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I’d gone there with my best friend, who can attest to the veracity of this statement, as well as the surprise on my face upon hearing it. We were attending a fundraiser for Laos, which – for those who don’t know – is a country devastated by US imperialism; one that’s been struggling to rebuild itself ever since the US sieged its civilians with over two million tonnes of explosives. Were it not for China, who poured $18 billion into building new roads, revitalizing Laos’ economy, and restoring its schools, Laos would likely still be just as weak and impoverished as the West intended.

As the fundraiser came to a close, the lead activist gave a closing speech on China’s growing role as a protector, funder, and crucial bastion against Western domination. Nothing I necessarily disagree with.

This particular statement, however – that “China does not ‘do’ propaganda” – came as a curt rebuke against an audience member, who’d expressed concern about the economic debt China now leverages over Laos. “Aren’t you worried,” this person was saying, “that Laos’ dependency on China will eventually lead to the loss of our national sovereignty?”

The activist rolled her eyes. “We owe everything to China,” she said. “Please keep your American narratives out of this.”

Now look. I understand the Left’s need to cozy up with China. I understand that anti-imperialist movements will never succeed unless we have the backing of powerful nation states, and that we cannot afford to alienate our strongest ally. I understand that by critiquing the nation, I risk bolstering the US’ sinophobic propaganda, or even enhancing its global control.

As Amy Yang (2026) warns us, it’s always dangerous to attack the ruling class of “non-aligned third world countries” (i.e. anti-USA countries), because doing so will only weaken their global fight against Western imperialism:

In the non-aligned third world countries, the national bourgeois ruling class is not only not the same as the global imperialist class, but rather their enemy. Hence the strategy that suits white Europeans in the imperialist core [i.e. anti-bourgeois revolt] will only lead to failure in the third world.1

To this end, I can empathize with the activist’s defensiveness, especially given how tired she must be of constant anti-China rhetoric. The American siege and subsequent abandonment of Laos, after all, deserves to be loudly condemned; and perhaps it’s useful, in combatting pro-American narratives, to (uncritically) uplift how China helped recover what the US destroyed.

Nonetheless, I worry that a refusal to critique our “anti-imperial” allies, or to even be suspicious of their motives, ultimately hampers the Left’s capacity for critical thought. More than that, I worry that it alienates us from the very people whose lives are most directly impacted by “non-aligned” regimes, i.e. those living under their rule, within the Global South.

The political position I’m referring to, which seems increasingly popular across American Leftist spaces, can be roughly summarized as:

USA = Bad, ∴ All anti-USA governments = Good

The enemy of our enemy is our friend.

Ironically, despite claiming to decenter the Global North, this sort of analysis situates the United States as the deciding factor within all its political evaluations.

Though tempting in its simplicity, it’s an analytic that leads us to selectively ignore what we hear from people actually living (and suffering) beneath anti-USA leadership. Maintaining its coherency requires us to sift out the testimonies we already agree with and discard the rest; exclusively platforming the perspectives that align with our pre-existing opinions. It’s the typical top-down, savioristic mentality of Western elites, who craft their narratives based on abstract ideals and theory, before listening to the people they claim to be speaking for. The supporting evidence, if any, is retroactively crammed back into the frame.

Which is how we wind up with so-called leftists singing the praises of Kim Jong Un, denying China’s interference in Africa, or downplaying debt crises in Laos. The concerns expressed by those actually living in the Global South are dismissed out of hand: condescendingly belittled as “ill informed” or villainized as “American psy ops.”

It’s an analytic that uses the veneer of Third Worldism to obscure what is a blatantly orientalist, fetishistic, and paternalist take on the Global South. Caught within this framework, anti-American leaders are stripped of complexity and framed as incapable of wrongdoing. Kim Jong Un is infantilized as a “girl dad,” while Nicolás Maduro is reduced to memes void of historical context.

Now, let me be clear. I do not agree with US military meddling in Korea, nor do I support the US’ sanctions, resource extraction, or villainization of Latin America. I am not, in any way, shape or form, justifying the US’ imperial projects.

On the contrary, I think that effectively confronting US domination and building transnational solidarity requires us to reject the condescending, self-obsessed attitudes that have hampered the American Left for so long.

It requires us to be mindful of how powerful countries, regardless of Global North/South or First/Third world designation, can and do act in self-serving, violent ways. This means being cognizant of the ways that imperialism (or, perhaps more accurately, neoimperialism2) has shapeshifted and evolved beyond brute force.

It means noticing how “Third World” nations have recreated relations of asymmetrical wealth flow, corporate monopolies, exploitative trade agreements, and cheap labor arbitrage as a means of neoimperial domination; even and especially when these processes are carried out by a nation’s corporate actors (serving as frontmen for state power).

It is not nearly the same level of violence inflicted by, say, the US’ carpet bombings of Southeast Asia, or Israel’s continual genocide of Palestinian people. Nor is it as insidious as the CIA’s long history of assassinating leaders across the Global South (e.g. Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba). Nor does it come close in scale to the US’ contemporary forever wars, resource extraction, and genocidal projects.

But it is also not above critique.

It is concerning that the Left is so deeply unwilling to name when its allies are at fault. In his essay arguing that China’s actions do not amount to “colonialism” in Africa, Jason Hickel writes:

[China] does not perform regime-change operations, assassinations and coups. It does not control African currencies. It does not impose sanctions or structural adjustment programmes on African economies. China has not perpetrated genocide in Africa. It has never invaded an African country.

Sure, China’s interference is not what we typically expect neo/colonialism to look like. They did not show up in a fleet of warplanes, the way the US often does. They also did not knock on the door with a big, printed sign that says “Hi, I’m here to colonize you!”

But the growing superpower has nonetheless developed an economic stranglehold over several parts of the continent, to such an extent that Chinese corporations now dictate the governance of entire villages. The company China Molybdenum, for instance – headquartered from Luoyang, China – has forcibly evicted and displaced entire Fungurume communities in the Congo, so as to make way for new mining projects. Siddharth Kara (2024) recounts:

“They kicked us from our homes!” an elderly man… exclaimed. “We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out, and now we cannot find enough food to feed our families.” […]

They destroy all your belongings except whatever you carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers… Maybe you would feel it is your right to go back to that place… This is how the people in Fungurume feel (p. 121-122)

In an obvious parallel to other colonial powers (Israel, the United States, Britain, Australia, etc.), China Molybdenum has contaminated Fungurume’s air, water, and food supplies with toxic chemicals, destroying the environment while severing people from their land (Kara 2023 p. 124).3 They have coerced its population into underpaid, dangerous labor under threat of starvation, and recruited the Congolese army to use force on those who don’t comply.

Similar tactics are being used by Chinese corporations in Kanina, Mutanda, and other Congolese regions, while American, Swiss, and British competitors enact the same violent strategies in Katanga, Kolwezi, and elsewhere. Notably, Chinese companies run 15 out of 19 major industrial copper-cobalt mining operations in the Congo, and the East Asian country maintains an outsized dominance over the market. Writing for the Black Agenda Report, Ann Garrison (2024) sums it up as such:

Huge Chinese corporations so dominate Congolese cobalt mining, processing and battery manufacture that one has to ask why a communist government, however capitalist in fact, doesn’t at least somehow require more responsible sourcing of minerals processed and then advanced along the supply chain within its borders.

See the following footnote for a longer elaboration on what systems “count” as imperialism + a response to Ali Kadri and other Leftist defenders:4

Lest you think this dynamic is unique to the Congo, or even to Africa, it’s worth mentioning that Chinese corporations are running similar Displacement + Extraction operations in Peru, Ecuador, and other parts of Latin America, over and against local community dissent.

In this context, I find it odd that so many “Leftists” are hellbent on believing that leaders of the Global South are incapable of wrongdoing, as if non-white governments won’t maximize their own gain at the cost of another’s. Amy Yang again, citing the Chinese government as her source, writes:

What non-aligned countries including Russia and socialist China try to build is not a replica of the world before the World War II, but a new world without any form of dominance where no country has the right to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs […]

As much as I want to buy into this vision of anti-capitalist worldbuilding, I can’t help but feel that its oversimplicity prevents us from recognizing when actors of the Global South (the “good guys”) hold ulterior motives. I worry that it reproduces a primitivist view of Third World leaders, framing them as immune to corruption, greed, or any other sort of human complexity; as incapable of deceit and dishonesty. Regurgitating the myth of the Noble Savage, it completely diminishes their skill for propaganda, performance, and political strategy.

Put bluntly, it’s a trope as racist as it is reckless. At the same time it pushes orientalist worldviews, it also clouds our analysis as aspiring organizers living in the heart of the American empire. It has undermined our calls for coalition, censored attempts at critical thought, and damaged our reputation – perhaps irreparably so! – to those doing the work abroad.

It has led us, moreover, to ostracize our comrades when they express concerns about their countries of origin and their “anti-imperial” leaders. In the most absurd of these scenarios, I’ve seen immigrant organizers accused of being CIA-propped infiltrators, merely because they shared lived experiences that go against the grain of mainstream Leftist thought.

The Iranian-American group Payandeh, for instance, has been criticized for denouncing the Iranian regime’s acts of domestic oppression, as if this was also an endorsement of the US and Israel’s horrific bombings, or even an equivocation to such atrocities. On a parallel track, Venezuelan advocates in DC were sharply condemned for speaking out against Maduro’s mass human rights violations, as if doing so was equivalent to endorsing Trump’s incursion on Latin America.

Ironically, this pattern of intracommunal policing only reproduces the very imperialist logics that Leftists claim to stand against. At its core, it inevitably privileges the information put forth by English-speaking, millionaire-backed organizations in the Global North – who already benefit from a comparable access to free speech, expression, and opinion – over the perspectives of those on the ground. I have seen Marxist organizers I respect, for instance, reflexively reshare misleading information put out by wealthy, American-based NGOs, even when it’s in direct contradiction with actual data and community voice.

Without meaning to, these NGOs have rubber stamped the narratives used by oppressive regimes to punish grassroots protest worldwide. I’m thinking of how India’s Narendra Modi, taking a page from the leftists playbook, accused the Cockroach Movement of being “CIA interference,” as a way to undermine its validity. Or, similarly, how Indonesian President Prabowo has framed dissident groups as CIA agents, so as to silence their criticisms. Or the way even American leftists have drowned out calls from Indigenous activists to stand against both Trump and Maduro as a matter of Environmental Justice and Indigenous sovereignty.5

As a recent example of this complicity, take the following infographic put out by Code Pink, a white-led feminist organization with a complicated history of speaking over those from the Global South:

The infographic has gained 10k likes and been reposted over 2,000 times. “Declassified CIA document confirms there was no election fraud in Venezuela,” it reads. Which is not only patently false to anyone that actually read the documents, but also very conveniently omits any mention of the 2024 election, on which Maduro’s legitimacy resides. (There is something doubly ironic about citing the CIA as one’s source, while simultaneously claiming to distrust all government sources).

Although I empathize with Code Pink’s goal of condemning Trump’s overreach, and can respect much (not all) of the work they’ve done elsewhere, I find this post deeply alarming. Not only is it an irresponsible misuse of their platform, but a deep blow to their credibility.

In addition to being intellectually lazy and morally dishonest, it’s politically debilitating when Leftists utilize falsehoods for their anti-imperial critique. By removing us from reality, they set us up for failure. Imprecise analysis leads to misplaced organizing. A foundation built on theory and theory alone cannot bear material weight.

Why is it that we’re so quick to believe whatever Code Pink and its associated organizations put out, without pausing to verify its claims? Is it because they’re a huge organization with millions of dollars in funding, at least a quarter of which is donated by its founder’s husband – the same multimillionaire that funds The People’s Forum (where this essay started) and other tankie powerhouses?

Is it because the Left, like every other political group, is influenced by a small minority of wealthy thinkers, who’ve used their resources to bludgeon critical thought and promote reductive analyses?

For even if we don’t want to admit it, the Left is caught up in the same economic, cultural, and linguistic hierarchies as the rest of the world, where the wealthy elite have an undue say in defining the political agenda. Iranian writer puts it best:

Anti-imperialists in the diaspora are consistently underestimating how power reproduces itself socially through our own cultural ecosystems. Through who gets platformed and protected, and who gets silenced. [...]

The “acceptable dissident” emerges very quickly. They are amplified not necessarily because their politics are rigorous or emancipatory, but because they fit neatly into frameworks already intelligible to empire.

Meanwhile, genuinely anti-imperialist voices are treated with suspicion, hostility, or outright aggression because they disrupt the moral simplicity required in these spaces.

And look, I understand that the Left cannot function without funding. As much as we may want to free ourselves from the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, the reality is that we rely on organizations like Code Pink, The People’s Forum, and their tankie offshoots to provide necessary resources for necessary causes: from the Palestinian liberation movement to the fight for Climate Justice.6 Likewise, Third World countries globally have no choice to accept China’s funding – despite the strings attached – so as to avoid US domination. Such is the ugly reality of operating in an oligarchical hellscape.

But this financial dependence does not warrant thoughtless loyalty. A funder is a funder, not a God, and they deserve to be treated with the same skepticism as any other authority. Meaning, we must be able to cast them aside once the conditions are right. This is a movement, not a cult. It’s time to tear down the altars.

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As I hit this milestone, I’ve been reflecting on the life I’ve lived so far, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s fallen short of expectations. The only real thing I’ve accomplished in the last few years is not-dying when I should have, which isn’t so much an achievement as it is a putting off of failures down the line.

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Plus, the story of my not-dying isn’t even an interesting one, given that it mostly takes place in waiting rooms, doctor’s offices, and therapy Zoom calls. It is dry, tedious, and self-aggrandizing, with a heavy woe is me undertone that turns off most readers. There is no great narrative arc, no wave-shape, no climax to my story; not even sex or a half-attainable crush to keep things interesting. I did not experience my first orgasm until a year after its close, at 3pm on a lulled afternoon.

Since then, I’ve ventured on several dead-end careers, got rejected by fourteen grad schools, and hodgepodged together three broken romances. In fact, I’m about to hit a one-year anniversary with my current non-committed, DL situationship, which is like the queer Gen-Z equivalent to staying in a decade-long loveless marriage. C’est la vie.

All of these things were aptly summed up in the words of a generous Elder recently: a distraught man who came up to me on the subway and spit on my shin, then asked me, drool dangling, “What? Do I look like a failure to you?”

Perhaps it was the spit that conjured some facsimile of intimacy, or simply the resonance of his phrase, but I felt a surge of bright kinship with him in this moment. Do I look like a failure; do you think I’m a failure; am I a failure? are the very questions I asked over and over again when I repeatedly let everyone down. When I lost my job over “emotional dysregulation”; when I stopped being able to live independently; when my therapist called 9-1-1 on me, and tried to force me into an institution. Failure follows mad and crip people like the plague, reminding us that our lives are always inadequate, shameful, not-enough.

As Mimi Khúc (2023) puts it, “[t]his kind of failure is all-encompassing, endless, forever: a kind of crip time I had no name for” (p. 9). I, like the man who spit on my shin, am desperate to dispel the accusation of failure… but such victories never hold, “because ‘rightness’ has to be constantly performed. Rightness can’t be achieved and then sustained on its own; there are always more choices to make, more right behaviors to enact, with failure dogging every step.” (Khúc, 2023, p. 72).

A la Lauren Berlant (2011), I am stuck dog-paddling dog-paddling dog-paddling, but this impasse leads to nowhere; caught in a holding pattern where the water is endless and cold; waves fly up my nostrils and its droplets burns my throat.

Granted, I reckon that much of my frustration has less to do with failure itself, and more with my bruised ego. Deep inside me, there’s a real entitled brat who can’t help but feel that we were not meant to fail so badly. This brat insists: we went to an ivy league school, where we had profiles written about us in AP and the Washington Post, got our first job at the age of 20, was elected student Chair of Academic Affairs, graduated with Honors… so how the fuck did we end up here?

And granted, I did not choose the path that Brown U trained me for. I did not take the consultant gigs, the coding classes, or the internships with big-name politicians, but rather went into the famously frustrating space of community organizing. This has looked like deportation defense mobilization, Disability Justice rallies, and distributing free empanadas on Saturdays – but also a lot of unsexy hours spent on Canva, writing in CryptPad, and responding to funders’ rejection emails. I knew, going into it, that there would rarely be success.

But God! I was not prepared for the extent to which we’d be failing. Failing and failing and failing. The “kind of failure [that] is all-encompassing, endless, forever,” as Mimi Khúc puts it.

Which is maybe why I’m writing this, because I’m hitting my breaking point, and I cannot seem to stop crying. I am unable to “emotionally regulate” the way I was taught to and I feel like the sky is continually crashing on my head.

On July 7th, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered by ICE patrols in my hometown of Harris County, not that far from where I learned to drive. And just a week ago, Chansareth Hong in Rhode Island – the father of a young person in my community, where I worked for years – was kidnapped during an immigration check-in, despite all of our best efforts to prevent it. He now awaits a likely deportation to Cambodia.

Every time I think about how much we’ve lost and continue to lose, I feel that failure welling up in my throat like a big, nasty tumor. The shame of having let everybody down.

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Part of the issue, as everyone is so quick to tell me, is that I need to “redefine” my notion of success/failure, and maybe they’re right. Maybe it is unrealistic to expect that one person alone, or even a whole collective of people, could possibly make a dent in the overlording structures of fascist, imperial power.

Disability scholar Johanna Hedva (2024) puts it eloquently in their essay “Notes on Activism (aka Notes on Failure),” that:

If capitalism in all its nefarious guises is our opponent, then yo, we are absolutely, 100 percent, going to lose. This opponent is bigger than us, faster, stronger, meaner, and he fights dirty. And he has rigged the entire game! […]

I like thinking that activism will always fail, because it means that the decision to take action, to act as though what we do matters, even in the face of certain defeat, is its own purpose. (p. 89-90).

Similarly, scholar Jack Halberstam (2011) dismantles the very notion of success itself, writing that “success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2); instead positing failure as a way to “escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior” (3).

Both these lessons are a bit undermined, I admit, by Hedva and Halberstam’s subsequent (and widely accepted) success after these publications, as their careers blossomed to meet every standard metric of greatness. (This is no shade; I love both scholars, and am glad that their words are reaching a mass audience.)

But it makes me wonder what “success” looks like, or is meant to look like, within left-leaning and anti-capitalist spaces. As we move away from wealth accumulation, status signifiers, and dreams of the nuclear family, what new goals have emerged to take their place? When we say “building community” (everyone’s favorite phrase), do we mean showing up, shoveling shit, and making long-term commitments; or do we mean that we’re competing in yet another popularity contest, fighting to see who the most “likable” is? How do we know when we’re moving in the right direction, versus just running in loops? What are the metrics by which we could possibly “succeed”?

