired. I grossly thought of seducing older men because that felt necessary? For some reason? I’d been desperate enough to wish that I was the one being looked at, regardless of the age of men that were looking at me. 

Wanting attention was a silent affair, obviously, and the resentment only piled upon itself, tipping towards an impending crash out towards any girl that was smaller, skinner, and lighter than me. It was frustrating because most of these girls were my friends and I can say with all my heart that they are beautiful, kind women, wherever they are now. I can also say that I recognise what kind of attention is necessary, and what is due for purging. In a way it’s quite tedious to write this because whilst I understand what will trigger me and what won’t, on a whole it’s easier and all the while harder to discern the attention economy because nothing has nuance and yet almost every piece of internet culture we’ve seen rise to the occasion has been picked due to a set of circumstance that is always somehow altered time after time.

 The internet has been unexplainable since its inception no matter how simple. The concept of being able to see another person’s life through a tiny screen is unthinkable. (Showing this to Victorian child, blah blah blah you know how the saying goes) 

It’s easy to go viral in the internet age, made easier by TikTok, but how do people stay in that limelight? And why can’t it be me?

For a long time I’ve wondered about the ways in which people go viral. Natural interest? Paid ads? Being extremely lucky? Most of the time I imagine a modicum of each is placed into a vat and tossed around until something slithers out and an internet star is born. 

It’s a peremptory process, this reaching into the ether and pulling out a new it girl or white boy of the month that we must like for a few months until someone is brave enough to say how this male celebrity looked like a rat and someone in the comments thought the same thing the whole time. Not to be on the side of these celebrities but, it is insane what people will say just because it’s on the internet. As we’ve established nothing is ever truly hidden, and the choosing ceremony of these people can often seem like big brother or some shit, just waiting with bated breath to see if the chosen ones will fail the masses.

The thing I fear most about this sort of choice is that when you haven been the one to orchestrate it, the mass opinion of you can’t be controlled and even if you did place all the puzzle pieces in the right place, people might hate you more for existing. Being a hater doesn’t need rationale, only the fervour of a straight white man that hates women. It’s not guaranteed that your it girl status will secure the right attention, and then what do you do? Do you debase yourself and give into the necessary humiliation rituals that most people hungry for fame partake in? Do you leave the public eye, resort to a life of quiet gardening in your cute little cottage that your daddy pays for? Sorry, the bitterness jumped out for a second.

During my era of wanting to be picked, I did whatever I could to become the kind of it girl I used to stalk. I would buy those easily breakable bar glasses and drink so much coffee in one day and be surprised when my body rejects it. I’d do these stupid pilates workouts that would make me feel good for three hours. I’d journal sparsely and post about it on TikTok. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these things, in fact I still do some of them in moderation, but when something trends, this something being the perfectly curated life of a skinny white woman, is it not natural that as an attention whore I would do the same? The results may vary, yes, but why are my results so astoundingly low compared to hers?

It might seem as though the people being chosen are simply plucked from the lot but the shiniest bulb catches the eye. How we pick these popular influencers is often purely an aspirational desire to look and feel the same, so wanting the attention they have is not insane to imagine, but how much attention are we really fit to handle?

Being loved by your audience is a flimsy thing. Of course, this is a sentiment I have as a person with no audience so I’m speaking only from the madness I see day to day, but there is truly no love more conditional than that of a fan. People are endlessly fickle with their support on the basis of what you can do for them, despite whether or not a person they support is morally good. Doja Cat has done some questionable things and yet her fan base grows and grows without fail. And whilst I agree that the insurgence of celebrities being ripped to shreds for not wanting to be treated like dancing monkeys is insane, I also think that there’s much to be said about the way influencers act once they realise the attention is not, in fact, absolute and will crash down on them the second something in the air shifts.

Could I comfortably blame them for complaining about the onslaught of hateful scrutiny disguised as a core tenant of fame? No. It’d be easy to, You wanted to be famous and now you’re bitching about it? You’re not cut out for this. But this assumption that’s placed upon “overnight celebrities” to have immediate star power and a ready made shield to ward off death threats is quite literally insane. The internet, pertaining how most of Gen Z have grow up with it, forces everyone into the eye of The Camera, creating influencers where there are none and cringy normies where there were once powerhouse celebrities. In many cases the people we’ve made famous are still just people, trying somehow to stay true to what they love and trying not to get cancelled, and the expectation that someone should know how to navigate the erratic revolver of fame is decidedly unfair.