I remember that the Latin roots of “revolution” mean to roll back or turn around, that revolvere means to come back in one oneself, again and again; that revolutio means to embark on cycle after cycle after unending cycle.

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Since returning to New York, I’ve been working with the Ain’t I A Woman!? campaign to abolish the 24-hour shift (which I wrote about here). As it stands, caregivers in NYC are expected to provide consecutive, sleepless 24-hour workdays, while only being paid for 13 hours per shift. The result is that many become chronically ill and prematurely disabled, while their patients are placed at severe risk of injury.

It’s no coincidence that these caregivers are almost exclusively Black, Latine, Afro-Caribbean, and Asian immigrant women, who lack the institutional power to dispute their labor conditions; that they’re living in economic precarity, speak little English, and live in a very different social-cultural world to the ruling class. So much so, in fact, that their own lawyers turned on them for political clout.

Passing the No More 24 Act is a matter of Labor, Disability, and Immigrant Justice entwined. It prevents the material precarity and manufactured disposability of our immigrant communities, whilst maintaining the dignity of disabled patients. If I cannot be there for the Araujo family in Texas, or Chansareth’s in Rhode Island, the least I can do is try and be there for my aunties in New York.

Since its inception, however, the campaign has run into a steep opposition. Not from the Ultra-Right as usual, but from within our own ranks, as members of the Left have continually dismissed the effort as low-priority, unimportant, or “too complicated” a matter to address. They’ve closed ranks around their political favs: Mayor Mamdani, who’s actively obstructed the bill’s passage, and Speaker Julie Menin, who’s refused to submit the bill for vote. When I tried posting about it online, a swarm of Mamdani stans mass-reported my account as “fraud,” until Meta had it deleted. (You can follow my new back-up account, which is also being mass-reported, here).

Disabled people are not popular, have never been popular, whether it’s the high school cafeteria or the mutual aid techno rave. Even now, as the Left clambers to claim its love for all oppressed communities, it consistently forgets its disabled comrades. There are no masks, no air purifiers, no wheelchair accessible entrances or cushioned seats at even the most well-funded teach-ins; no thought or consideration for people whose bodyminds are intrinsically excluded by the existing sociopolitical structures.

Not to mention how racialized, poor, and genderqueer disabled people are often double exiled: from ableist left-wing events, but also from the vast majority of disability organizations, which remain predominantly white and middle-class. These spaces are cleaved across lines of race, class, and gender, where certain voices are clearly privileged above others. Trying to participate in them, I am beat down by the apparent sentiment, unspoken yet acted upon, that the only disabled people to truly matter are those who are white, cis, class-privileged, and male.

In a gut-wrenching encapsulation of this phenomenon, I met with the all-white leadership of a prominent disability organization last week, to try and gain their support for No More 24. But I was reminded – brutally so – that their advocacy could never extend to protect disabled immigrants. They informed me that our campaign was simply not a “priority,” and it certainly wasn’t worth the political risks entailed.

Leaving that meeting, I wanted to cry. I thought of disabled, Latina scholar Aurora Levin Morales: “You have forced me to turn out of my own culture to find allies worthy of the name” (2015/1985, p. 49). And of Audre Lorde (1983), quoting Barbara and Beverly Smith (1979): “I was not meant to be alone and without you who understands” (p. 153).

Despite growing efforts by BIPOC organizers and scholars (e.g. Berne 2015; Moore Jr 2000; kim 2025; Schalk et. al 2025), there’s no denying that disability spaces remain disproportionately white. The very notion of who counts as “disabled” is skewed heavily by racial, linguistic, and class-based biases; favoring those with the resources, capital, and cultural knowledge needed to obtain diagnosis.

It is this betrayal, from our supposed allies, that has shattered my faith in the movement. The ableism among (currently) able-bodied organizers, running parallel to the racism and misogyny from disability advocates, that leaves us stranded; stuck in a holding pattern of endless, all-encompassing failure; moving in cycle after cycle after unending cycle. Water flies up my mouth and burns the back of my throat. I look absurd when I try to spit it up, I’m sorry it hit your shin. and, Do I look like a failure to you?

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If you can’t tell (as some in the comments are struggling to do), Ru is a comedian, satirizing the vacuous leftist language that has taken over the web. “I no longer work with Trader Joe’s employees,” they tell us, because “I consider their feigned positivity an act of spiritual warfare.”

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Ru Anderson is joined in this genre by baristas “Thyme and Cale” (@bkcoffeeshop), the Bushwick polycule (@pencilsofcolor_), Marley Gotterer (@marleyismarley), and Prance from @bocxtop. Each of these accounts have soared to internet fame through poking fun at queer, left-leaning people of color. At first glance, their punchlines are almost indistinguishable from those on the ultra-right. They could pass as jokes on Fox News or a Tucker Carlson podcast, honing in on liberals’ performative allyship, the pervasiveness of language policing, and the nonprofit impulse to throw a performative “x” into every label (folx, womxn, etx.), without actually challenging the material barriers to trans and nonbinary inclusion. Which is a little ironic, given that these creators are all queer, trans, and/or left-leaning people of color themselves.

For those on the outside looking in, it seems like the Left can’t stand itself.

They’re not entirely wrong.

This is no longer the left-wing of the 2010s, whose collective optimism was buoyed by Obama-era “wins,” and who genuinely believed that “the arc of empire bends toward justice” (Hartman 2025, p. 99). Rather, this is a left-wing exhausted by rising fascism, the proliferation of ICE brutality, Israel’s unwavering genocide, and more. We are no longer convinced that change can be made through establishments or identity politics, and any optimism we have left is deeply shaken.

As Gen Z comes of age, moreover, many of us are starting to realize that the overcorrections made by our millennial predecessors – though well-intentioned – have only come back to bite us. Their staunch identitarianism, political correctness, ideological censorship, elitism, and weird, borderline fetishization of China1… all of these things have backfired hard.

I don’t just mean that it’s made us unpopular (though it has), but rather that these strategies are so hollow and corruptible that they’ve been easily taken up by centrists, corporations, and political zionists to obfuscate systems-level critique.

In this simulacrum of progress they’ve given us (jokingly known as “Woke 1”), we’re expected to vote for zionists and warmongers so long as they’re baipock, buy our way out of oppression, and embrace China as some anti-imperialist fantasyland, while ignoring their violence against Uyghur communities, the Congo, South America, and Tibet.

If I sound irritated, it’s because I am.

As our internet trends reveal, I’m not alone. The popularity of online satire gestures to a budding tension within leftist spaces, where we simultaneously believe and don’t believe in our own work. We still want racial, gender, and queer liberation, but we’ve grown cynical of the tactics used to achieve it. In this context, satire becomes a tool to release pent-up resentment and express doubts that would otherwise get us ostracized at a coalition meeting. It offers a site (a “safe space,” if you will) to express honest critique and frustrations.

There’s disagreement, of course, as to whether or not this type of humor is conducive to our political aims, or if it actually validates right-wing rhetoric. I’ve heard from comrades on both sides of this discourse, the latter of whom believe that there’s “no space in our movement for these edgy, 4chan-coded attempts at humor” (direct quote). They would prefer, by and large, that all jokes (if any) be directed solely at the ruling class; a group that’s lazily defined as an amorphous mass of cisgender white people.

Respectfully, I disagree. As much as white people deserve to be made fun of, I’m bored of the same, tired one-liners being used over and over (and over and over and over) again. I mean, we already know that white people can’t dance, can’t use seasoning, can’t take the sun. We know this so well that white people themselves are capitalizing on the stereotypes for laughs. Often enough, our comedy spaces become completely centered around whiteness, when we’re meant to be making things for (and about) ourselves.

I want jokes that are relatable, that make me feel seen and represented, even and especially through ridicule. Learning from the late Dorian Corey, it’s the practice of reading someone (“[finding] a flaw and exaggerat[ing] it”), and being read in turn, that builds community among marginalized communities; binding us together through the affective force of a shared, insider humor.

Continuing from Corey, the art of the read is distinct from “insults” or “slurs” hurled by those in power, as its logic is not dependent on a belittlement of marginalized identities. Rather, the joke is structured through a shared value system, where “flaws” are collectively defined by the inside-group.

In Madi Hart’s skit about leftists partying on July 4th, for instance, the subject/audience is not mocked for being anti-colonial, but rather for failing to be anti-colonial enough. Or in Taha Arshad’s skit about therapy-speak, the joke is not so much about therapy in itself, but rather its misuse. Buried in those gags and goofs, there are legitimate critiques of performative activism, colonial apathy, and identitarianism taken too far. It’s medicine hidden in a pill pocket, swallowed before I realize I’m being called out (or “called in,” as the saying goes now).

Unlike most other forms of entertainment, comedy is unique for how it taps into the viewer’s subconscious, drawing out doubts and frustrations they’re too afraid to admit. It articulates the misgivings we might have with the resistance, or even with our own comrades; giving space to all the politically incorrect thoughts that cannot otherwise be expressed for fear of retaliation.

Author Tricia Hersey, writing about Substack creator Lil’ Mama, praises Black satire for what it “wrestles out of us.” Cathy Park Hong (2020), reflecting on the work of Richard Pryor, notes that good comedy “root[s] out what we repress in our subconscious” and creates a much needed container for honest discourse (p. 37). It’s a sharp relief from the daily slog of self-policing and overthinking because, as Hong continues, “[r]eal laughter is an involuntary contraction that bursts out of you like an orgasm” (p. 43). It cannot be carefully curated the same way we manage our speech, but rather erupts from our chests before we have a chance to think about it.

Not to mention the political value of laughter itself, which creates an immediate, instinctive sense of closeness between the audience and the comic, as well as the audience and each other. As Lauren Berlant (2022) reminds us, successful jokes create a “sudden interestedness and solidarity” among those who are “in on it” (p. 36). By drawing out shared, unconscious beliefs, they affirm a communal worldview between audience and comic, and between the audience and each other.

Through this guttural impulse, which is felt more by the body than the mind, communal bonds are established at precognitive levels. Successful comedy gives rise to a sense of togetherness that earnest dogma, with its sterile appeal to logic and rationality, could never achieve. Continuing from Berlant, “the impersonality of the joke, its spontaneous takeover of consciousness, is a test of relationality,” with the ability to “induce reciprocity, mutuality, and affective continuity” when it works (p. 37).

Perhaps this is why the Left’s current culturescape is so dominated by satire that never could have passed in the era of “Woke 1”; why trans, queer, Black, Indigenous, and other POC creators are increasingly poking fun at themselves and each other rather than the ruling class. Not because they’ve moved toward the political center, or because they’ve become more conservative, but because they’re desperately trying to save a sinking ship.

Broadly speaking, we’ve become acutely aware that we cannot create change by imposing a code of conduct so strict and puritanical that it replicates the oppressors’ attempt at control. We know, moreover, that we cannot expect our communities to be perfect, saintlike figures, and that our media ought to reflect this by offering complicated, multifaceted representation. It’s in this context that creators are deploying satire to mock their own communities, creating room for imperfection, disagreement, and discourse; loosening the social restraints put in place by our predecessors, and in doing so, setting up the Left to hear its own critique.

It’s notable to me that some of the biggest comedy stars in recent years ( , , Ayo Edibiri) have gained fame by making fun of the very “diversity wins” we celebrated only a decade ago. Their surging popularity is symptomatic of a Left that is sick of itself; reflecting a consumer base that’s tired of their own political party and cynical of liberal buzzwords, eager for someone to cut through the crap.

@ziwehappy aapi month to you and yours. #ziwe #apimonth #coleescola #comdey #fyp

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If the millennials’ cultural boom was characterized by a sense of confidence, earnestness, and genuine faith in the Left’s moral clarity, then Gen Z’s is shaped by a desperation to not be so easily fooled. Rejecting the cruel optimism that wrecked our millennial predecessors, this generation has opted for a sort of positive nihilism that mocks its allies and enemies in equal measure. The comics we’ve made famous are not the politically correct bloggers of Tumblr 2012, but rather their obnoxious, bratty little siblings.

This is a cultural zeitgeist that aims for irreverence over sincerity, and blasphemy over doctrine. It’s a wave of creators that wrap themselves in layers on layers of irony and caricature, intent on remaining opaque. Whether or not it works at building political power, or if it’s just a sad attempt to avoid being vulnerable, only time will tell. In the event Gen Alpha is not completely lost to the rise of AI slop and educational defunding, they might wind up just as disgruntled and annoyed with their predecessors as we are today.

After all, satire incurs its own kind of risk, and plenty of it too. I’d be naive to ignore the myriad ways it could backfire just as hard, if not worse, than previous trends already have.

For instance, I’ve heard comrades worry that it will normalize the criticism and diminishment of already marginalized groups; encouraging, or at least enabling, people in power to keep punching down. Worried, moreover, that it’ll provide fodder for right-wing commentators, in that it’s easy material for pundits to take out of context and use as evidence of “leftist psychosis.”

There’s some merit to this concern, yet I can’t help but feel that it’s pointless to try and placate a group so committed to cruelty. Hateful people will mock us no matter what we do, even at our most earnest and pure. I mean, look at the overwhelming backlash to The Odyssey (2026): every review I see is crammed with racist comments and AI videos about Lupita Nyong’o, or misgenderings and tear-downs of Elliot Page. This, despite it being one of the biggest franchises of the year, attached to a director with unparalleled levels of cultural cache. If Christopher Nolan himself can’t appease the edgy white boy demographic, we certainly can’t either. I’m uninterested in catering to the hypothetical reactions of Charlie Kirk wannabes, or allowing their media illiteracy to dictate our cultural decisions.

The greater risk of satire, really, is that our own people won’t realize it’s meant to be funny, which is embarrassing; or they might be hurt by it, which is bad; or they might lash out to cancel the original creator, which becomes devastating for everyone involved. Even now, I hesitate to write satire myself, lest it reach the wrong crowd again.

The last time I produced anything remotely funny, it blew up so much bigger than I ever expected, until it drew the ire of some pretty popular names. Which meant getting doxxed, fedjacketed, and pushed offline. (Since then, I’ve learnt there’s a whole subset of leftist microinfluencers who build their followings through cancelling other leftist creators… a reality so sad that it feels like a satire in and of itself.)

If anything though, this online policing is but a painful remnant of the days when liberal self-righteousness reigned high, and its existence only underscores the need for cultural change. The rigidity and pervasiveness of “carceral feminis[m],” which abolitionist-theorist Pilar Maschi (2025) describes as “social media cop-calling” (p. 39-40), has fractured and weakened our collective; creating an atmosphere in which people are too afraid to speak, take risks, or experiment with anything new. In the words of Hannah Glenn, “it’s created an environment where nothing can thrive, nothing can even grow.”

I have seen people try to cancel Ziwe for not knowing what “NAACP” stood for, and others rear pitchforks because (famously lesbian) singer Reneé Rapp used the f-slur. If this can happen to celebrities widely known for their dry wit and intentional satire, I can only imagine what happens to smaller, nascent accounts preyed upon by those with much larger platforms.

It’s deeply concerning to me that the Left has become so eager to censor speech and to punish people for their mistakes; that some of its biggest influencers are just as horny for power and control as their right-wing counterparts. Sometimes, it feels like we’re a movement of abolitionist-ACAB-cops. If it sounds oxymoronic, it’s because it is.

But if you can’t fight fire with fire, then you certainly can’t fight cop behavior with cop behavior; meaning, I will not engage in this battle of polemics, lest it validate the archaic moral binary it rests upon. Rather, I think the clowns, jesters, and TikTok comics of the world are correct to detach themselves from the Left’s debilitating seriousness. I can’t out-cop a cop, but I can certainly reject their authority by playing where I shouldn’t be.

The stakes are too high for us to sit waiting in the sidelines, too afraid of messing up. I’d rather that we slip and fall than do nothing, and I hope that you tease me when I do. I hope to be there when you stumble, to dress your wounds amidst my own giggles. More than anything, I hope we’ll still be marching together by nightfall; knees scraped, elbows bruised, and bellies sore from laughter.

Yes, on the technicality of my heart pains, breathing problems, and absolutely fucked-up, ultra-medicated brain, I’m technically (medically speaking) disabled. But I am also a class-privileged, South/East Asian settler on stolen Lenape land. My access to wealth and social capital has allowed me to surpass many of the barriers that injure (i.e. disable) crip communities.1

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For instance, I have paid for outpatient care using out-of-pocket funds, totaling thousands of dollars in medical fees. I have avoided forced institutionalization, solely because my family could supervise me at-home. I’ve never had to rely on mutual aid or food distributions for meals, meaning that I can mostly protect myself against anaphylactic allergens.

I’ve been privileged enough to rewrite my immediate body-environment as much as anyone can, circumventing the most severe consequences of manufactured disablement. Given the deep entwinement of social, political, economic, and biological systems, it feels inappropriate for me to hyperfixate on the latter.

For when disability is reduced to a matter of individualistic identity, we risk neglecting the structural forces that produce disability at scale. More than that, we inadvertently sideline those who lack the cultural and linguistic capital to identify as “disabled,” as well as populations whose unwellness is so endemic as to go unnamed.

Often enough, this allows the ruling class to mobilize disability optics as a progressive veneer for center-right policies; ones that benefit a select group of disabled people through exploiting (and often disabling) less visible communities.2 We see this happening in New York City today, where private insurance companies are using “disability rights” rhetoric to justify their exploitation of home caregivers – most of whom are elderly, immigrant women. They’ve claimed that caregivers must provide consecutive, 24-hour shifts straight in order to “protect” disabled patients, without regard for how these labor conditions have injured hundreds of workers (who report chronic joint pains, loss of mobility, cardiac failure, joint replacements, and more).

By using the pretense of disability advocacy, these corporations successfully evade naming the real reason they prefer this practice, which is that it significantly boosts profit margins. Under current law, home care agencies only have to pay employees for thirteen hours per 24-hour shift. Historically, the 24-hour workday has allowed “private operators to steal an estimated $1 billion dollars per year” from caregivers (Hernandez & White, 2022).

They began using disability as a scapegoat in February, when a grassroots coalition of caregivers came closer than ever to passing the No More 24 act. A bill to abolish the 24-hour workday and split the period into two 12-hour shifts, carried out by two separate workers. At the beginning of this year, Mayor Mamdani and Speaker Menin had both publicly voiced their support for No More 24, and it seemed almost certain to pass. So insurance companies and home care agencies pivoted to a new strategy; one that masked itself in the language of liberalism, progress, and equity. This was the framework of disability activism.

In March, they wrote an open letter claiming that 24-hour shifts are a form of disability rights, and that anything less would amount to ableist violence. Granted, the very claim is absurd for a number of reasons, not the least being that exhausted caregivers cannot provide proper support to disabled patients. But it worked. In response to their open letter, Mamdani revoked his support and Speaker Menin withdrew the bill from vote.

There’s a double irony to this maneuver. First, it neglects how the 24-hour workday itself is deeply ableist, increasing the risk of injury (and subsequent institutionalization) for home care patients. In the words of Winona Cyr (2026), 24-hour workdays only “reinforce the idea that disabled people don’t deserve the dignity of legitimate care.” Furthermore, as Keith Rosenthal and Arielle Concilio Parra (2026) have pointed out, the dehumanization and exploitation of caretakers is inseparable from the manufactured disposability of their patients. In a recent speech given to the public, Keith Rosenthal (2026) asserted that “the reason home care work is so devalued and treated so inferior is because disabled people are devalued and treated inferior in this city.” Similarly, Reverend Letiah Fraser (2026) has described ending the 24-hour workday as essential to ensuring that disabled people live with “dignity,” and as “full participants in our communities.” Even the United Nations (2026) released a report finding that “24-hour workdays deprive older persons and persons with disabilities of quality care and support, potentially compromising their rights, well-being and safety.”

Second, the Yes 24’s so-called “disability rights” framework actively promotes and exacerbates caregiver injury. Caretakers across Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx are constantly debilitated by ongoing exploitation, sleep deprivation, and racialized wage-theft. Their joints are strained, muscles ruined, and bones displaced. Their bodies are permanently maimed and mangled by relentless 24-hour workdays.

Home care recipient Adrian (2026) puts it better than I, arguing that the practice requires caregivers to “sacrifice their health for us” – creating an endless cycle of mass disablement.3 As Jasbir Puar (2017) writes, the ruling class have established “an economy of injury that claims and promotes disability empowerment at the same time that it maintains the precarity of certain bodies and populations precisely through making them available for maiming” (p. xvii). This latter group is, not coincidentally, composed exclusively of working-class Black, Latine, and Asian immigrants, most of whom speak limited English. The public is so desensitized to their unwellness that we rarely register their condition as one of disability – so used to seeing older Aunties with canes, walkers, and frail, wobbling steps, that we hardly pause to question why they’re injured in the first place.

This trend is not new. For centuries, Black, brown, and immigrant women have been construed as natural laborers and insensate machines, as unfeeling flesh and unhuman ornament – as impervious, or at least highly resilient, to pain (Spillers 1987; Schuller 2018; Chen 2012).

Even the mainstream disability rights movement has remained largely indifferent, if not hostile, to the disablement and injury intrinsic to racial oppression (Erkulwater, 2022). Despite growing efforts by BIPOC organizers and scholars to complicate the field (e.g. Berne 2015; Moore Jr 2000; kim 2025; Schalk et. al 2025), there’s no denying that racialized trauma is often omitted from the dominant narrative of what “counts” as disability.

The 24-hour workday is but an outgrowth of this cultural narrative, which has conditioned us to neglect or deny the pain of racialized women. It frames their expressions as inscrutable, primitive, or hostile (Yao 2021), and discourages any feelings of empathy.

This leaves our communities in the very strange position of having to “prove” their disablement. Sometimes, this is done through exacerbating the pain already present, so as to make it legible for public viewing. Thrust into today’s “economy of injury” (Puar 2017) – where attention is fought for and won through sensationalism, spectacle, and shock value – the act of self-mutilation often seems like the only way for dehumanized populations to gain sympathy. This is especially true for those who’ve been rendered invisible or inferior on account of skin color, gender expression, language, and/or citizenship status.

Politically speaking, it is often wielded by those with no other way of making themselves heard. I am thinking, for instance, of Palestine Action in the UK, who embarked on a 73-day hunger strike to protest the genocide in Gaza. Or that of detained immigrants in the US, who’ve continually used hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions of their detention centers. I am thinking of people who are forced to hurt themselves just to be noticed; who are made to display their injuries just to be seen as worthy of care.

On April 16th, home care workers too went on hunger strike. For seven days straight, amidst rainstorms and freezing winds, they sat outside of city hall, eating nothing. They transformed their unwellness into a spectacle for mass consumption. Spectators dropped by to take photos, struck by the spectacle of these older Asian women, still starving. It was then, and only then, that Speaker Menin agreed to submit the bill to vote.

In policy discussions so driven by spectacle, disability has to be exciting before it warrants attention. The public is not interested in unwellness that is subtle, gradual, or chronic, illnesses that are so ordinary as to be unremarkable, or pain that can’t be visualized. Audiences do not want to see the tedious, day-to-day challenges of living whilst disabled. They want short-form content and TikTok-ready reels, with pain packaged neatly into each. Stories that fit the brevity of their dwindling attention spans, with clean, satisfying endings.

Knowing that public attention would only last for so long, Speaker Menin and Mayor Mamdani stalled the act’s passage with amendment after amendment, delay after delay, hoping that people would lose interest and move on. Hoping that we’d become desensitized to the caretakers’ campaign, the same way we’ve always been desensitized to their exhaustion and fatigue. Hoping that our attention would be captured, recaptured, recaptured, recaptu–

And the bill was never brought to vote.

At the time of this writing, Menin has yet again broken her promise to end the 24-hour workday. Home care workers are promising to resume hunger strike at the end of July if no progress is made. (Learn how you can get involved and support their campaign here).

And perhaps this is the other reason I don’t identify as “disabled.”

Because there was a time when I did, and I saw immediately how much everyone wanted a show out of it. Because I was seven years old, and I caved to those desires in a desperate plea to be liked, or cared for, or both. I put on a pretty dress and smiled bright for the cameras, only for the journalist to step in and say “no smiling please, we need to see you look sad.”

And I was eighteen years old when I realized all the attention had dried up, and I needed new ways to make my illness fun and exciting. More obvious, more interesting, more camera-ready! So I stopped eating, took up substances, and did everything I could to exacerbate the illness in my awkward, growing body. (Not consciously of course, but it never has to be.)

Once I started, I could not stop. I learnt how addictive self-harm can be. Then, all of a sudden, four years had passed. I was twenty-two, and on the verge of dying.

In a global reality so oversaturated with violence and tragedy, the question is no longer if you’re suffering – for the answer is always Yes! – but instead, whether or not that suffering is great enough to matter. Activists across the political spectrum are engaged in a de facto battle of oppression olympics: from left-wing organizers denouncing systemic failures, to January 6th rioters claiming persecution by the state. All sorts of pain, of varying validities and degrees, get platformed as proof of victimhood, and indiscriminately conflated into one. Acts of sexual abuse are framed as equally vicious as the #MeToo movement’s “witch hunt,” and TERF discomfort is placed on the same level as the terror induced by transphobic violence. To attain worth as political subjects, we must convince the public that our unwellness is just as severe as everyone else’s. Political philosopher Bayo Akomolafe (2023) puts it this way:

The rush for proper citizenship is now pushed aside by the rush for victimhood – which is not a dismissal of harmful relations, or a belittling of the ways bodies become violated. Instead, melting icebergs and their unanticipated effects mean that statehood is stretched beyond its capacities to maintain the territory of the civilian. The “victim” becomes the additional pressure on the state to keep to its promises, to enact compensatory measures, to ensure representation. (Akomalafe 2023)

In this context, starvation and self-harm become effective strategies to gain public attention and state compensation. We’re both performers and audience to today’s political circus: caught up in an unending showcase of our pain, while side-eyeing our competitor-allies, determining where to allocate our own interest. Pain, performed correctly, acts as currency.

For communities deemed “undesirable,” “unproductive,” or otherwise lacking value to the state, the task of proving our humanity – and earning care – is even greater. Often, it means laying our trauma bare, whether in the caption of a social media post, grant proposal, or GoFundMe paragraph. It means relinquishing our right to privacy and becoming an object of pity.

Squeezed into this paradigm, disability gets distorted, degraded, and packaged up as a spectacle for mass consumption. The disabled body, by extension, is transformed into a freak-show and fetish-object simultaneously.

At its most sinister, the audience demands (explicitly or not) that disability be made worse – more obvious, legible, and click-baity – before they begin to care. Caught in the snare of superficial identity politics, disabled people must be “disabled enough” to deserve care. Sometimes, this means actively hurting ourselves and exacerbating extant injury. It means making our pain so severe that people can’t miss it.

We begin enacting the state’s agenda on its behalf: destroying our bodies and draining our political collectives of energy until we no longer pose a threat. We trap ourselves in a never ending cycle of spectacle and response, creating a dependence on injury and anger. Any resistance that grows from this pattern requires a constant supply of bad news to stay relevant.

And I get so confused, trying to figure out where we fit into this and how we might opt-out, if we can opt-out at all. I wonder if we must keep playing this game – of attention snatching, clout chasing, and raising visibility – just to stay alive. I wonder if opting out means death.

​​At the time of this writing, I’ve grown tired of writing. I do not want to divulge any more memories, nor do I want to retrofit my story into something coherent and satisfying for the reader. I’m tired of treating my life story like an essay to be refined, revised, and rehashed; of treating my body of flesh like a body of work to be propped up in the window and picked apart by critics. I am tired, as Joan Didion (1979) puts it, of living “by the imposition of a narrative line,” in which every tragedy is pulped into a “social or moral lesson” for the audience (p. 11). I am tired of assembling order from the mess and pretending that every illness has meaning.

Still, it seems that I can’t help myself. I’m moved to write in the same way I was once moved to vomit up my dinner everyday, caught in a constant compulsion to lay my insides all bare. I could claim that I’m doing it for noble reasons (I vomit to refuse patriarchal demands for feminine self-contained bodies; I write to keep record of modern, political atrocities), but also admit that I’m doing it for selfish reasons (I vomit-write because I like how it feels). Even in this essay, ostensibly critiquing the compulsion to display our unwellness, I still succumb to that very urge: inserting vignettes about my own history and struggle with illness, hoping that you won’t notice my hypocrisy.

I don’t identify as “disabled,” and yet I can’t seem to shut the fuck up about my experiences of disability. Even if I had the option to opt-out – of attention snatching, clout chasing, and raising visibility – I’m not sure I would take it.

I might be “better” now, in the sense that I’m properly medicated, productive again, and a little more regulated, but I am still unable to let go of all the things that have made me ill the past twenty-odd years. I am not starving myself, puking up meals, or otherwise debilitating my own body, but I am still writing confessionals online. Perhaps puking up words is just a sneakier way of broadcasting my injury to the world. Vomit-writing as a way of asserting myself into a canon that doesn’t really want me.

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In her “Barf Manifesto” (2015), Dodie Bellamy lauds vomit(writing) as a literary form that refuses logic and order; refuses the academic compulsion to “pin[]things down” or “forc[e] experience into predetermined form” (p. 45). She lauds vomit’s ability to upend all sense of normalcy and break the reader-viewer from their everyday lives. Quoting Bellamy (2015) quoting Eileen Myles, “[p]uking would put something on the sidewalk of the everyday so it could begin to be now” (p.45). Puking breaks the order-of-things and gives us something to start from. An emission, an expulsion, a transference of my innards onto your lap.

Hi, it says. Look at me.

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This essay is an excerpted, Substack-optimized version of a longer zine I made, which I would be very honored if you ordered below.

buy my barf, baby

I am quite tired of everyone touting “rest as resistance” (even if I agree with the point they’re trying to make), since so much of my life lately has been spent in obligatory rest; unwanted and unchosen. It’s hard to feel like I’m resisting much of anything, really, when I’m laying in bed because my body says I have to.

Yes, I understand how rest disrupts capitalist systems. Yes, I understand that this is especially important for Black, brown, and femme people, whose bodies have long been exploited to fuel said capitalist systems. And yes, I believe that everyone should be able to rest, and the fact that I can is a rare and incredible privilege.

But none of this alleviates the intense panic of realizing that there’s still eight hours left in the day and nothing and no one to fill up that time; no one to join me in my ocean of empty sheets. Nor does it make me any less envious of my friends, who get to grow up in the “real world” while I’m stuck in Neverland.

I wanna go back to sleep already, except it’s only 3pm, and the sun is still really bright. I think if I close my eyes now, I’ll feel it glaring, judging me, through the window. I guess I could watch Bridgerton instead. Kill an hour or three.

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I miss having my heart be hurt in the poetic sense, even though younger-me would tear her hair out for the sort of peace I have now. I miss the experience of uncertainty, of conflict and change. I miss having experiences at all!

I’ve spent so many hours watching oak saplings grow in the backyard. There’s something sort of cartoonish about their shape: two, symmetrical leaves, protruding from a green stalk, just like in Animal Crossing.

I watch them crown through the soil and poke out the grass, half an inch taller every night, until they’re mowed down again on Thursdays.

I’m trying to recalibrate my inner temporality: away from City Time, toward Earth Time. In lieu of Summer flings and nighttime raves, I focus instead on how the azaleas widen with sunrise, how the wind rearranges the tree branches, and how birdsongs change each hour.

I recite the Octavia Butler mantra, “God is Change,” and remind myself that change happens in suburban backyards too, albeit at a micro-level scale.

Just today, I sat with a green anole for twenty minutes, watching its air sac expand and contract; open and close. I am noticing things that I’ve never noticed before. As my world shrinks down, so does it grow larger all at once.

Today I had the conscious revelation that I was really “one with the earth,” and the thought was so cliche and embarrassing that it made me barf a little in my mouth.

God, please don’t let this be my life forever.

I miss being touched and held and hit on. I miss the rancidness of strangers’ sweat. I miss sex.

I’m tired of moving at “earthen time,” “divine time,” “ancestral time,” whatever you want to call it – I’m too shallow for this. I want all the pleasures and sensations that this world has to offer, and I want it all right now.

I want time to move fast again!!!! I want to do weird drugs and have weird sex and get my heart broken to smithereens!!!!!!!

Being one with nature is cool and all, but I’d rather be getting fucked sideways over some nameless loser’s couch.

I know they mean well, but I’m honestly a little offended when people send me quotes from The Nap Ministry. As if napping is some special talent or chosen skill of mine, and not something I end up doing because I’m tired all the time.

How neoliberal – to frame everything as some form of choice or individualist agency.

Or maybe it’s not neoliberal at all. I don’t know. All I know is that it makes me annoyed.

I’m tired of all this feminist discourse that says our bodies belong to us. As if my body’s an unthinking object, ready to obey my every whim. As if my body lacks its own agency. As if it’s not fighting me at every juncture.

“My body, my choice!”???

Ha! Hahahah ha Ha Ha! Girl, I fucking wish.

I can’t even take a hot shower without this thing getting dizzy.

My body’s been so stapled through with a million fucking monitors and trackers and weird devices that beep. All of it feels like an extension of Doctor H— with her huge, freaky eyes, pushing into my skin. She reminds me of the Other Mother in Coraline.

If I had more energy, I’d probably have a bombass analysis to put out right now, about how insidious the surveillance state is or something. A Foucauldian critique of medical technology’s invasiveness.

But in the meantime, it just makes me sad. To be reminded, so brutally and everyday, that everything is very much not mine.

Tracey Emin’s installation, My Bed, features her slept-in, dishevelled bed; stained by bodily fluids and littered with cigarettes, vodka bottles, condoms, and a tampon. The sculpture represents her four day manic-depressive episode, where she did nothing but drink and fuck.

I feel a startling amount of kinship with Emin’s soiled sheets. I’ve spent so many hours/days/weeks staring at nothing but my own curled-up legs beneath the blankets and thinking of these covers as an extension of myself. In many ways, the lived-iness of Emin’s bedsheets feels more intimate (erotic and sensual) than the condoms and semen sprayed across its skin. The all-consuming embrace of bedrest (!) outlasts her long-gone partners.

I’m offended by all the critics that saw My Bed as representing an unreal, liminal space (what Eva Meijer described as “a place outside of real life”). The truth is that nothing could be more “real” – more carnal, corporeal, and human – than the experience of being-in-bed. Everything else – the one night stands, the drugs, the vodka – is mere distraction from the endless, aching reality of BED! ! !

I’m extra-offended by art historian Laura Lake Smith, who sees Emin’s escape from bed as a “redemption” arc. Paraphrased by Alina Cohen, Smith argues that “the bed is empty, of course, because Emin decided to leave it and sublimate her troubles into art.” As if Emin’s bedrest is somehow at odds with the act of creation (or even the Sublime). As if “redemption,” with all its connotations of better-ment, healing, and wellness, is the only acceptable goal; one that, apparently, requires “leav[ing]” the bed.

Girllllllll. Imma stay in this fucking bed and still be fucking sublime.

Today, I laid down flat on the sun-baked driveway and took a nap, just so I could feel some variety in sensation.

Everyone is mad at me, ‘cuz the neighbors thought I was dead. Oops.

I hate when people mansplain the Social Model of Disability to me. Like, I get it!!! Trust me, I really, really do.

Yes, disability is socially constructed…to some extent. Yes, disability is created by structures and systems of inaccessibility; as well as by centuries of intergenerational trauma and harm, compounded over time. Yes, all bodies are shaped by the power structures they’re born and raised within.

I understand these things intellectually. I believe in them too.

But none of this theory does much to capture the actual, subjective experience of Feeling Like Shit!!!!!!!!

I can regurgitate all the edgy analysis, sure, but this shit still fucking sucks.

Vanessa Andreotti, author of Hospicing Modernity, argues that we (Americans) really need to reconnect with our shit. Both literally and metaphorically. Speaking from an anti-colonial lens, she says:

“[When non-Indigenous] people want to feel connected [with the universe], they [only] want to feel connected to the moon, the stars, the flowers, the whales… but not … with the shit. With the difficult things, the painful things, the things that are not as elating…”

Whereas Indigenous rituals of interconnection, by contrast, are often aimed at extending “our capacity to sit with the shit.” Settlers’ hippy, granola approach to interconnection is a hedonistic distortion of Indigenous ayahuasca practices, in that it aims solely toward pleasure.

Nothing encapsulates this better than our relationship to shit itself, which usually ends at excretion and erasure. It’s an “externalization of culpability,” Andreotti says; a rejection of ugliness.

And yet, decolonial, anti-capitalist efforts can only succeed if we really “stay with the shit… stay with [the] pain.”

I used to work with a mutual aid group that distributed free bedsheets to poor, disabled people. One of their comrades was a hotel janitor, and she’d smuggle out all the “ruined” sheets she was meant to throw away. Someone else would wash or mend them, and someone else still would drive it to the final recipient.

Isn’t that so fucking beautiful?

I am so in love with these inanimate objects, each of which exist as palimpsests of hands and touch and care. This is the kind of tenderness and intimacy that some people, dimly content with the most banal of relations and sex, will never be so fortunate to know!

(Deep down, I also think there’s something a little kinky and fun about a communal bedsheet circulation… but I reckon I’ll keep this to myself. A bit of private perversion, as a treat.)

Tracey Emin’s escape from bedrest cannot be a “redemption arc” (or however Laura Smith put it), for this assumes some impossible, binary distinction between “bed” and “everything else.”

No such division exists! Between the bedroom and the streets; laying in versus “living.”