Fame, despite its haphazard ruling, is a very real thing. A measurable metric that’s surpassed its limits whilst simultaneously devolving into degeneracy every decade. Those that used to be famous now cling to the newer, shiner algorithms that they can’t adhere to as easily as their successors, and the successors themselves are slowly falling into the trap laid out by the fact of time. But you no longer need to have the prerequisite of being a celebrity to gain attention. What’s worse is that the people vying for fame are no longer celebrities, but regular people and children with absolutely too much tech exposure.

As the cycle of attention continues in this irregular whirlwind, we have no idea if The Next Big Thing is going to be somebody’s tax paying father or a hyperactive twelve year old. No one really knows what social media will look like in the next five years and whether that’s a good or bad, it’s comforting to some degree. Rules can be changed, people can hopefully find some individuality in the sea of sameness and despite pop culture’s lack of serious behaviour, there’s a desire to be seen somewhere in all of us.

The Waiting is a young woman lounging at the edge of my world.

The Waiting lives up to her name, wraps my body tight in a 

Suctioned bag so I can’t bare to think about anything good

So I can’t ever reach her.

The Waiting doesn’t have the will to give as she chooses,

Otherwise I’m sure she would love to.

…

How can I have so much free time 

And not do anything with it?

I’m lazy, that must be it,

Or I’m tired, that’s a good option too,

Or I’m waiting for the lady at the edge of my bed to finally give me what I want

The Waiting keeps all my desires in her belly, 

It bloats up every morning with promise, 

And every night I lay my head on a pillow

With no feathers and no silk, 

only the rough cotton of rejection

The Waiting is a lady I’ve promised to love

To love the wait is to fill up your time with other things,

Things that have meaning

I could write, I could draw, I could read

I’ve loved reading the past few months

Instead I stare at The Waiting with pleading eyes, 

Eyes that water red until all I have left is frustration 

Where is the job? Where are the friends? Where is the success? The passion to create?
What have I done for these things to hesitate in finding me?

…

I don’t have the energy to do anything

 I’m weighed down by this, of course,

But isn’t it funny how much time I have now?

Shouldn’t I use this opportunity,

This empty space to colour the walls in 

Something meaningful?

I am a writer (a pretentious one at worst, a confusing one at best)

Without a job I can pretend to my hearts content, 

Slip away at a moments notice into the 

Brine and salt slowness of my countryside thriller

Or the singular grey of my man eating mansion

And a dinner party to die for. 

Good things come to those who wait,

and I have. Waited, I mean. For a long,

tortuously slow time until now,

and The Waiting no longer waits for me.

The Black woman is a desirable creature in the most primal form imaginable. The Black woman is something to take apart and use, No need to put her back together. The Black woman only knows desire, sees herself desired and runs towards this source of light. The Black woman is desire materialised.

I think about a Black woman’s desire often as I am both Black and woman. I think about how our forms have been sexualised since our days of being inchoate masses of bones and teeth. I think about the way we are shamed for not desiring, but being desired. Taking on the shape of desire as though we’d chosen this build when in reality, this body chooses us. Desire is not the same as intimacy, despite what you might think. Intimacy requires tenderness, a certain kind of desire that flew over out heads and met the lighter colours along the way. A Black woman is not soft because she has no time to polish her scales, their rough edges grazing skin and pulling. Her own skin sullied by men who see her as less than. The skin that’s applauded only for it can be stolen.

Black woman and her desire is hard to explain but I will try. She is dating this guy (she considers dating women but her desire is not meant for softer hands). The man is tall, brown, lighter than her. That’s important. The Black woman meets him at night when all things have blackened and her skin shines like thick, tooth rotting chocolate. She blinds him. She knows this and uses it, curves it, rubs off on him to create a symbiotic mould.

The Black woman is ass and titties. The Black woman is a conduit of sexual violence. The Black woman knows not why she’s desired outside her shape, believes herself to be the embodiment of an armoured creature, builds up these high, sparkling walls that take years to climb. When the guy she is dating finally gets past the barbed wired tips, the Black woman is sure that he is the one. They have become an inseparable force, a power couple, Jada and Will pre-entanglement. The Black woman begins to revere her body, because it is loved by one man and herself.

It is then, and only then, that he morphs into a sinister being. The fact of her body is suddenly an issue, suddenly a cause for concern. After the Black woman has been drained of her fight and her desire is no longer enough, she is discarded. She is softened, tossed out like wet fish. The Black woman, in search for another parasitic affair, continues this routine, the contours of her hollow impulse pulling men into her snare. Married or cuffed, there’s no one able to resist he.

These same men, do they not ridicule her in fear of her power? Say ‘you’re a thot, a bitch, a pussy with legs, not even pink. No one wants you outside of your desire, and even then, your desire isn’t your own.”