I believe this very strongly. Mostly, because I have to. Politically and ethically speaking, I must believe that this counts as life, no matter how much it resembles, approximates, or passes as death. I must believe that there’s divinity to this too – to obligatory rest.

There’s simply no other choice!!!

We go back to his, have mediocre sex, then lay there ‘til noon the next day. I stare at his back, at the sunlight dappling his skin, and trace circles against his shoulder. I wonder if he’s pretending that my hands are another’s. Am I a body-surrogate for an unnamed woman? Is he?

This play-act is stupid.

I tell him I’m gonna go home. To my surprise, he jolts upward and grabs my wrist.

“Wait–” he says. The smallness of his voice makes my heart thaw. I reach out, pet his hand, and offer to stay. He pulls back.

“No, I was just gonna ask for my shirt back.”

“Oh. My bad.”

And what’s so great about being held, anyways? What’s touch but an exchange of pressure and heat, facilitated by a complicated, microscopic web of tiny, intricate nerve endings? What do we mean when we use the word touch?

Touch-ing (verb) implies immediacy: the immediacy of bodies, pressed against one another, here and now; the obliteration of time, space, and separation.

Your capillaries expand and contract. This brings heat to the surface of your skin, which then transfers to the surface of mine. The heat is close and it is fast. It makes me feel warm. Is this (heat) what we mean when we say that we long for touch?

On April 21st, we’re laying by the windowsill, underneath the sun. The light is hot and warm. It feels kind against my skin.

My face is pressed to your chest and I can feel your heart’s propulsions; I feel it fall, then rise, coming to meet me at where my body closes and yours begins. With lazy fingers, I trace circles on your skin, imagine that I’m tracing the passage of blood through your heart: pause to rest in the atrium, free-fall to the lungs, cycle through the body, again and again. I think about how every new orbit around your core is a conscious choice made against you, by your blood, by your body, to stay alive.

I read somewhere – I can’t remember who wrote it – that blood is the very connective tissue that holds the body together. Without it, we’d be formless, like blobs of mushy slime.

Blood, then, has held me together through the violent shifts of each season and movements that comprise each year. I’m grateful for that. What else will hold my body whole? What else would hold me?

I am here, holding you, underneath the afternoon sun. And I am here, watching the glossy white tiles grow wide between us as you cross the floor of Newark airport. I do not realize, not yet, how much of my warmth you are taking from me. I feel this future pressing against my chest. I feel your body against my skin.

The first time I lose you, there’s at least a foot of distance between us. We’re sitting quietly, side by side, as the radiator hums. You strum your guitar. We don’t talk. I think about closing that gap, about leaning my shoulder into yours, but I worry that I’ll suffocate you.

Here’s what happens at the moment of touch: the weight, form, and roughness of the Other is picked up by mechanoreceptors (special exterior nerves), which transforms them into electrical currents and transmits them to the central nervous system. We have two different kinds of mechanoreceptors: the SA1, which captures all the heavy, prolonged touches (the way you pressed me to your chest), and the RA, which captures lighter, fleeting touches (the way you strum your guitar, the way you stroked my hair, the way I traced circles on your shoulder).

What about the heat?

Next to the mechanoreceptors are these things called thermoreceptors, and they’re responsible for detecting shifts in temperature. Like mechanoreceptors, they are “excitable” cells. This means that they generate electric impulses in response to external stimuli. They’re activated by the heat on your skin when you hold me.

Through the charges emitted by nerves in the skin, this body becomes aware of another. It becomes, biologically speaking, “excited” by the revelation that something exists outside the self. In this moment, the body feels that it is not alone.

I am writing this at 2am, in my too-big bed, feeling your absence. I’m pressed against its void. You’d expect nothingness to be weightless, but you’d be wrong. Nothingness has a real heft.

I know this because I’ve held you in my arms. (Your body and all the particles that comprise it.) And I’ve found that your absence is heavier – much heavier – than your mass.

This is a love affair: between me and the void.

The paradox of touch is this: at no point throughout this entire process, of nerves and cells and electrical charges, do our particles actually touch. As our electrons veer toward collision, they repel each other. One electron fires a photon. It hits the other. Propelled by this photon, the second electron turns back the way it came.

Touching, it turns out, means not-touching.

Or, put another way, touching you is actually an act of touching the vacuum between us. Vacuums composed of virtual, indeterminate particles that do and do not exist. To touch is to touch-nothing; to touch and not-touch all at once.

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And still, regardless of whether cells literally collide, the effect of touch remains. The warmth, the pressure, the way your heart begins to race.

At the moment of touch/not-touch, the skin becomes warm. Our cells are transformed.

Isn’t this what we mean by “touch?” I mean the body, made and remade by the Other.

Your head grows heavy on my lap and I guess that, technically speaking, we’re touching, but we’re not really touching.

Or, put another way, you’re touching me, but I’m not touching you. It’s a question of subjectivity: you might say, for instance, “I’m touching the sofa,” but not “the sofa is touching me.” The sofa does not make your skin feel ablaze, nerves light up, or your heart begin to race.

The body is made and remade by the Other, and I fear that I’ve been made and remade by you so many times that I’ve lost my self entirely.

Perhaps “touch,” then, is no longer the right word to use. Touch means to push against the void, but there is no void. Every boundary has melted; our particles collide, crash, violently.

At this moment of not-touch, I discover: what’s so great about touch: we were two different people, touching. As it confirms the existence of the Other, so does touch confirm the self. It does so via charges on the skin. Skin? I would not know my skin, were it not for sensations on its surface. My sense of skin is constructed via touch.

Touch, I’m trying to say, connotes both closeness and distance, sameness and difference, all at once. Not one without the other. So as I lose myself to you, perhaps better words to use are: consumption, possession, or whatever it means to swallow someone whole.

At the time of this writing, there’s four months and two miles of cold air between us. That distance we once lacked has now grown, and grown in abundance.

I’m with some guy I met off the apps; I don’t remember his name. He holds me tenderly, gripping my waist, tracing spirals on my spine. His touch is tender. Soft. It’s kind.

Touch-ing requires both physicality and instantaneity: bodies, pressed against each other, in the here and now.

But I am not here. Even as my cells register his weight and his presence, I’m not here.

I’m in December, in April, in May. I’m by your side in New Jersey, in Cranston, at the beach. We’re driving to DC, to protest with our friends; we’re sobbing on the floor; we’re smoking on the balcony.

Are we touching?

As an East Asian girl back on the dating scene, I really thought my biggest selling point (read: marketable fetish) would be my race. I’m not proud of this approach – but alas, I’m a realist. I figured that most of the men swiping right on me are driven by fantasies of obedient, passive waifu dolls; fantasies so culturally ingrained that I can’t blame them for wanting it.

(Okay. Maybe I can blame them a little bit.)

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In Eating the Other, bell hooks refers to this sort of racial fetish as a "commodification of difference” (1992, p. 366). hooks explains that dating “exotic” women is one way to make relationships feel more exciting. Or, as she puts it, it’s a “spice… that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” (1992, p. 366).

While hooks wrote mainly of relations between white and racialized partners, much has changed in the thirty years passed. Fetishization no longer falls neatly across the line of white-people vs everyone-else (if it ever did). Rather, it’s grown complicated by the rise of inter-POC relationships. Meaning that it’s not just a top-down dynamic anymore; fetish travels sideways, loops back, and spirals back in.

As someone who’s dated across the racial gamut, I can guarantee that yellow fever shows up from people of all colors. (Equal-opportunity fetishization turns out to be the true achievement of multiculturalism!)

And to be clear, I’m not saying that this problem is unique or exclusive to Asian women. I know that all minoritized people face varying forms of exoticization and fetishization, with real, material ramifications. (Think “BBC” tropes, or that of “spicy Latinas”).1

Nor am I absolving my Asian brethren from this critique. If anything, Asian men might be the biggest culprits when it comes to fetishizing Asian women. Maybe because they feel the most entitled to our bodies, having been taught to expect a good, Asian wife. Maybe because so many of them are deeply insecure, and feel enraged when Asian women “betray them” by dating outside the race. Maybe because they’re sick of being effeminated by mainstream culture, and need to displace their anger onto those with less power than themselves. I don’t know. I will say that my scariest intimate experiences have usually been with Asian men.

If anything can unite the men of different races (and I mean all different races, Asians included), it’d be their weird preoccupation with Asiatic femme sexuality.

Which, thankfully for them, can now be openly (even proudly) discussed. For this fetish has become trivialized, accepted, and reduced down to a punchline, even and especially among more progressive crowds (of which, I admit, I’m especially guilty2).

In some sense, the model minority myth, along with all our (real and perceived) adjacency to whiteness, has made yellow fever an increasingly palatable joke. Never mind the violent consequences it has for Asian femmes in economically and/or legally precarious positions, or the way this translates into abuse against Asians in sex and other intimate industries.

As an East Asian girl wading through the American dating scene, I simply can’t avoid those yellow fever waters.

Option 2: Miss Material Girl

But, okay. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong.

Ever since moving to NYC, I’ve found that race is no longer the primary driver of my desirability.

Here, my greatest selling point – the most enticing part of my social profile – is not to my skin tone, anime hair, or slightly slanted eyes, but rather my Ivy League degree. The one collecting dust under my bed. Because although no employer seems to care that I went to Brown, plenty of eligible bachelors do.

You’d be shocked at the number of lewd messages I get that sexualize not my features, face, or body, but my level of education, political stances, and/or perceived eloquence.3 In-between the dick pics and requests for nudes, people make constant remarks on my credentials and/or social standing. To quote just a few (with nasty parts redacted):

• I think ur smarter than me. Is it weird that it turns me on?

• I dunno what it is about you… maybe that u seem so woke?… but it makes me want to [very graphic, NSFW description].

• i stalked your insta and damn smth about yr spoken word got me rly horny

• I read your Substack articles as foreplay ;) 4

Which is odd, given that we’re all explicitly seeking mindless hook-ups on Feeld. These people aren’t searching for life-long partners, deep relations, or even thoughtful conversations. And I doubt they want me to recite poetry during sex, or debate Marxian theory as aftercare.5

So what gives? Why’s there so much focus on intellect? Is it that they all want to see me as a full, holistic human being, complete with thoughts and emotions? Or – God forbid – that sapiosexuality is a real and valid orientation?

Probably not.

Most likely, it’s because these qualities act as signals of social class.

Never mind that I work in the nonprofit industry and make below 60k a year. The fact of my education, language skills, and social media image all operate as indicators of socio-economic status. Which is, apparently, very sexy.

Granted, my sample size is narrow. Given the sort of kinks I enjoy (described here), I can imagine that my partners’ fixation on pedigree stems from a desire to feel powerful. The more status I’ve accrued, the more powerful they get to feel via interpersonal domination.6

If you want a broader perspective, see Lana Li’s essay on a similar topic. Her experiences, as an East Asian woman of relatively high social status – albeit of a very different lifestyle – mirror mine in many ways. And although I found her writing threaded through with classist undertones, much of which I can’t endorse, she nonetheless puts it quite well when she writes: “men… aren’t intimidated by my Harvard degree. They actually love it, or to my discomfort, fetishize it.”7

While Li celebrates the desirability of the “accomplished” woman – going as far as to commend how these sorts of women attract “‘high value’ men” (her words, not mine) – I can’t help but be suspicious. Has class really superseded race as the front-running fetish? And if so, is it really worth celebrating?

Option 3: The Accomplished Woman

All Li’s talk of “accomplished women” reminds me, eerily, of another cultural commentator from over 200 years ago. One who defined the “accomplished woman” in the following way:

No one can be really esteemed accomplished, who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.

For those of you unfamiliar with this lecture, it’s given by none other than Miss Caroline Bingley – the fictional antagonist of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Characterized as shallow, petty, and cruel, Caroline Bingley is obsessed with nothing but her own social status, and with the prospect of elevating it through marriage. Elitist to the point of parody, she acts as a satirical mouthpiece for flawed patriarchal systems.

This soliloquy, among others, are intended to both represent and mock societal expectations of women; to expose the absurdity of social demands. These points are solidified when Elizabeth, Austen’s central protagonist, quips that it’s a miracle such a creature could exist at all.

And yet, despite this critique being made all the way back in 1813, it seems that little has changed since Austen’s publication. Caroline Bingley’s long-winded ramble about the “accomplished woman” still holds true today. Sure, the actual skill list might need some updating – instead of “singing, drawing, and modern languages,” we might sub in qualities like “4-year college degree,” “white collar job,” “clean girl aesthetic,” and “good media taste.” But the basic logic remains. A woman must be accomplished – in accordance with mainstream ideals – to be seen as an eligible bachelorette.

Furthermore, “she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions” (Austen, 1813). All of which is a covert way of saying that she must present as a socio-economic elite.

Indeed, modern bachelors have developed their own coded language to filter out prospects by class. This includes the villainization of “republican makeup”, or the constant mocking of “bad lip filler” and “chopped BBLs.” Generally speaking, a lot of “icks” tend to act as cover-ups for beliefs about who is or isn’t of value.

I’ve felt this strongly in my hook-up endeavors, as play partners try to suss out facts about my upbringing, education, and professional achievements. Sometimes, I feel a bit like a showdog poodle on display: bred, groomed, and prodded, so as to win the attention of some wealthy Wall Street boy.

All of which is to say that perhaps, just perhaps, this supposed shift from a race-based rubric toward a class– (or “accomplishment–”) based criteria is not quite the progressive turn we think it is. Far from pushing us into some racially equitable future, it feels like falling back to the 1800s.

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Option 4: The Accomplished Woman… of Color?

And anyways, where does race fit into all of this?

Because certainly, I’d be naive to think that class can truly supplant race in how we perceive others, and foolish to ignore how race and class are inextricably intertwined.8

How does race shape our conception of the Accomplished Woman, and vice versa? What does it mean to be an AWOC (Accomplished Woman of Color)? Or, more on-topic, to fulfill an emerging AWOC-fetish?

For I think this might be the best way to describe New York’s dating scene: imbued with racial fetishes more refined than those of other states, in that they’re less conspicuous, harder to spot, and layered with classist fixations. Men aren’t just looking for a walking, talking waifu anymore; they’re looking for one that can successfully recount the latest New Yorker, like a well-bred parrot. Beyond her darkly-hued skin, an AWOC’s list of must-have traits extends to include the repertoire of her speech, mannerisms, and etiquette. Which, while it may sound more humanizing than basic-brand yellow or jungle fever, is nonetheless a reduction of people into pre-defined, empirical qualities; desired more for what she represents than who she actually is.

Not to mention the consequences this has for those without the resources, generational wealth, and/or social capital to pass as “accomplished.” The AWOC fetish-isn’t just harmful in itself, but also perpetuates the complementary narrative that those without fancy degrees are somehow less desirable. Regardless of the fact that they’re just as smart, capable, and talented (if not more so) than they’re privileged peers.

Furthermore, for all its focus on “invisible qualities,” the AWOC-fetish is far from color-blind. It merely asks that one inhabit and perform racialization differently than their predecessors.9 After all, given that race is a visual technology, then it stands to reason that one’s accomplished-woman “air and… expression” (as Caroline Bingley puts it) changes how they’re racially read. For example, consider how make-up varies by country and ethnicity. The racial presentation of a third-gen Asian American thus differs from that of someone born and raised in Asia, or a Black American from someone in Africa.

And just to be clear, becoming an AWOC should not be confused with becoming more-white. Indeed, I’d point out that “accomplished” Asian Americans are usually more tan and brown than their cross-continental counterparts, partly due to the difference in beauty standards. (Just to reiterate… I do not think the white-vs-BIPOC binary serves us as well as it once did).

Yellow fever hasn’t disappeared from my dating life, but evolved. As our racial imaginary changes over time, so do the processes of objectification and exoticization that accompany it. Intellect, cultural hybridity, even internal contradiction (between her “ancestral” and “current” home) are all parts of what makes the WOC so interesting beneath another’s gaze. (I will say that the times I get cat-called the most are, weirdly, when I’m wearing some combination of batik + converse shoes).

Option 5: Fuck That Shit

This advice is cliché, but at the end of the day, trying to mold yourself into someone’s fantasy – whether it’s waifu, material girl, or Accomplished Woman – is exhausting. The game is rigged. Every “option” is just another costume designed for someone else’s consumption.

So maybe the only path forward is to refuse the script altogether. Instead of bending yourself into whatever shape is theoretically “likable,” the real question is: do you even like them? Do they share your values, humor, and interests? Do they make you feel good in your own skin – not as a marketable archetype, but as a messy, contradictory, whole human being?

One of the bare-minimum standards for this decision is that they’re interested in you as a person; in your ideas, beliefs, and opinions, regardless of where you went to school. That they take you seriously, without needing any sort of external validation that you’re worth listening to.

Hence, Option 5: Opt out. The most eligible bachelorette (or bachelor) is the one who knows their worth.

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She’s not necessarily white, but she’s certainly swallowed the doctrine of white civility. By this, I mean that she’s starved out the racialized “savage” within herself – the part that was defined by primordial, gluttonous, lustful desires – and shut down all capacity for sensorial pleasure. She’s grown disconnected from her most innate knowledge, and deeply dependent on external validation.

Her descent into anorexia most likely began as an assertion of agency. Not-eating was her way of feeling in-control. Perhaps her only way of feeling in-control.

Even if her very seduction into this belief (not-eating = control) is, ironically enough, a result of broader systemic manipulation.

By this, I’m referring to how our narrative around food restriction has been seeded into the collective culture, discourse, and subconscious via decades of political messaging, much of which preceded her (or my) existence. Its very logic is rooted in deep-seated nationalistic ideologies,1 traced all the way back to the 1910s (if not earlier2).

It was during those years that not-eating became almost synonymous with good citizenship. A rapid cascade of socio-political transformations led to food restriction being seen as a gauge of one’s moral virtue, racial purity, and social propriety. Examining these changes, along with their effects, is necessary to understand how anorexia was (and is) deployed as a tool of state control.

1910-20s: The rise of calorie science and wartime rationing

The late 1910s saw a firestorm of political shifts, each of which irreversibly altered America’s dietary norms. These included: the rise of calorie science, the outbreak of World War I, and the surging popularity of Euthenics (a.k.a. Eugenics’ “sister science”).

First, the reduction of food into quantitative numbers (“calories”) effectively supplanted the role of taste, pleasure, and tradition in choosing what to eat. Decisions once rooted in culture and preference were now meant to be determined by rational, “objective” logic.3 Popular advice – circulated by home economics textbooks, newspaper columns, and political messaging – consistently advocated for strict limits on calorie consumption. Some went so far as to villainize “taste and desire” as inherently wicked and corrupt.4

The authority of calorie science was further solidified during World War I, when it was used to promote food rationing. As the US government pushed for civilians to reduce their eating habits, calorie science offered the foundation for two key claims. First, that different grains and food products were functionally interchangeable – regardless of taste – due to their comparable nutritional value. Second, that human beings can – and should – subsist off of some abstract, caloric minimum, as decided by a faceless, nameless scientific expert. Not only was such a dietary change possible, but also morally righteous and necessary.

In this way, the United States differed from their European counterparts, who managed rations through top-down policing. America, the so-called “Land of the Free,” saw such an enforcement as undemocratic, borderline fascist, and antithetical to their core ideologies. Instead, they chose to promote “voluntary rationing” by equating food-restriction with moral goodness. So long as citizens were convinced that going-hungry was of their own, free will – and, moreover, an expression of their patriotic duty – they’d embrace such a challenge with vigor.

Hence, the United States Food Administration launched a series of campaigns that framed food conservation as a sign of virtue, health, and beauty. In New York’s Grand Central, for instance, an overhead banner instructed viewers to “Eat less, look better, feel better, help win the war” (Veit, 2013). Similarly, the Food Administration’s much-repeated mantra throughout this period was that everyday civilians must aspire to “victory over ourselves” (Veit, 2013). American citizens (mainly women) were called upon to change their kitchen habits, with the new priority of nutrition over pleasure.

Voluntary rationing as patriotic duty and citizenship

Over time, this association between diet and patriotic duty would extend to questions of civil rights. Restricting one’s eating habits, various publications proclaimed, was necessary to prove the capacity for rationality and discipline needed to earn full citizenship.

A prominent (though admittedly decontextualized) Woodrow Wilson quote was often circulated at this time. “If men have not self-control,” it goes, “[then] they are not capable of that great thing we call democracy” (Veit, 2013).

Given the then-ongoing suffrage movement, the significance of this connection should not be understated. Indeed, is it any coincidence that white women, who were seen as bearing the burden of conservative eating, won their right to vote during this same period?5

The extent to which rationing was truly “voluntary” is thus up for debate, given that the alternative was to be seen as morally, intellectually, and politically insufficient.

In short, it’s in this way that civilians were conditioned to regulate their own eating habits (in accordance with mainstream norms), all whilst believing that such restrictions were expressions of their own, free will.

As Saidiya Hartman puts it, the “liberty” here is actually exhortation, albeit masked in the language of “obligation, duty, and responsibility” (Hartman, 1997, p. 141).6 It is thus that the “burden of freedom” – or rather, the burden of continually proving oneself worthy of such freedom – becomes just as heavy as external demands (p. 142).

Far from refusing to become a surveillance state, the US government merely minimized the need for middlemen by conditioning civilians to regulate themselves. (Notably, a number of propaganda flyers quite literally told citizens to “Be Your Own Policeman.”)

The truly insidious nature of this campaign, however, is not only how it convinced Americans that going-hungry was their own decision, but that doing so amounted to the accumulation of virtue.

Indeed, we find traces of this ideology still lingering in our collective unconscious today, wherein fat is often seen as an indicator of laziness, greed, or other forms of immorality. Such beliefs show up in hospitals, where overweight people are less likely to receive necessary treatment; in our media, where fat villains are framed as stupid, tyrannical, and/or cruel; and our everyday social interactions, where overweight people are treated as inferior and/or unwanted.

Is it any surprise, then, that so many of us are hardwired to view thinness as a measure of superiority; to believe that the skinnier we are, the more valuable a person/citizen/body we become? And is it at all strange that we’ve been conditioned see such self-starvation – which is historically, culturally, and systemically equated with willpower – as an act of agency, strength, and self-determination; even, at times, political defiance?

Perhaps the worst part of this all is that, once someone is steeped in this mentality, no amount of “skinny” is ever skinny-enough. There’s always room to be thinner, better, more virtuous than one already is. The goalpost keeps moving, so the starvation never ends.

As much as anorexia cloaks itself in the language of restraint, it’s really just another unruly temptation – capable of consuming the subject-body, all whilst convincing them that it’s of their own, free will.

Modulation of the Subject-Body

What the US government probably didn’t know – yet nonetheless benefits from – is how addicting it feels to “deliberately” starve oneself. As the sensation of hunger becomes entwined with that of achievement, the anorexic subject grows increasingly hooked on the dopamine released by fasting. Enacted over time, this behavior literally reshapes one’s neural pathways to reinforce its own perceived necessity.

Not to mention the increasing evidence showing that eating disorders, like many other mental illnesses, are heritable; passed down from parents to children.

Anorexia is thus not only an avenue toward good citizenship, but also modulates the body and its descendants to remain good citizens.

Without conflating the two, it’s useful to contextualize this conditioning within the United States’ longer history of weaponizing addiction against politically devalued populations. We might note how colonizers introduced alcohol to Native communities, so as to induce alcoholism and stifle the threat posed by potential insurgence (Woodland & Page, 2023). Or, how Big Pharma targeted poor Black, brown, and Appalachian communities for opioid distribution, so as to foster addiction and boost profits.

Notably, of course, there are clear and important differences between substance abuse and eating disorders. It’s important to note that those struggling with the former face criminalization, employment discrimination, incarceration, and many other legal challenges. The latter, quite often, do not. If I mention this wider pattern of systemically induced addiction, it’s only to point to the ways that hegemonic powers have consistently deployed addiction (intentionally or not) as a tool of control and demobilization.

As I’ll get to in a later essay, we might understand anorexia – or, more precisely, the propaganda, institutions, and media that help induce it – as a form of Foucault’s biopower. His framework posits that oppressive systems are maintained not only by overt force, but also through the subtle modulation of bodies via systems like schools, hospitals, and sexual norms. Or even health classes, cookbooks, and fitness magazines! Or even… Henry Sherman’s Home Economics book, Chemistry of Food and Nutrition.

Last, but certainly not least: where does race fit in?

If this essay has seemed suspiciously colorblind to you, know that it was deliberate. The evolution of anorexia within Black, brown, and immigrant communities has occurred in parallel to that of their white counterparts, but in ways complicated by racism and xenophobia. Oftimes, racialized people were viewed as inherently gluttonous, greedy, and lacking self-control – thus offering a foil for white women, through their anorexic endeavors, to distinguish themselves from.

Indeed, much of early food management discourse was actually built on efforts to secure white boundaries against racialized “contamination” (via BIPOC’s “strange” and “exotic” foods).

Given all of this, the narratives around discipline and civil rights affect BIPOC communities in very different ways. An exploration of these trends deserves a dedicated piece of its own, which I plan to write in the coming weeks.

The anorexic woman I began with – exceedingly disciplined, chronically self-regulating – had never been just an individual. She’s the echo of a century-old project, one that fused bodily control with moral worth, citizenship, and patriotism. She’s a perfect subject; a model citizen.

Either the author (1) craves control so desperately that she turns her body into an ongoing object of discipline; (2) starves herself to meet unattainable beauty standards; (3) needs the sort of “high” (a.k.a. derealization) attained by chronic hunger, so as to cope with daily struggles; and/or (4) just doesn’t want to exist anymore, with starvation being the most accessible means of slow suicide.

Such is a roughly sketched taxonomy of E.D. essays. Although they have, thankfully, become increasingly complicated by questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in recent years, most can still be loosely organized into some combination of these trends.

I’m familiar with this canon, in part because I’ve lived through all four tropes. Sometimes concurrently, sometimes not. (During which, these essays served as a major lifeline).

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Such is the curse of being a self-proclaimed hot-girl with major manic tendencies: I seem destined to be a walking, talking cliché.

My story's already been played out, over and over again, by a million different people, in a million different places. It’s also been depicted, researched, and unpacked by thousands of artists and thinkers, more eloquent than I could ever be.

So much so that this entire ordeal (i.e. purging every meal for four years, passing out, almost dying, etc. etc. etc.) has felt, often enough, like I was re-enacting a very lazily written script. Dear Lord, couldn’t you come up with something new? If I have to die, why’s it have to be in the most self-inflicted, John-Greenian, manic pixie white girl way?

I was so embarrassed by the triteness of it all, that it took me years to seek help.

I mean, come on. How could I look my parents in the eye – as descendants of famine, displacement, and poverty; who’d helped me through endless life-threatening health crises, medical treatments, and hospital visits; who’d sacrificed everything to ensure my stability – and confess that I’d flushed it all away? (Literally. Gagged, vomited, flushed… hahaha.)

Instead, I convinced myself that I could overcome this challenge through sheer force of will. If I had the discipline to starve myself, surely I also had it in me to recover. In much the same way an addict “can quit whenever s/he wants,” I would simply choose to eat better.

As you might’ve guessed, it did not work.

In the end, it would take dropping to 76 pounds, losing my job, almost dying, and a tight scrape with forced institutionalization before I finally asked for support.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing extraordinary about this.

For all our talk of tolerance, eating disorders still belong to a pantheon of mental illnesses (alongside addiction, substance abuse, self-harm, para/suicidality, etc.) that our culture looks down upon as faults of character or weakness of will. Anorexia, in particular, is most unfairly associated with vanity and shallowness. Probably because its symptoms are most visibly overrepresented in teenage girls.1 And there’s no one our society hates more than a teenage girl.

To find evidence of this, one has to look no farther than the abundance of TV shows and popular media that deploy anorexia as a punchline, characterize it as a bimbo’s dieting fad, or use it to indicate the shallowness of a “mean girl” character.

But this belittlement obscures the very real severity of its impact. Anorexia has the second highest mortality rate of all psychiatric illnesses, just behind opioid use disorder. Its relapse rate is 40-50%, with many never fully recovering.

And this is only those on record. Who knows how many more eating disorders go undiagnosed, unnoticed, or utterly ignored, either because it’s such a normalized part of “diet culture,” or the affected person lacks the wealth and resources needed to attain professional support.

It should be mentioned, moreover, that eating disorders are often co-morbid with substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder, PTSD, severe depression, and more; all of which function in mutually perpetuating cycles. Many of the deaths attributed to these illnesses – though at least partially caused by starvation, malnourishment, and its effects on one’s judgement-making abilities – are largely unrecognized as eating disorder-related.

So, I dunno. Fuck the stigma around clichés. They exist for a reason.

The fact that anorexia’s become “so passé” only gestures to how we’ve managed to recognize its alarming salience, while still dismissing its severity. This sort of cognitive dissonance, which I admit to being complicit, remains a huge barrier to those seeking help.

Broadly speaking, the way our cultural discourse depicts, and responds, to any sort of epidemic is deeply revealing of who we see (or don’t see) as worthwhile. And it’s no coincidence that anorexia, as an illness most often associated with femininity, is one so often trivialized.

This August marks the one year anniversary of my recovery. While I’m still working on unlearning the inherent shame of such a fuck-ass illness, I also feel like I’ve created enough distance where I can write about it from a place of emotional safety.

So, in honor of this milestone – which I long thought I’d never reach – I’ll be writing a series of posts that explore the different aspects of anorexia: as a sociological phenomenon, a product of colonial history, a biopolitical weapon, a spiritual deadening, and an entrypoint to critiquing choice-based activism. I’ll also be speaking to what it’s like at rock bottom, along with how such an experience alters – even widens – one’s frame of mind.

For those of you who know me, it should hopefully come as no surprise that I’m approaching this through a harm reductionist framework. Eating disorders, as any other form of self-injury, usually emerge from necessity. For many, it’s a tool of survival, a defense mechanism, or their only way of coping with a deeply violent world.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be drawing from crip theory, disability justice, Mad Studies, and Fat Studies to understand this psycho-social phenomenon. I write from the standpoint of a third-gen immigrant, cis, East Asian girl with significant socio-economic privilege, who grew up physically disabled in several ways. I name these identities explicitly, in part to contextualize my experience, but also to gesture at the ways it’s been deeply shaped by the structures that surround me.

Needless to say, I can speak only from my own limited point of view – the bounds of which I’ll try to point out whenever it seems relevant.

I’d love, and be so grateful, if you followed along with me as I unpack this with y’all <3 by hitting the Subscribe button 🥰

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IF YOU NEED IMMEDIATE SUPPORT

For those who need less abstract assistance, I’ve also created this guide of “things I wish I knew about recovering from an ED.” It contains contacts, advice, and other resources that might be useful, especially for those who are (rightfully) wary of the medical industrial complex.

NEXT IN THIS SERIES: Anorexia as a Tool of the State

I’ve had therapists call 9-1-1 to my door, on account of my failing to meet a weight goal. I’ve had them threaten me with forced institutionalization. And I’ve had them say deeply racist, hurtful things, all whilst denying how a 9-1-1 call could possibly be triggering for certain demographics.

And I know how fucking scary your own apartment can feel in the aftermath of such a boundary-breach. Professionally speaking, it certainly doesn’t motivate someone to get better.

I wouldn’t wish that shit upon anybody.

So, in lieu of having had such a resource myself, I’m starting up a small, non-exhaustive guide to seeking safe, politically-conscious care. I’m not a medical professional – nor do I claim to be – so granted, take it with a grain of salt. I speak purely from my own lived experiences, and am more than open to suggestions, revisions, and/or additions from community members.

Table of contents:

1. Finding a therapist: know what to ask for

2. Questions to vet a potential therapist

3. Putting together a team (dieticians, clinicians, and psychiatrists)

4. Suggested reading

5. Open ask: send me residential care advice!

6. Final note

Finding a Therapist: Know what to ask for

Personally speaking, I need a therapist that:

• RESPECTS PATIENT AUTONOMY. Meaning, they’ll ask for my consent before deciding on shifting to residential care. Also meaning, they work collaboratively with me on any recovery plans and/or behavioral changes.

• IS SPECIFICALLY TRAINED IN EATING DISORDER RECOVERY. Meaning, they’re not a general therapist and/or trained in a different area. Also meaning, they can cite the literature, programs, and/or credentials they have in this space.

• EMPATHIZES WITH A DISTRUST OF MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS. Meaning, they won’t scoff at or belittle me for being wary of their field. Also meaning, they understand all the reasons why a minoritized person would want to stay away, and are willing to put in the work to create a space where I can feel safe.

• IS ANTI-RACIST AND CULTURALLY COMPETENT (or is at least willing to learn). Meaning, they’re not going to approach everything through an white cultural lens. Also meaning, they understand the systemic factors that contribute to my experience.

In order to find such a therapist, it can be helpful to have a basic grasp on the vocabulary and frameworks used in the field. To this end, I’ve jotted down a couple helpful terms below (“harm reduction” and “decolonial therapy”) and included some links to learn more about each.

Frameworks:

• For a brief summary of harm reduction in ED recovery, check out this post.

• Check out @dr.jenniewh and @bodyjustice.therapist for guides on eating disorder recovery through a harm reductionist lens. Both are taking clients in their respective jurisdictions. If you happen to live outside their given states, no worries – scroll to the bottom for advice on finding a trustworthy therapist in your area.

• Check out @decolonizingtherapy, along with her book of the same name, for information on decolonial

If you want more in-depth resources, check out the book recs at the bottom of this post.

Questions to ask a potential therapist

What’s your therapeutic framework?

• Here’s an open-ended question to help you get a gist of what they do. Common answers will include CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy). While I didn’t name them above, both these approaches are pretty helpful when it comes to changing literal behavioral patterns and practices.

Are you familiar with decolonial and/or anti-racist frameworks? What texts and/or books inform your work?

• This latter question allows you to test if they really know what they’re talking about, or if they’re just saying Yes in order to get a new client. I was super lucky in this regard, as the third therapist I called not only read and loved Decolonizing Therapy, but was literally taking a professional development course on that exact text.

How do you define "harm reduction" in the context of eating disorder recovery?

• Again, this is giving them a chance to show off their knowledge + make you feel comfortable in their field expertise.

How do you address situations where a client's harm reduction goals might differ from traditional abstinence-focused approaches?

• Meaning, how will your therapist act if the patient isn’t already the “perfect patient” (i.e. perfectly willing and amendable to whatever request the therapist makes)? How will they work with you to validate your own goals, even if they clash with theirs?

How do you ensure client autonomy and empower individuals to make informed choices?

What is your stance on forced institutionalization? What criteria would have to be met in order for you to call 9-1-1 or similar on me?

• It’s important to ask explicitly what would trigger a 9-1-1 call, so that you can feel safe and speak vulnerably moving forward. For instance, with one therapist, I was too afraid to ever tell her when I purged, because I thought she might call the medics on me immediately. It would be helpful to have a clear, non-ambiguous understanding of what actually triggers a call, so that you can share without fear.

###

If you identify as BIPOC, queer, an immigrant, and/or carry an identity relevant to recovery, here are a few questions (taken from Jaja Chen) that can help you sus out a therapist’s cultural competency.

• What is your racial/ethnic and cultural background? How does that impact your work as a therapist?

• What is your experience when it comes to working with ________ (ex. specific racial/ethnic backgrounds, immigrant populations, LGBTQ, etc.)

• How do you work with clients whom have experienced racism, discrimination, or immigration-related concerns?

• What does it mean to you to provide culturally competent care? What training have you had on this topic?

• What is your comfort level when it comes to talking about topics such as white privilege, racism, discrimination, or systemic oppression?

Putting Together a Team

What I didn’t know, when I first began recovery, was that most patients work with more than just a therapist. Indeed, because eating disorders are as much a physiological illness as they are a psychological one, it can be really important to have experts trained in the biological/physical aspects of care.

This, to be honest, is one of the main benefits of joining a residential facility, as they provide you with a cohesive, competent team from Day 1.

So, if you can, I recommend seeking and contacting other professionals, either simultaneous to or after finding a therapist. (Note: A lot of ED therapists will have their own recommendations for dieticians, clinicians, and psychologists, so definitely ask your therapist if you have one).

Because putting together a team can seem so overwhelming, I’ve listed out my own personal order of priorities re. finding experts.

Priority #1: Dietician

I know it sounds dumb. Like, so dumb, to “have a dietician”. But this connection was actually so incredibly helpful for me, maybe even more so than my therapist.

It’s the dietician that will help you create tangible shifts in eating behaviors. They’re trained and equipped to make small, incremental changes that will not overwhelm or scare you, whilst still being geared toward your ultimate recovery. (TBH, this is the harm reduction-esque part of the treatment!).

It also helps that dieticians are covered by a lot of basic insurances, so be sure to check that out.

And I’d be stupid to not name and personally recommend my own dietician, Jessica Cortez.1 She’s fucking awesome. Like, actually, so fucking awesome. She’s patient, empathetic, and was completely willing to work with me at a pace that felt right for me.

Priority #2: Clinician

Eating disorders really fuck up your body. It causes serious heart problems, fatal mineral deficiencies, organ failure, and more; most of which cannot be determined by a weighing scale alone.

Consequently, it’s really important to have a clinician that can check up on these things regularly.

Again, here, you’ll want to find someone who believes in a harm reductionist approach and won’t just ship you off to a residential center without your consent. To do this, either refer to the therapist questions above, or ask for advice from your existing team.