Can you imagine? Shamed for the shape everyone assigned to you. Can you imagine? ridiculed for taking advantage of something stuck to the back of your neck, suddenly apart of your soul.

But the Black woman doesn’t know intimacy. She has never asked herself what she desires. Wonderment is a beautiful thing. It is a privilege to be curious when you are always trying to survive. The Black woman searches for her own curious desires, which is to say, she familiarising herself the shape of her body.

The Black woman is trying to be both madonna and the whore. She is scouring the internet for someone to tell her what it is she’s meant to desire. There is no one in her life willing to tell her, mothers and aunties appalled at lust that isn’t first borne from a desire to please a man, no, the Black woman is trying to please herself. She takes up dating apps, she finds it hard to define herself in words. The sultry pictures do a better job but it has been weeks and she does not recognise that woman. The Black woman is dating, is laughing with old men with older money and boyish grad students that wear glasses and exist only to please. The Black woman is somewhat uncomfortable when they show her love. The Black woman at times takes their love and shits on it. She believes the problem is her. There is a root cause somewhere in her body but the threads keep spinning. How does one find desire and cut it off? How does one live with both lust and intimacy? Truthfully, she wants to fuck. Is that so bad? Needing sex? Of course it is! She reads the bible, craves damnation. Prays to a god she’s never believed in to take her vagina away. She has nightmares of female castration, of being rid of her womanhood if it means being rid of her sin.

It is a horrible way of living. trying to understand a body that has never had agency, trying to seek help from families that looks at you in disgust. Where to turn to except for the men who see desire in her form and relish over it? she feels a sharp sense of guilt, the kind of pain that swells under the skin and itches. She feels a rip, a tear in her fibres, the kind that snap from a bunch. she howls in pain, thrashing in her clothes. She is burning, keeling over in rage, trying desperately to understand why she cannot simply exist.

Her body is morphing, shuddering as it sharpens at the edges and falls away at the edges of another lover’s bed, reaching it’s crescendo. There is no way of stopping it. Who’s desire is this? Who is this body for?

Eventually, the Black woman reaches a cress, the ephemeral bridge of a rainbow that holds up the meat and bones of her soul. She opens her eyes and the clouds wave at her, saying, you owe no one but yourself an answer.

She takes this as an absolute truth and discovers something in her splintered parts, the shards winking back at her as she assesses, looks, tries in whatever way to see other parts of herself not defined by a whole shape designated at birth. The Black woman and her desire look inwards, waiting for the clouds to part again.

I am, and have always been, obsessed with desire. I see it at times as a cautionary tale of devilish temptation, and at others as a means of taking apart your insides and sowing them back together. One of my favourite movies that presented me with my earliest memories of desiring something was Secretary, the adaptation to Mary Gaitskill’s short story of the same name. It follows Lee, a woman recently released from a psychiatric ward getting a job as the secretary to a neurotic lawyer with whom she enters a sado/masochist relationship.

I revisited the film in many forms; video essays, written essays, and the source material. My conclusion is that the film doesn’t dissect the relationship so much as it exploits the novelty of early 2000s romcoms, using that as a foundation for this barrage of a movie. Many articles have critiqued the film, of course. To disclaim, I won’t be tackling the murky context behind the main relationship however ingrained it might be in the topic of desire, but rather I'm trying to understand the bad feminist, and the woman who desires what she isn’t meant to.

In the video essay SECRETARY (2000): A Spankingly Good Love Story, Antiheroines points out the opinions within post #metoo articles revisiting the film, which key words like “consent” “manipulation” “work place imbalance” and “abuse” were used to mark the film’s message.

“For some time I thought I had to feel the same way, and if I didn’t then I was a bad person, or worse, a bad feminist.”

the bad feminist

There’s a scene towards the end of Secretary where Lee is presumably hallucinating as she carries out Mr. Grey’s order of sitting still for days on end. A woman sits across from her and places down a stack of feminist texts, telling Lee to “read about women’s struggles.”

The bad feminist is a tale as old as time, the kind where a woman who chooses the thing not considered most equitable to her place in society is othered. See for instance: A woman’s choice to be a career minded individual is considered an undermining of her role as a mother and wife. A woman’s choice to be a housewife is an undermining of the progressive work feminism has undertaken to get women into the workplace. But is the evidence of choice not the goal? Is there no space for a woman that desires something outside of the expected pick?