Priority #3: Psychiatrist

If you’re willing and open to medication, finding a trustworthy psychiatrist could help significantly. Especially since eating disorders usually stem from some other, pre-existing mental disorder (e.g. depression, OCD, etc.), treating those illnesses can be a real game-changer.

Book Recommendations:

First, here are three accessible, compelling reads that really helped me (I’m sure there are many others; these are just the ones that found me at the right time):

• Strangers to Ourselves: An exploration of different mental illnesses, with two chapters on eating disorders, that approach such phenomena from an empathetic lens; refusing to pathologize deviant behaviors, and instead asking why they emerge and what they provide to the affected person. Each chapter is formatted around a real person and their story, which makes for a more intriguing, plot-centric read. It also includes a nuanced, balanced review of the debate on psychiatric medicines.

• Limits of My Language: A highly relatable overview of depression and how it feels. Made me feel very seen and offered my language to articulate the struggles I was undergoing. Also provides a political analysis of eating disorders and why they arise, along with practical advice for recovery.

• Healing Justice Lineages: An anthology of different healing practices, as drawn from Black and brown ancestral knowledges. Provides an analysis of the inherent political aspects of communal healing, along with how such work can be mutually interwoven with our organizing practices.

• The Hollow Half: In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. This memoir dives deep into three generations of Palestinian displacement and its deep entanglements with modern day eating disorders.

If you want a more academic, systemic analysis of eating disorders, check out Modern Food, Moral Food by Helen Zoe Veit. It provides an overview of how this shit is rooted in colonial and white supremacist histories (especially its chapter on calorie counting), and can provide an extra oompf for those who are motivated by a drive toward political resistance.

Finally, for the most practical how-to to recovery, I have to recommend the 8 Keys Strategies and 8 Keys Workbook.

(If you need help pirating a copy of anything for free, just shoot me a DM!)

Residential Care

I admit that I don’t have advice for those who want and/or need to enter a residential facility, largely because I do not have experience here. If anyone has advice or recommendations, please let me know, and I can add it here.

Final Note

If you’ve gotten this far, then I just wanna say that I’m proud of you… this stuff is hard to acknowledge, much less seek help for. So you’re on the right track, and that’s fucing awesome. Even if you can’t see it now, I promise – promise – that it does get better.

If it’s not obvious, I’m really feeling my oats this season. A new yellow belle of the ball. The world is my oyster, and Feeld is my fucking shucking fucking knife. (Sure, there’s not a whole lot of pearls in the shell, but I’m more than happy with its meat. Hah!)

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This Summer is the first in a long while that I’ve been physically healthy, mentally well, and not in recovery for some sort of mind/body-fuckery. I feel secure enough, finally, to engage in hook-up culture without having to worry that my entire, fragile psyche will be shattered by the smallest of perceivable slights.

Consequently, it’s also the first time I can access a privilege I’ve always coveted; one that’s usually reserved for wealthy, white people with enough material, emotional, and social stability to distinguish between roleplay and real-life.

I’m referring to that of submissive sex, surrender, masochism, and the relinquishment of power; of deliberate and intentional objecthood, performed with and for total strangers.

Admittedly, it’s a practice that Asian women – and racialized femmes at large – have long had a fraught relationship with, given the way that such dynamics (dom/sub, but also: person/thing, owner/property, colonizer/savage) have historically been enforced. I’m no stranger to the guilt that accompanies this sort of remembrance, nor am I unaware of how my peers, elders, and even ancestors might feel about my actions.

Indeed, there are moments – in the aftermath of good aftercare – when all these concerns catch up to me: that I’ve been a shitty leftist, feminist, daughter; that in letting myself be objectified, I’ve brought shame to all my ancestors who strove for precisely the opposite (i.e. the dignity of personhood and full humanity).

One friend (who shall remain unnamed) once accused me of “betraying the Asian community,” by validating the stereotype of Asian femmes as sexually promiscuous.

After I politely asked her to shove it up her ass, I took her opinion into serious consideration. And after much contemplation, decided that she was (still) wrong. Also, super fucking self-righteous, annoying, and therefore removed from my close friends list.

But, okay. I get where she’s coming from.

Unlike the “normative” subject, racialized and minoritized femmes are never seen solely as individuals, but rather also and always as representatives of their collective. The pressure to be perfect, sinless, virginal saints is thus quadrupled, in that our actions inevitably reflect back on the communities that raised us. There are real-world consequences to which narratives we uphold, consciously or not, on people who look like us; especially for those in positions of greater vulnerability.

Indeed, it’s impossible to ignore the frightening impact of widespread fetishization: from the serial murders of Black and brown trans women, to the transnational femicidio of Latine girls, to the violent shooting and criminalization of Asian spa and sex workers.

Bearing the question: is it ever ethical – far less reclamatory – to encourage such dynamics through an “anon” dating profile? Or does the consensual degradation of myself, as an [Insert Identities Here], make me complicit in the degradation of all [young women / Asian femmes / people of color / etc.]?

Furthermore, can kink ever “just be kink” when the systems of power, dominance, and inequity that undergird such play remain intact? Is it ever really “subversive” to claim objecthood when, regardless of your consent, plenty of people still see and treat you as a commodity?

Recent online discourse tends to think not. These last couple of months, in particular, have seen a resurgence of oddly puritanical, 1970s-feminist thinking – comprised of (mostly pretty boring) Sabrina Carpenter think pieces – that either discount, omit, or explain away the possibility of feminine sexual pleasure.1

A growing number of content creators seem to believe that the existence of porn, kink, and fetish is inherently and exclusively patriarchal. Femmes who enjoy, consume, or profit from such an industry, by extension, are either self-hating sell-outs or self-deluded victims. (For examples of such arguments, just look up #anticorn on TikTok).

Putting aside the blatantly SWERFy undertones of this narrative,2 as well as its exceptionally patronizing language, I’m really quite struck by these writers’ total failure to consider the sensation, desire, and eroticism that might drive such sexual encounters. I’m frustrated, moreover, by their reduction of femmes into permanent victims, as if we’re unable to actively make our own choices.

In denying the agency of consenting adults, these writers inadvertently re-objectify the very people they see themselves as liberating. Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson put it best when they explain how liberals’ “presentist concerns about systemic racial inequality and white supremacy,” tend to “circumscribe…the intimate and interior lives” of subjugated peoples (p. 189). As if one’s socio-political position precludes their capacity for kink play and pleasure.

Puritan feminists, in erasing the existence of sexual enjoyment, inevitably neglect how such sensation may allow us to “steal [our] bodies back” from systems of control; how erotic practices, no matter how fringe, are a way to reconnect with our bodies in a culture that would rather have us self-estranged.3

In doing so, these activists perpetuate a repression of the body and all its sensations, via the language of “progressive” moral policing. They uphold a colonial privileging of the rational, self-possessed, moral subject, whose mind is in constant, total control of the body.

Not only is this stance misaligned with real life, in which our desires and feelings are often illogical, irrational, and at odds with our conscious thoughts – but it also completely disregards the political potency (even necessity) of healthy, consensual eroticism; of allowing the body, on occasion, to overwhelm the mind.

By this, I mean that there’s a delicious, incoherent sort of agency to be discovered by shutting off one’s brain.

Even if the avenue to realizing such power is, often enough, through the consensual assumption of objecthood.

For someone who thinks (and overthinks) a little too much, I relish the moments I exist as nothing but flesh. Where I’m not interested in thinking; just feeling, feeling, and feeling.

It’s once I’ve relinquished all control over a situation, all decision-making power, that I can return to my body; experiencing each moment of pleasure, without having to plan for what comes next.

This dynamic allows me to be present and self-connected in a way I’m otherwise not. And it creates space, so much space, for new sensation. Once the brain shuts down, it’s like a whole other part of my interior world, heretofore hidden, is completely unlocked; teeming with shocking intensity.

Following Audre Lorde (1978):

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence… (p. 47).

Put otherwise, it’s a special kind of getting-fucked that teaches us to raise the motherfucking bar. Once you’ve tapped into that reservoir of un(civilized)human feeling, it becomes impossible to settle for the stale “good-enough” state-of-things that liberals so often worship.

Given that colonial systems rely on the suppression of embodied knowledge, embracing eroticism thus poses a significant threat to structures of status quo governance.

According to Lorde (1977), moreover, such eroticism allows us to be “more in touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living”; capable of evaluating life on the basis of what “feels right,” rather than purely through the lens of Euro-dominated thought (p. 26).

Speaking solely from my own experience, it just so happens that one pathway to this source is through deliberate objecthood, un-humanization, and the attendant relinquishment of self-composure.

I’m far from the first writer – much less the first Asian femme – to identify the emancipatory potential of submissive sex. Even if most theorists don’t explicitly name themselves as # Rope Bunnies, the subtext is there (for those with eyes to see it)!

In Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng (2018) writes:

It may seem counterintuitive or even dangerous to talk about the raced and sexualized body’s affinity for being thinglike, but it is precisely the overcorporealized body that may find the most freedom in the rehearsal of corporeal dematerialization (p. 85).

What Cheng means by this is that, in exercising a “nonsubjective agency,” the objectified femme-of-color eludes the imposition of European rationality. The performance of objecthood allows for “a temporary relief from the burdens of personhood and visibility” (p. 77). And, a la Saidiya Hartman (1997), this transcendence puts one beyond the control of a self-disciplinary culture and society.

Similarly, in Has the Queer Ever Been Human?, Luciano and Chen (2015) posit “dehumanization as an opportunity” (p. 186) to realize forms of agency beyond the purview of Cartesian subjecthood. As Vivian L. Huang (2022) argues, such thingliness allows “modes of doing, knowing, and being that are inaccessible” to a colonial gaze (p. 3); it achieves what Bayo Akomalafe (2023) describes, in reference to Black subjecthood, as ontological fugitivity. By assuming objecthood, one becomes unreadable to the hegemonic field of interpretive linguistics.

This approach gestures at a new way of responding to dehumanization. Rather than attempt claiming access to the human – a category that has, from its very inception, been built upon our exclusion – it enables us to lean into all the possibilities of being self-avowedly non-human. Free from the responsibilities of self-possessed, neoliberal subjecthood; from the individualizing, isolating implications of being a self-bounded person.

Further, it gestures to ways of navigating the world that rely on physical feeling – perhaps even pleasure – rather than “logical,” thoughtful willpower.

And, baby, I’m all here for pleasure.

What new politics are opened up by the centering of sensation in our theory, praxis, and everyday life?

To sit with our feelings, not in an attempt to understand them, but to see where and how they might move us?

Following a number of prominent theorists, I’m interested in viewing affect not as a byproduct of logic and reason, but rather as “the felt change in the power of the body” (Protevi, 2009). If all affect refers to “an ability to affect and be affected” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), then the nurturance of positive feeling suggests a greater capacity for action. Isn’t this, in itself, significant to any political agenda?

(At the very least, it’s certainly less petrifying than over-intellectualization!).

Adopting such an approach, of sensation-centered action, requires relinquishing the liberal impulse to dissect and “understand” the deeper meaning of every thought and feeling.4 It means accepting that we’ll never fully comprehend our fluid, ever-evolving selves, in return for getting to feel things more intensely.

By this, I mean that: Yes, at the deep, hidden core of most kink play, there might be some sort of unresolved trauma or self-hatred. Sure. It sounds likely.

But honestly? I don't care!!! And neither should you!!

There are limits to therapy-culture, with its instinct to “unpack” each feeling, or discover its so-called “root causes” via psychoanalysis.

I simply cannot afford to live my whole life from within the tiny bounds of my brain, trying to rationalize every aspect of my existence. If I did, I’d risk missing out on sensation itself, along with everything it has to offer.

To be clear, I recognize the harm that arises from mass-endorsed fetishization. I whole-heartedly oppose the popular portrayal of Asian and other racialized femmes as inferior, unfeeling, or existing solely for the sake of a white/masculine gaze. I’m vocally critical of any narrative that circulates or normalizes such an inherently violent view.

And at the same time, I reject the premise put forth by purity feminism: that fighting such a stereotype requires, or even permits, policing femme bodies and pleasure.

I’m sick of the narrative that we’re somehow complicit in our own oppression, merely because we manage to find pleasure in the circumstances we’re given. I find it both hurtful and regressive to focus blame on individual femmes, or their chosen partners, rather than the structures that normalize non-consensual violence.

I hate, in particular, how it portrays people as mere synecdoches for their socio-political histories, rather than complex, messy individuals with complex, messy desires. It flattens out our relationships, without regard for particular circumstances surrounding them, and demands that we be politically perfect (self-policing) subjects.

Which, ironically, is just as dehumanizing as the objectification that purity-centric critique intends to address.

Anyways, I highly doubt that the repression of my own pleasure will have any effect on the material or rhetorical circumstances around me. I would rather channel my energy, gained through eroticism or otherwise, into actually pragmatic, political actions. Whether that be marching in the streets, or caring for my community; it all requires a certain baseline of emotional wellness.

No, sex is not inherently political. But politics cannot exist without sensation; and for some of us, this is best spurred by pleasures of the flesh. I.e., hot, kinky sex.

So, in a world that already hates and fears feminine pleasure, I simply refuse to cut off yet another avenue to that “hidden source of power” (Lorde, 1977). Regardless of what my so-called sisters may think.

Honestly? If I was a less classy woman, I’d end this essay by telling you how annoyed I get whenever I see an anti-kink “feminist” pop up on my timeline. With their superiority complex and bloated-ass egos; so smug and self-righteous, despite their only political education being, quite evidently, the fucking Handmaid’s Tale.

And if I were less classy still? I’d let you know that I’m very much single. Meaning: if you know your way around ropes, blindfolds, or whips, I’m there. Also meaning: yes sir, yes ma’am, please and thank you.

NOTES

For many marginalized people, the deliberate re-enactment of power differentials – in the form of mutually recognized roleplay – can feel like a reclamation of agency within their given situation. Indeed, there’s something so delicious about choosing to play a role for a fixed amount of time, within a fixed amount of space, before returning to a world where I have zero control otherwise. To not only claim it as my choice, but also decide where, how, and with whom it occurs; to decide when it starts, and when it ends.

Kaneisha, the central protagonist in Jeremy O’Harris’ Slave Play, exemplifies this in the extreme: making her white, liberal boyfriend kink-roleplay as an enslaver, so as to make him reckon with his own history as a white “demon”. In an odd, meta sort of way, this fantasy places Kaneisha in a position of control, thus allowing her to gain a sense of peace about her interracial relationship.

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The Online Right is getting hunky. Six-packs, buff arms, toned chests: all these things and more have become key traits of the right-wing manosphere. From Andrew Tate, to Myron Gaines, to billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg, the new face of the conservative movement is here. Fit, muscly men, whose biceps barely fit in their tight, black tees.

Meanwhile, the Left has nothing to offer but soy boys, vegans, and plant daddies. It’s almost like they’re uninterested in padding soft, fragile egos with layers of muscle and sinew, or proving their masculinity through “alpha male” regiments at 4 in the morning.

In fact, the Right has such an exclusive chokehold on fitness aesthetics, it seems that even the NYTimes can’t write about Hasan Piker (a buff, leftist commentator) without referring to him as a “Progressive Mind in a MAGA body.”

Thus, a clear dichotomy emerges: between buff hunks on the Right, and twig-thin nerds on the Left.

But don’t let the surface-level difference fool you. In many ways, conservative influencers are driving toward much the same goal as left-leaning organizers. Both want to feel powerful in their bodies. Both want to feel capable, strong, and virile; like they have autonomy over their flesh, and agency over their movement.

Jonathan Keeperman (a prominent voice on the New Right, known online as L0m3z) describes his movement’s goal as “a sense of vitality”; defined as “the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future.”

Leftists, too, strive toward “vitality”. The Embodiment Institute, for instance – a training center for left-wing organizers – equips their participants with the ability “to fully feel their lives… [so that they’re] neither forced into numbness nor reactivity.” Similarly, Generative Somatics – another training institute – is designed to help organizers “engage the body (emotions, sensations, physiology),” so they can channel their embodied knowledge into movement work. In centering feeling, embodiment, and innate power, these goals may as well be the unwritten elaboration to Keeperman’s ideal.1

Both the Left and the Right, in surprising simultaneity, are thus evoking the promise of power at a time when such a feeling seems to be in short supply. Indeed, faced by mass economic precarity, global unrest, and corruption rampant among our political parties, Americans on both sides of the aisle feel more powerless today than ever before. It’s only natural, then, that they’re drawn to the vision of vitality, offered – albeit through very different means – by either end of the political spectrum.

The question, then: What are the differential effects achieved by these competing strategies? And which are more successful?

To get at the root of this dilemma, it might be helpful to dissect the foundational ideologies of the Left and Right respectively; to acknowledge their overlaps, before tracing out their conflict.

Consider the following four quotes. Two are from Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), the “most influential figure on the Nietzschean Right,” and two are from Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian, feminist poet, who remains one of the most notable thinkers on the Left. These quotes have been edited to remove gender markers. Can you figure out whose is whose?

1. “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings… The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression.”

2. “Life has a thing inside it that reaches beyond itself… if you don’t reach beyond yourself you are dead! Most of mankind is the walking dead.”

3. “Among your instincts you will find the longing for strong friendships, that the modern evil tries to snuff out. And they have good reason to try this, because every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships… and [sibling]hoods.”

4. “While a piece of each [of us] remembers the old ways of another place — when we enjoyed each other in a [sibling]hood of work and play and power… In the interests of separation, [we’ve] been taught to view each other as always suspect, heartless competitors.”

The Answer: Quotes 1 and 4 are from Lorde’s collection of feminist essays, Sister Outsider, while quotes 2 and 3 are taken from BAP’s racist, misogynistic guide, Bronze Age Mindset. I hope that the similarities here – if not in style, then in content – are self-evident.

Both are vaguely Nieztchean, in that they’re centered around a belief in innate power that’s been suffocated by sociocultural norms. Both believe in the necessity of uncovering and embracing that internal force. While the Right might refer to this power as “vitality,” Lorde refers to it as “the erotic,” defined as a “source of power and information within our lives.”

BAP speaks often of how “feeling” is the true route to knowledge, not “science” or “reason” (Ch 22-23). Similarly, Lorde writes of how “our feelings… [are] spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas” (Poetry is Not a Luxury). Mirroring BAP’s own frustration with enlightenment rationality, she writes that “the white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us…whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.” (Poetry).

In spite of this apparently shared goal, however – to reclaim feelings from a culture that would rather have them “kneel to thought” (Lorde, Poetry) – the writers diverge in a number of key aspects. This happens as soon as we return gendered language to their respective texts. While BAP is hyperfocused on “brotherhoods of men,” Lorde is interested in reviving “sisterhoods”; while BAP views women as inherently inferior, Lorde hopes to protect women from sexist violence; while BAP views power as “masculine,” Lorde sees it as “deeply female”;2 and while BAP believes his power is being suppressed by femininity, Lorde diagnoses the problem as systemic misogyny.