There is no space for othered women, women who desire all of the above or neither. I’ve critiqued feminist media before for it’s shallow portrayals of women empowerment, sluice messaging slipping past the fingers with no effort. Secretary is not about female empowerment but the individual choice of one woman and her circumstances. Lee and her anxieties about the world is very relatable to me but would I enter an inappropriate sadomasochistic relationship with my boss? No. However the opinions of both this film and its preceding short story are marked as offensive portrayals of women, the movie more so.

“On one level, I want to recommend Secretary for its sheer audacity alone. On another, I want to dismiss it for its dumbfounding and offensive presentation of women. On yet another, I want to dismiss that previous thought because the film isn’t a big, broad social commentary; it’s an (extremely) offbeat tale of romance between two desperate, lonely, and very, very messed up people.”

To consider the film or the book in a broader conversation of social commentary is to do so at your own discretion, the way I’m doing so now, dissecting the woman’s desire within the context of the film.

Where is the line for a woman’s control over her own desire? Does this line exist? Are mentally ill women being taken advantage of in this movie? It depends. I think in one way, there are the worrying implications of Lee’s dependance falling on Mr. Grey, who is a man, who is her boss. I wouldn’t blame you for using this as the basis surrounding the assumptions of abuse within their relationship.

On the other hand, to assume that a mentally ill woman cannot make her own decisions takes away the choices she makes, in the same way everyone other than Mr. Grey does in the film. At the start we’re shown a mousy Lee, dressed like an overgrown child who’s never seen the world and remains shielded by her dependant mother. She is not control of anything but the harm she inflicts on herself.

I don’t think Lee matures over the course of the movie solely because of Edward (Mr. Grey), and sure, there could’ve been healthier ways for her to cope with the realities of life without engaging in kink. Edward of course, indulges her in the world of kinkdom and she enjoys it. There are stipulations pertaining to their relationship that should never exist outside of fiction but she enjoys being a masochist. It ties into her desire to be given orders, to carry out mundane, mindless tasks that require nothing but what is asked of her. In a way I also think there’s some neurodivergence in there but different topic, different time.

The hate this movie gets is largely centred on Lee being controlled by Edward. I won’t contest this given the nature of their relationship, however this inadvertent dismissal of her role in this the issue.

I think, when it comes to the topic of heterosexual relationships, there is a tendency to believe that the woman is never in control of her desire. For millennials, A woman’s desire was seen as a rebellion towards men, especially women who knew and utilised said desire. In the movie Teeth, a young woman experience’s Vagina Dentata, a folktale about vaginas with teeth, and castrates men when she’s subjected to male violence. The film symbolises the importance of consent more than it does the fear of a woman’s desire, but the element of control held by a woman still speaks to the fact of it being seeing as an oddity. Desire, in this context, is angry and powerful, something a woman should not be.

In Secretary, Lee is desperate for Mr. Grey’s attention after he calls off their relationship. She teases him with sexy photos, she shows up at his house, she’s committed to making him see her desire for him as something to take seriously. There are many instances in which she outright says “because I want to” at the questions of why she’s putting herself through debased acts.

I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute. I’ve come to enjoy books about horrific, untethered women. Women that are abject in their sorrow and do horrible things for their own gain. I find women like this interesting simply because I have never seen a woman like this. We know men as violent creatures, gold plated pieces in an unbalanced hierarchy they created. A concept like Vagina Dentata and The Monstrous Feminine simply flip the roles, but ends up containing more nuance.

A woman’s shameless desperation to be loved is something I judge only because I would never be brave enough to show that deep of an emotion. I get second hand embarrassment from women like Lee because I’m already trying to imagine myself doing that, hating what I see, and subsequently disliking the woman committing the act. I sit down with the reality of unlikable women often because as a former pick me, it’s difficult trying to separate a woman’s action from a man’s reaction. I’ve grown out of that, thankfully, and find it easier to sympathise with a scorned woman than a powerful man.

There is something withering about a woman feeling someway about you wholeheartedly. Mr. Grey is a clear representation of the self hating man, and how a woman who becomes as strong-willed as Lee makes him uncomfortable. Someone disgusted by their own sexual desire often disguises the wholeness of their hatred by depending on humour to deflect, or just straight up being a dick. Mr. Grey—played by James Spader, my favourite freak—is the dick variation, appalled by Lee’s genuine want to be used in the way he has always berated himself for. Her self-assurance is in full swing and she owns entirely her desire, something he could never do.

The victimisation of Lee removes her shameless behaviour, the fact that she been cheating on her boyfriend the entire span of her relationship with Mr. Grey and said in many instances that she wants to continue being degraded, even when Mr. Grey didn’t want to continue degrading her.