In short, they disagree along two key axes: the extent to which power is masculine or feminine, and subsequently, whether it’s suppressed by either feminism or patriarchy. These differences have critical implications for how power is pursued and manifested, as well as the extent to which these strategies succeed.

Notably, neither masculinity nor femininity, as it’s used here, should be conflated with either manhood or womanhood. Rather, both descriptors refer to a set of values, ideals, and frameworks for understanding the world, detached from gender.

In BAP’s view, masculinity refers to hierarchy and competition, while femininity emphasizes equality and fairness. (Masculine) power, therefore, is equated with strength and dominating others; it’s threatened by the societal normalization of feminine values, which seek to punish and flatten out such hierarchies.3 He’s echoed by other contemporary conservatives, who argue that (masculine) power has been suppressed by a hyperfixation on fairness, feminist ideals, and a privileging of the weak.

Consequently, for the Right, the feeling of power is often equated to that of physical prowess; to the sense that one can literally mold the world to their whims. For a visual manifestation of this, one doesn’t have to look much farther than Hulk Hogan’s performance at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

This notion of power particularly appeals to vulnerable, young men, who are desperately searching for ways to feel better in and about themselves. The right-wing’s narrative, which entails a straightforward scapegoating of feminism, as well as an appeal to more traditional depictions of strength, seems like the easiest solution.

Hence the rise of right-wing influencers like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines, whose key enticement lies in biceps and abs. They, alongside a myriad of other so-called “Sigma male” icons, draw young men in on the promise of power and strength, all whilst sneaking in a dosage of ultra-conservative rhetoric. Journalists have referred to this as the “wellness-to-fascism pipeline,” wherein the Right uses fitness groups for base-building.

But does anyone, having followed this advice, actually feel any better?

Right-wingers seek to restore power through bulking up. Yet this misses precisely where feelings of powerlessness really stem from: not in what our bodies look like, but rather how they feel. Or, more precisely, don’t feel.

By this, I’m referring to how so many of us (at least, in the colonial West) have become detached and dissociated from our bodies. We don’t know how to listen to our inner needs or wants, nor allow the body to play a role in decision-making.4 The result, naturally, is that we become dependent on external authorities to guide our livelihoods, and increasingly numb to our own intuition. This is what makes us powerless. And no amount of weight-lifting can change that.

Adrienne Maree Brown has described this phenomenon as a severing of the body-mind, in which we’ve disproportionately privileged the brain above the flesh. It began, roughly speaking, with the spread of Enlightenment (Cartesian) logic, which sees the mind as superior to the body. Within this paradigm, disciples learn to distrust their feelings and seek “rationality” instead.

Such a worldview has been violently spread via colonization, imperialism, and classism, wherein relying on embodied knowledge was framed as “savage.” Not to mention how capitalist structures, and the commodification of labor entailed, has alienated workers from their work, as well as the physical experience of performing it. Or how the objectification of femme, BIPOC, and queer bodies, as exacerbated by the proliferation of social media, has further distanced people from their flesh.

As Johanna Hedva puts it, modern society has conditioned us to become consistently disassociated from our own, somatic being-in-the-world. And being so disassociated, it’s difficult to exert agency over our own lives.

Restoring true strength, therefore, requires a reconciliation between mind and body. This allows us to tap into that “source of power” lying within each of us, and to minimize our vulnerability to outside pressures.5

When people grow fixated on how they look in the mirror, they aren’t gaining real power. They’re still molding themselves toward externally-set metrics, instead of attuning to what they, deep down, really want. It’s a goal of aesthetic and aesthetic alone; focused on outside approval, rather than nurturing an internal, embodied knowledge.

What the Right is really lacking, at the end of the day, is a sense of the erotic.

“For the erotic,” according to Audre Lorde, “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” In other words, it’s not about how many pounds you can bench press; it’s about how deeply you feel your actions, both within and outside the gym.

The Right claims to pursue “vitality,” but ultimately fails to achieve anything more than its most superficial appearance. Even Jonathan Keeperman, golden boy of the Right, has gone on record to say that conservatives have largely neglected the necessity of “eroticism to vitality.” And vitality without eroticism, Lorde points out, is nothing but “sensation without feeling.” The illusion of power – without power.

This is what happens, after all, when one ejects femininity from their movement space. For if masculinity entails aggression and assertiveness, then femininity – which entails sensitivity, empathy, and a drive toward fairness – is necessary to balance it out. Without femininity, one ends up with outward strength and inward numbness; as Lorde puts it, sensation without feeling.6

Indeed, as left-leaning organizers have long known, true power requires a masculine and feminine balance. Brontë Velez explains that “masculine energy is a kind of support… a holding space,” and “feminine energy… is an infinite, pleasure-centered, erotic source” (emphasis mine).

Similarly, in Restoring the Kinship Worldview, Don Trent (Four Arrows) Jacobs and Darcia Narvaez argue that “each of us has to find our own internal balance” of masculine and feminine energies. This idea was widely accepted in Indigenous cultures across the world, until the West distorted it via their unnecessary gendering of masculinity and femininity.

When the Right fixates exclusively on masculinity, therefore, they cut off the (feminine) sensitivity needed to be powerful. Ironically, in doing so, they inadvertently perpetuate the very processes that got us here in the first place; by shutting down their emotional capacities and learning to ignore their embodied needs, the Right makes it impossible to reconnect with the deeper, more profound sources of vitality that lie within.7

If the Right wants to talk about power, fine. But let’s be clear: the kind of power they’re selling is a cover for a profound lack. And what they’re missing isn’t more muscle. It’s more feeling.

“I am Heathcliff — he's always, always in my mind — not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself — but as my own being…”

(Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, pg. 87)

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There’s nothing subtle about transness in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Its central character, Catherine Earnshaw, explicitly tells us that they’re more man than woman.1 They consistently complain that Heathcliff (their adopted brother) is “more myself than I” (Brontë, 85) and yearns for a unification between their two bodies; one that, as many scholars have noted (e.g. Jean E. Kennard, Heather Moglen), reads not as sexual, but rather as a literal, physiological fusion. On several occasions throughout the novel, they express contempt for being seen as a woman, and strive to break the “shattered prison” (Brontë, 172) of their own, gendered flesh. They repeatedly clamor for objects that symbolize masculinity, beginning with a whip (37), which is later replaced by Heathcliff himself. Most tellingly, once they pass through puberty, they cease to identify with their reflection in the mirror; referring to their body, instead, as a haunting stranger (130). All this and more suggests that Catherine despises the gendered image imposed upon them.

Indeed, recognition of Catherine’s gender nonconformity informs many of the novel’s central themes: from the intensity of Catherine and Heathcliff’s attachment, to Catherine’s sense of being trapped, to their use of the supernatural as an escape from their mortal flesh.

So why, then, do we not read, much less teach, Wuthering Heights as a queer narrative? Especially as book bans are on the rise and politicians are trying to erase queerness from our classrooms, it seems increasingly urgent for educators to highlight the existence of trans (or, at least, gender non-conforming) characters in taken-for-granted classics. Efforts are already being made to articulate the queer undertones of books like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Why not add Wuthering Heights to the list?

This is particularly important in a climate that claims transness and “gender ideologies” are new phenomena. Trans youth deserve to see themselves in historical novels, and to know that these identities have existed long before such words even existed. Books abound as to the existence of trans figures in renaissance texts and 1960s’ sculptures. I’d love to include Victorian literature within this realm.

Below, I begin with an exploration of the author’s biography, so as to outline how Emily Brontë’s plausible nonconformity shaped the novel’s plot. Then, analyzing Wuthering Heights through a trans reading practice, I emphasize how the novel relates to contemporary systems of transphobia, before showing how and why we ought to teach it as such in our classrooms.

I. Emily Brontë, a.k.a. “The Major.”

The experience of reading classics like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is made richer when informed by an acknowledgement of the authors’ queerness, as well as an understanding of how that queerness shaped the novels’ themes. The same is true for Wuthering Heights.

So far, attempts to do so have been limited to questions of Emily’s sexuality. Several scholars (e.g. Virginia Moore, Camille Paglia, and Stevie Davies) have speculated about Emily Brontë’s attraction to women, citing the femme subjects of her love poems, disinterest in men, and attachment to fellow schoolgirls. Not to mention how her sister, Charlotte Brontë, burnt many of Emily’s letters, poems, and manuscripts post-mortem, out of desperation to save the younger writer’s reputation. Letters that, many historians believe, contained proof of Emily’s queer desires.

Without discounting the significance of Emily’s probable lesbianism, I hold that we’d benefit greatly from an analysis that goes beyond Emily Brontë’s sexuality, and begins to pick up on questions of her gender. Especially as these former investigations have, by and large, overshadowed curiosity about the latter.2

Writing in 1928, Romer Wilson states that “[Emily Brontë] early knew the boy in herself, and later knew the man. Others knew it too” (35). Indeed, the residents of Haworth Village, where the Brontës lived, described Emily as “more like a boy than a girl” (Wilson, 122). The family’s servant referred to her as “a little masculine,” and a parsonage employee as “like a boy” (Robinson, 142). Charlotte’s friend recounts how Emily “would whistle in masculine fashion,” as did Monsieur Héger claim that Emily “should have been a man” (Gérin, 34, 127). And in her homelife, Emily was known by the distinctly male nickname, “the Major.”

Even critics and reviewers were well aware of Emily’s more masculine tendencies. As early as the 1800s, reviews of Wuthering Heights complained of Emily’s “singularly masculine bent” (Smith).

The evidence, taken both from Emily’s private life, as well as the explicitly trans elements of her novel, suggest that Emily herself might have found resonance with the modern decoupling of sex from gender. Transness, after all, is nothing new, and it benefits us all to realize how these experiences existed long before words like “trans” were even invented. It’s not far-fetched to presume, moreover, that these lived experiences directly informed the creation of Catherine Earnshaw.

This matters not just in an ethical sense (in that it combats the erasure of trans people throughout history), but also in a literary sense. By this, I meant that the acknowledgement of Emily/Catherine’s potential transness, as supported by the historical record, transforms how we read Wuthering Heights. It adds new weight to the novel’s central theme of difference versus sameness, the suffocating quality of Thrushcross Grange, Catherine’s aversion to (cisnormative) success, and their unfulfilled desire to become Heathcliff. Simultaneously, it allows us a greater understanding of what the trans experience was like in the 1800s; how it was rationalized, articulated, and ultimately confronted.

II. Reading Wuthering Heights through a Trans Framework

Wuthering Heights, in a lot of ways, is about Catherine’s struggle (and ultimate failure) to conform to the demands of femininity. This begins early in childhood, wherein Catherine’s father is constantly vexed by their wildness and boyish tendencies; traits that he finds endearing in Heathcliff, but unacceptable from a daughter. “It pleased him rarely to see her gentle,” says the narrator (Brontë, 45). It’s when they’re sick and idle that he most loves them, then turns to ask, “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” (45).

Indeed, this refrain – Catherine’s inability to be “a good lass” – is repeated, in various formulations, from their oldest brother (Hindley), and later their husband (Edgar Linton). The men in Catherine’s life are constantly berating their inability to be a proper girl/woman. With, of course, one exception.

When it’s Catherine and Heathcliff alone, the two happily deny the existence of a gender difference between them. When Heathcliff beats Catherine in a race, for instance, he does not attribute his win to male superiority (as other characters – and, eventually, Brontë’s literary critics – do), but rather insists that it’s only “because she was barefoot” (50).

It’s only when the two are finally, forcefully separated by the Lintons’ aggressive bulldog – who, as several critics argue, represents an initiation into adult sexuality (Gilbert and Gubar; Kennard) – that Catherine begins their “descent” (Gilbert and Gubar) into the imposition of womanhood. They’re removed to the care of Thrushcross Grange, wherein they’re outfitted with lace, gowns, and frills. By the time they make it back home, five weeks later, they look completely transformed. “I should scarcely have known you,” Hindley says, for “you look like a lady now” (Brontë, 55).

To the outside spectator, these lace and frills appear as a sign of (cisnormative) joy. Nelly, the novel’s narrator, watches on with apparent envy. Once Catherine is 17, married, and permanently moved to Thrushcross Grange, Nelly explains that they seem to be “in possession of a deep and growing happiness” (98).

Catherine’s own speech, however, relays a different story entirely. They confess that “[their] heart ached with some great grief” (131) over their separation from Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights, then describe a jarring dissonance between their identity and the body they now inhabit. They deny – or, at least, block out – the “seven years” that comprised their social and hormonal maturation, as that whole time period only “grew a blank” in their mind (131). “I did not recall that [those seven years] had been at all,” Catherine frets (131). Deep down, they insist, they’re still a child. (A noticeably androgynous one at that).

It’s as if, Catherine says, “at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights… and been converted at a stroke into Mrs Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange” (131-132). It would not be far-fetched, I think, to view Catherine’s memory loss as a defense mechanism, which often emerges in response to a traumatic past. Nor would it be absurd to see their amnesia as indelibly tied to the onset of puberty and the increasing salience of gendered (mis)recognition.

Most notably, perhaps, is Catherine’s wholesale rejection of their own appearance. “It is significant,” writes Lucasta Miller, “that Catherine finds her own reflection in the mirror unrecognizable” (Miller, Part IV). This happens at the age of 19, once they’re over 8 months pregnant and increasingly disturbed by their changing body. They view their reflection, as if it were a stranger, and they shriek when it moves. The image, they say, “haunt[s]” them (Brontë, 132).

The narrator interprets this incident as proof that Catherine “was delirious” and “raving” (132). Lacanian critics of the novel, meanwhile, have dissected this scene as evidence of Catherine’s sexual immaturity (Miller, Part IV). But in contrast to both these interpretations, I argue that Catherine’s sense of dissonance is neither madness nor failed psychological development, but rather a form of dysphoria, experienced and conveyed through the language of Victorian-era, gothic horror.

Indeed, this is precisely what I find so valuable about reading Wuthering Heights through a trans lens. It not only adds a layer of meaning to the novel, but also suggests how the author used Horror as a vehicle for expressing her own frustrations around identity. Much has been written about how the supernatural is reclaimed and reconfigured in service of queer literature. Many theorists have written about how vampirism in Dracula represents Bram Stoker’s own repressed homosexuality. Similarly, many have written about how The Picture of Dorian Gray is an expression of Oscar Wilde’s queerness. In much the same way, I read Wuthering Heights as articulating Emily Brontë’s gender nonconformity, in which Catherine’s ultimate demise signals a violent rejection of womanhood.

Driven by desperation to destroy the “prison” of their (gendered) body (Brontë, 172), Catherine eventually starves themselves to death. Despite being pregnant, they refuse to eat for several days, until they finally pass away.

We might, on one hand, interpret this as a straightforward suicide. Under such a reading, we could see Catherine’s death as a consequence of the cisnormative systems surrounding and suffocating them, which provided no tolerable path to life; where self-destruction appeared like the best, if only, option.

On the other hand, we might also interpret Catherine’s anorexia as an ill-fated attempt to eradicate the perceived “femininity” of their body. As several scholars of Victorian literature have pointed out, voluptuousness and fat were often presumed to signal sensuousness and the maturity of womanhood. Catherine, thus, can be read as starving themselves in order to masculinize their own image, with death being the tragic byproduct.

Bringing things back to a modern context: could we not, in some ways, see this narrative as a morbid precipitation of the increasingly recognized connection between dysphoria and anorexia? Could we not, also, tie this to the total inaccessibility of gender-affirming care, either then or now? And, furthermore, to the systems intent on assigning gender and sexuality to the most neutral of human body parts (i.e. fat and curves)?

Catherine is only nineteen when they die. Although it’s a fictional story, it ought to be taken as a poignant warning, still relevant today, of the disproportionately high suicide rates among trans and gender nonconforming youth.

This is, at heart, why I think it’s so critical for English teachers to adopt trans and queer lenses in the classroom. First, because students deserve to see their own identities, struggles, and experiences reflected in historical literature. Second, because it’s vital that teachers create spaces to openly discuss the challenges youth are currently facing, and to help guide them through it. What better way to do that than to use the required reading as a convenient springboard?

As for how to do so, I have some suggestions, which I’ve written down here. Yes, I know that literally no one asked for this. I did it anyway.

Guide to Trans+ Reading in the Classroom

The document includes recommendations for contemporary books to read as companion pieces, which both parallel Catherine’s narrative whilst also providing narratives of trans joy; discussion questions about the novel’s themes, its relevance today, and film adaptations; connections between Catherine’s transness and Heathcliff’s racialization; as well as externally linked guides to trans reading practices.

III. The Haunting of Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë died in much the same way as her fictional character: by self-imposed starvation.

If we assume, as many critics do (e.g. J. C. Knoepflmacher), that Catherine acts as a stand-in for Emily’s own unexpressed desires, then we can almost read Wuthering Heights as a long, elaborate cautionary tale against all that Emily found so suffocating and intolerable about the world; against the systems that made her life unlivable. A better understanding of Catherine’s anorexia, as outlined above, thus offers a plausible understanding of the motives behind their author’s tragic demise.

An ethical accounting of Emily’s death, therefore, cannot be limited to the act of starvation and illness itself. Rather, it ought to include the conditions of oppression that wore her down; the structures that denied her ability to live, authentically, as her(?) full self.3 Structures that are distinctly patriarchal, gendered, and cisheteronormative.

Not to mention that, centuries after her biological death, Emily Brontë’s legacy continues to be distorted by critics, many of whom ridicule the notion of her queerness (e.g. Melvin Watson, Fannie Ratchford, and Muriel Spark); by English classes, weirdly intent on teaching Wuthering Heights as a cisheteronormative love story; by film adaptations, that both distort and whitewash the original tale; and by a political zeitgeist that denies the existence of trans or gender-nonconforming life. This violence hasn’t ended; merely adapted to the times.

It breaks my heart that Emily Brontë faces the same violence in death that she did in life. And it breaks my heart that this violence continues to affect the lives of innumerate trans+ youth today, whose identities are continually dismissed as being “ideology”.

I first read this book in high school. I remember feeling perpetually confused, struck by the feeling that somehow, my classmates were reading an entirely different book than I. How did they not read Catherine’s narrative as a total rejection of womanhood, along with all the violence entailed?

But I didn’t yet have the words to articulate this hunch, which was felt more in body than in mind, and I suspected that if I tried, my essay would be marked down. When I did attempt to form this analysis, albeit clumsily, I was told I was seeing things that weren’t there.

Which, in hindsight, is wild. Because there is nothing subtle about transness in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

I can’t imagine how much more devastating this would be if I were trans, nonbinary, or otherwise gender-nonconforming. To have my interpretation dismissed out of hand, along with the gender affirmation it entailed.