However this is not a thing of BDSM entirely. At the end of the video, Antiheroine concluded that:

“It’s not about the sex, and it’s not about the kinks or the lifestyle. It’s about this one specific person with whom she has this specific relationship with. She wants Mr. Grey. This movie is not about BDSM representation to begin with. It’s about two weirdos finding each other.”

You don’t need me to tell you that abuse victims getting into BDSM relationships is a thin line to traverse. But abuse victims who seek sexual freedom is a different thing altogether.

The woman’s desire is a thing left untouched.

A woman’s desire is always undermined by the expectations of what that desire is meant to look like. It seems as though many reviews to this day believe Lee to be a victim to Mr. Grey, that she’s exchanging one form of abuse for another.

You could argue that Lee has been brainwashed or that she’s being taken advantage of, but in my eyes Mr. Grey was the only person that saw her as an adult, which in the film she’s presumed to be.

There’s a wide culture of treating people with mental illnesses as though they’re incapable of making individual choices, and in some cases, that might be the case, but when it comes to women, especially women in media that are portrayed to be mentally ill, they’re commonly sexualised or infantilised.

There’s been a current increase of men saying they want to date a ‘crazy’ girl which often translates to someone they can control. It’s a blatant fetishisation of mentally ill women with the assumptions concerning the sexuality of these women garnered from popular media. Watch any Sam Levinson show and you’ll understand what I mean.

In Secretary, most of the infantilisation of Lee’s mental illness is done by her mother, who, in her own way, is trying to love her daughter by having Lee depend on her. Mr. Grey, whilst being a dick, is the only person that sees her for who she is. He recognises her oddities the first time they meet and as time goes on, he’s well adapted to her quirks, and despite being rude about it, helps her overcome her self harming.

The thing about Secretary: the film is that it’s not asking you to see any of it’s relationships as a representation of good or bad. Of course, the marketisation deters from the source material’s message of sexual abuse in the workplace, but also the film created it’s own identity. A fantastical, surreal world where all of these people can be weird together.

To me, the only fantasy present is the idea that I can be in control of my desire. The black body—my black body—is pushed as an object of hidden desire with many, many caveats. A black body is hot but not pretty. Sexy, but not beautiful. Fuckable, but never dateable. I was sexualised at a young age, but now in my 20s I find myself wanting to desire both myself and my version of sexual intimacy.

Of course, this societal regularity has changed quite drastically, and I really couldn’t care less about being desirable to society, only to someone I love and care about. Which brings me back to the film. Lee by the end of the movie is a completely different person. She’s more demanding of the things she wants, and what she wants is Mr. Grey. She wants their dynamic, uncaring about her ex boyfriend Peter’s frustration as to why she’s so obsessed with the lawyer. The world does not matter, only he does.

Secretary is a film I don’t relate to, but it’s one I appreciate simply for the fact that Lee didn’t come across as a victim—in terms of her relationship with Mr. Grey—to me. She was in an institution, she got out, she worked for a weird guy who made her weirdness feel validated and they fell in love.

There’s this odd belief that mentally ill women are never implicitly in control of their own desire, as though impossible. If Lee is seen as a victim for the majority of the movie, then what can we say for the women that find themselves enjoying BDSM? Does a woman have to be completely and utterly free of mental illness to be considered dominant over her desire? Women that enjoy perverted things and are looking for someone to be a little perverted with? How much power are we giving to abuse as a root cause for a woman’s want?

This isn’t to dissuade you from questioning the intentions of this movie. The writer of the original short story does so herself, citing that the film has a sort of “Pretty Woman” haze over it, shadowing the uncomfortable reality pointed out in the source material with a kinky and darkly comedic romance.

It’s important to mention that the film is not a faithful adaptation even though I find it a good film. In the book Debby (Lee) is broken by the experience with the lawyer. Its ending is perhaps the closest to what we’d see today, where a work place relationship would be treated as an issue rather than a “kinky rom-com”.

In a New York Times article, Mary Gaitskill revisits Secretary decades later with a note on the story’s protagonist Debby years later in her short story Minority Report, and the impact of the events in Secretary.

It’s hard, because, in a perverse way, what the lawyer did awakened her and made her feel more alive than ever before or since. But that aliveness came at a heavy price. For example, she came to believe that her sexuality had closed off the possibility of motherhood for her. Was that actually the case? Would that have been the case even if she hadn’t met the lawyer? She doesn’t know, and these thoughts may be chimerical. But very painfully so - Mary Gaitskill on Revisiting Her Story “Secretary”.

How much can a woman desire without it altering her perception of said desire in the future?

I think, and bare with me here, that you should watch and read Secretary once. I’ll understand if you hate it, but I’ll also understand if you love it.