(I’m not even saying this is the one and only correct reading of Wuthering Heights. I know that literature is subjective and open-ended. But to refuse considering this analysis at all? It’s hurtful and invisibilizing).

Now, over six years later, Emily Brontë – and the injustice that consumed both her life and legacy – continues to haunt me. So much so that I’ve spent two weeks writing this essay about a book that most people haven’t touched since Junior High. An essay that will probably, at best, garner 8 likes (from 6 friends and my parents).

Honestly, I didn’t even really want to write this post! But every night for the last fourteen days, I’ve been up ‘til 3am, unable to sleep until I hammered more of it out.4 As Catherine haunts the moors, so does Emily consume my waking thoughts. She demands to escape the mold of womanhood that confined her during life; to be seen for who she really was. For her to find peace “in that quiet earth” (Brontë, 356), we must begin by doing better in our classrooms and politics alike. We must do better by our kids.

Works Cited

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. London, Harper Press, 2010.

Moglen, Helene. "The Double Vision of Wuthering Heights: A Clarifying View of Female Development." Centennial Review 15 (1971): 391-405.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Holmqvist, Sam. ‘Narratives of Transing in Sarah Grand’s “The Tenor and the Boy”’. Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, Issue 16.1, 2020.

Wilson, Romer. All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Bronte.

London: Chatto and Windus, 1928.

Gerin, Winifred. Emily Brontë A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971.

Kennard, Jean E. 'Lesbianism and the Censoring of Wuthering Heights', NWSA Journal, 8.2 (1996), 17–36

Knoepflmacher, U. C. Emily Brontë "Wuthering Heights." Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Susan Stryker; My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage. GLQ 1 June 1994; 1 (3): 237–254. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237

Totalitarian violence begins quietly. Frequently enough, it starts through the forced removal of hair. And with that hair, personhood.1

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This was true in Nazi Germany, where victims were stripped and shaved naked before being forced into labor camps. It was true in the American colonizers’ war against Indigenous youth, where kidnapped children were made to cut off their hair, despite its cultural and spiritual significance.2 It’s true in Israel’s genocidal regime, where Palestinian detainees are shaved right before release, in one last act of humiliation; where Palestinian residents have been forced to adopt buzzcuts, so as to stall the manufactured spread of disease.

And it’s certainly true in El Salvador, where thousands of men are being stripped, shaved bald, and locked away in death camps without any due process.

The significance of hair and clothing should not be understated. As a signifier of personhood, its forced removal indicates a readiness, on part of a regime, to depict and treat them as less-than-human. Theft of hair is, often enough, a gesture toward theft of life.3

In the words of holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger, “Enforced nakedness (…) is the dispossession of the self, the loss of identity.”4 Similarly, fellow survivor Primo Levi writes that to be “without hair” is to be “without name.”5

And once a person is reduced to what Agamben calls “bare life” – meaning, alive in the biological sense, but not as legible, sociopolitical agents – it becomes politically normative for them to be tortured, degraded, and systemically killed.6

We saw this most blatantly last month, when Kristi Noem forced El Salvador’s prisoners to strip and pose as a backdrop for her newest photoshoot. Not as people, but as props.

And as soon as they’re robbed of any humanity, these prisoners – of Germany, of America, of Palestine, of El Salvador – are either actively murdered, or placed in conditions so inhumane that survival becomes near impossible.

Indeed, the atrocities of El Salvador’s mega-prison are already well-documented. Suffice it to name here that: many of the men have been imprisoned indefinitely, with neither trial, criminal conviction, nor release date; are regularly and arbitrarily beaten; kept in excessively overcrowded cells; forced to sleep standing; intentionally deprived of food, water, and healthcare; and denied any contact with family, lawyers, or the outside world. Already, close to 400 deaths have been documented, and the status of many more remain unknown. It has not yet been confirmed if Kilmar Ábrego García, the man mistakenly deported from Maryland to El Salvador, is alive.

Why are we not up in arms about this?

Our friends and neighbors are, quite literally, being shipped off to foreign concentration camps. If nothing changes, they’ll likely die there.7 It’s a mass-exported genocide. So where’s all the rage?

For almost two years now, we’ve been watching, on livestream, the US-funded massacre of Palestinian people. It’s been openly lauded by both parties, framed as “normal”, and increasingly absorbed into the background noise. So much so, that the public’s grown numb to the horror of ethnic cleansing. Even when it lands on our doorstep.

Some of us have protested the genocide of Gaza, sure, but to disappointing results. Neither administration, red or blue, has ceased sending bombs to Israel. Our voices, though raised, are nevertheless unheard. Sometimes, they’re very deliberately ignored.

This isn’t a partisan issue. Trump and his bootlickers might be enforcing today’s violence, but it was Democrats that set the moral standard. It was Obama that expanded and legitimized ICE’s power. It was Biden that funded a livestreamed genocide of Gaza.

And it was the Democrats, for this last year and a half, that have demobilized their own base. Through ignoring their own constituents, they’ve started to extinguish what hope was there. Through their callousness, they’ve taught the people that fighting is ultimately futile. Through normalizing the relentless massacre of Palestinians, they’ve set a precedent that can’t be undone; paving the way for Trump’s present day decimation of Venezuelan migrants.

Palestine became a litmus test for how far the American empire could go unchecked. Under Biden’s watch, it proved itself impervious to rulings by the ICJ, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, several other international bodies, along with its own people’s dissent. If these last two years have taught us anything, it’s that the so-called USA believes it can get away with anything it wants, no matter how atrocious; that nothing, neither external nor internal pressure, will hold them accountable.8

And liberals are still surprised that Trump’s ignoring the courts? Get real.

Democracy didn’t start to crumble with the entrance of Trump. It was always precluded by the multiple genocides on which this country was founded, the genocides we’ve enacted overseas, the ones we’ve funded by proxy, and the one that our politicians have defended for the past year.

For the Democratic party to take a hard stand against Trump’s bridling fascism, it needs to get clear on its own values first. It is not enough to condemn one genocide, whilst still arming another; to call out the human rights abuses occurring at home, while flagrantly violating those of the Global South; to accuse Trump of oligarchy, corruption, and capitulation to Russia, whilst taking money from AIPAC and capitulating to Israel. (Looking at you, Cory Booker).

These issues are fundamentally interconnected. The sooner we realize that our fight for liberation here necessitates liberation there, the sooner our people can unite. And the sooner we can win.

A la Lilla Watson, our liberation is bound together. A la the Combahee River Collective, true freedom means freedom for all, which means ending all systems of oppression.

No justice, no peace. From Palestine to El Salvador, our people will be free.

Places to donate:

• https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/

• https://immigrantjustice.org/

• https://chuffed.org/project/107585-help-rola-and-her-family-rebuild-their-home-in-gaza

• https://www.gofundme.com/f/tmy7gu-help-my-family-evacuate-from-gaza

• https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-zinh-rebuild-her-life-and-achieve-her-dream?lang=en_US&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link

Places to join:

• Your local ICE Watch group

• Within Our Lifetime (WOL), The People’s Forum, and other pro-Palestine orgs

Drop donation links and calls to action in the comments below.

People are mad that their favorite sex worker is, it turns out, not the smooth-talking seductress they imagined her to be; but, in fact, kind of an awkward person.

Ari Kytsya’s latest OF video is going viral. Not because it was particularly good, but rather, because it was unexpectedly lackluster. Her newest film, which was teased and promoted on TikTok for weeks prior, features her and fellow influencer Girthmasterr, going at (what looks like) twenty minutes of clumsy, amateur sex, filmed on a wobbly iPhone camera at 0.5 lens.1

Since then, fans have been flooding her comments with accusations of “bad acting,” “seeming nervous,” and “ripping them off.” In short, for not living up to the hype.

Setting aside my own judgments of the film, I have to ask: what is it, about “spicy content” in particular, that allows users to feel so entitled to a premeditated fantasy; one that they came up with entirely in their own heads? For the bulk of these criticisms are not so much about the shoot’s technical aspects, but revolve largely around the “character” of Ari herself. Why isn’t she more confident, more elegant, more charismatic? As Hazel Hawke puts it in her After Dark review, “[I expected more] from an influencer who begins all her videos with, ‘So I’m a bop, I’m a mattress actress.’”

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In response to this backlash, Ari has released a video defending herself:

God forbid a girl is nervous and awkward, making a movie like an hour after meeting someone. I honestly think that’s just my personality. Like obviously, on social media I can record things over and over again until it looks good. But in person, that’s just me. I saw a lot of comments saying my acting was bad. But I wasn’t acting; that’s just me.

It’s such that Ari finds herself at the center of an unwinnable paradox. On one hand, she’s adored for the persona she’s crafted online, as being authentic, vulnerable, and funny. Her fanbase consistently lauds her kindness, wit, and sense of humor, with many stating that they only subscribed to her OnlyFans after coming to love her non-sexual content.

But when she’s “being herself” in an adult film, those very same fans feel betrayed. They loved Ari for being real. Until Ari was actually real.

Thus is the trap of modern day porn production. With the advent of social media, and the guise of closeness it offers, it’s no longer enough to just be sexy. One also has to create and sustain a sphere of parasocial relationships; maintaining enough of a persona, both within and outside of sex work, that their audience can consistently project a set of fantasized ideals. In one video, Ari acknowledges that the product she profits from most is not just thirst traps or nudes, but her “personality”. In addition to being a sex object, bop, and mattress actress, she also has to be a #relatable friend, girlfriend, and crush.

And, as demonstrated by the backlash to her video, it’s not always easy to be both a sex object and human being at once.

Yes, her fans seem to say, be a full, complex, multifaceted human being – but not like that. Be sultrier. Be wittier. Don’t “yap too much” while giving head. (Indeed, this latter line is a frequent complaint on her last video).2 When her fans demand to see “the real Ari,” what they really want is for Ari to become, to fully embody, the alter-ego they’ve built up in their minds.

So what gives? Is it possible to ever package and sell intimacy without objectifying, commodifying, and ergo dehumanizing one’s full personhood and self? (Spoiler alert: I think the answer is YES).3

For context, there’s nothing new about exchanging intimacy for goods or services, either within or outside a capitalist economy. Nor is it unique to sex work.

Indeed, it’s so commonplace that feminist sociologists have, for decades, dubbed and studied a wide array of occupations as “intimate labor.”

This is widely defined as work that involves the management of interpersonal relationships, so that they “are – or give the impression of being – physically and/or emotionally close…private, caring or loving.”4 According to Viviana Zelizer, it usually entails some “knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third parties,” such as the sharing of secrets, confessions, or bodily privacy.5 This includes sex work, yes, but also nannying, nursing, masseusing, and therapizing. The list goes on.6

I name this only to say that there’s nothing inherently wrong about purchasing or bartering for intimacy. In fact, in a world that runs on the provision of intimate labor, it would be far worse to not compensate intimate laborers for their work. (As we do with, say, unpaid housewives). Especially when most people in the caretaking industry happen to be Black, brown, queer, and/or femmes.7

Where it becomes problematic (even dangerous) is when consumers forget that intimacy, paid for or not, does not equate servitude; that it requires give and take on both ends. Part of what makes human intimacy so uniquely precious is that it involves, at bare minimum, one other agent whose thoughts, desires, and needs are not the same as yours.

Outside the virtual sphere, for instance, clients are widely expected to respect the boundaries set forth by sex workers and escorts. If the needs don’t align, then you might cease being a client, sure. But it doesn’t give you license to berate, ridicule, and publicly mock someone for falling short of your fantasies, or to demand they push past their discomfort to meet your every need. (Doing otherwise puts you squarely in the realm of assholes, pricks, and, worst of all, sexual assaulters).

In other forms of intimate labor, moreover, such as elder care, therapy, and nursing, it’s integral to the job that laborers occasionally push back on their clients’ beliefs. Intimacy is not so much subjugation as it is ongoing trust and negotiation.

Regardless of whether it’s compensated, commodified, or freely given, all intimate relationships, by their very nature, involve some level of friction and imperfection. That’s just part of being human. Friends fight. Partners get heated with each other. Sometimes, sex workers feel awkward. That doesn’t make the intimacy any less authentic. If anything, it makes it all the more real.

As Ezra Klein puts it in his critique of online relations:

I think the friction of relationships between human beings is really important. As a person, it’s good for me that my wife does not adapt herself into whatever I want her to say. It is part of being a healthy human being that other people exist with friction to you.

So what is it about the online, parasocial relationship that leads people to expect frictionless wish-fulfillment?

In part, it stems from the way that virtual platforms have marketed themselves as a friction-free environment. If you don’t like something, you swipe it away. Each influencer, model, and actor is an expandable member of a constantly rotating cast. As soon as they fail to amuse, they’re gone! Online consumers are thus positioned as all-powerful arbitrators of value, whose sexual, intellectual, and emotional needs are met at little-to-no investment from themselves.

As a result, our tolerance for friction, and subsequent capacity for intimacy, is deeply diminished. The Ari x Girthmasterr controversy is only one example of how online spaces have warped our understanding of personhood, closeness, and care. Clients (i.e. consumers, users, or parasocial friends) feel entitled not just to a sex video, which Ari certainly delivered, but to the very person that is Ari Kytsya. Not only do they want access to her life, inner world, and vulnerability, but they want to grasp and mold that inner world toward their own tastes.

Brought to its logical and frightening conclusion, the video’s emerging notoriety has led to an influx of male stalkers showing up at Ari’s home. As “fan” entitlement is both enabled and encouraged through waves of online backlash – in which a shocking number of influencers have normalized leaking, pirating, or otherwise stealing Ari’s content – the social contract around intimate labor seems to be eroding.

The implications of this aren’t bad just for content creators, but for the consumers themselves, who seem increasingly ill-equipped for real, mutually intimate relations. For proof of this trend’s growing resonance, one has to look no further than Netflix’s latest hit series, Adolescence, which dramatized these dynamics to wide acclaim.

The show depicts how a young, lonely boy finds comfort through Instagram, porn, and online models, all of which condition him to feel increasingly entitled to and in-control of the women around him. It does a beautiful job of delving into the internet addict’s psych; demonstrating how online interactions have warped his worldview, obliterated his tolerance for friction, and thus strained his ability to develop genuine connections.

Both Adolescence and the Girthmasterr controversy are microcosms of a larger pattern that’s only going to get worse. The problem is not so much that intimacy itself is being marketed, sold, and consumed – indeed, intimacy and sex are, and have always been, invaluable forms of labor, for which workers ought to be compensated – but that social media has framed it as a one-way transaction, in which the consumer possesses exclusive control.

Notably, these problems only stand to be further exacerbated by a growing trend of what dubs “AI’s chokehold on intimacy.” As AI chatbots become increasingly trusted to fulfill consumers’ emotional needs – providing all of the dopamine reward with none of the emotional risk – intimacy risks being less and less about a collaborative interplay of differing desires, and more like one partner molding their very being into the shape of another’s fantasy. (For a visceral look at these dystopian, AI-generated dynamics, I strongly recommend ’ short story about “your beautiful submissive girlfriend”).

Given the landscape we find ourselves in, what are consumers, content creators, and intimate laborers meant to do? How can we develop alternative, healthier ways of relating to one another, in spite of all the ways social media has invaded our lives and shaped our most intimate dynamics?

Unlike thinkers like Jonathan Haidt, who’s often regarded as the key theorist in this area, I do not think the answer lies in banning social media. I’m all too aware of the relief that internet relations can offer queer, BIPOC, and disabled people with limited access to in-person communities.

I also don’t want to bash parasocial relationships wholesale. As someone who sleeps better when listening to her favorite podcast, I understand the genuine need that parasocial relations can fill, and that it’s possible to do so without compromising real-life relations. There’s nothing inherently harmful about OnlyFans, TikTok, or Instagram, so long as consumers have a baseline understanding of what relationships and personhood entail.

I do, however, believe that at the same time we make these virtual leaps forward, we must also put more resources toward creating opportunities for emotional development through in-person relationships. I’m obviously not the first person to call for third spaces, accessible community organizations, etc. etc. etc. Rather, I want to highlight how their absence has created the conditions for social media’s disproportionate influence on lonely users. Neither children nor adults should be receiving their primary emotional development from social media algorithms, in which their desires are the only thing that matters.

Anyways. If you’re still here, thanks for hearing me out, either in spite of or because you dis/agree with me. Feel that friction? It’s hot.

And as always, the golden rule of virtual intimacy is to support and compensate your content creators – so consider hitting the like and subscribe below <3

Many thanks to for looping me into this TikTok drama and for providing the core analysis of this essay. See screenshots (below) for credit where credit is due xx

To highlight this core (often overlooked) theme, I’ve collated a short list of my favorite #WhiteLotusLiberals that really embody the philanthropic spirit of the ultra-rich.

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#7: Black Girl Magic

This queen, who’s winning mad points for her casual Fanon and Césaire name-drops.

Paula is a WOC (Woman Of Color) going to a PWI (Predominantly White Institution) – i.e. an intersectional victim – so she doesn’t even really count among the crew of White Lotus’ otherwise evil elite.

This character offers a perfect embodiment of what Du Bois calls double consciousness. On one hand, the radical Black activist inside her wants to steal money for Native Hawaiians (slayyyyyy), but then her internalized oppressor gets in the way, as she ends up getting caught and pinning everything on a Native Hawaiian boy. Less slay, but who can blame her? She was only trying to assimilate, after all.

Paula’s the kind of chick that joined the encampments for the content opportunity, then left as soon as things got dangerous. And that’s exactly the sort of imperfect ally we need right now.

(Ngl, as a Brown U grad myself, I can’t help but identify a bit with Paula!! #RepresentationMatters)

#6: Hillary Clinton Stan (x2)

Jaclyn and Laurie, who are brave enough to be mildly upset when their friend votes for Trump. These two definitely wore blue bracelets post-election to signal their allyship. As a WOC woman, I’m grateful to women like these for making our cities feel safer!

#5: Basically a Native

On first impression, this guy seemed like a real schmuck. He relocated to Hawai’i during a pandemic, even when Hawaiian leadership explicitly asked mainlanders to stay out; provided free marketing to the colonial tourism industry that Native Hawaiians have long tried to bust; and then bought two multi million dollar houses in Kauai.

In the end, however, his crimes are excused by the fact that he’s satirized them on TV. His hit show, which this post would be baseless without, has raised plenty of awareness around the evils of modern day tourism; as evidenced by the direct boost it led to in tourism-related sales. Thanks, Mike!

#4: Guy Who’s Probably on LingusDating

Third wave feminism is over, and it’s time for the fourth. This is where we go a rung above WOC in the oppression olympics, and begin to include an even more victimized class of people: White Guy Feminists.

These are the dudes who’ve read This Bridge Called My Back and rated it 5 stars on Goodreads, but still get dissed because of how they look! Perfect case in point? Albie.

Look at those sad, dopey eyes. Listen to his long, pointless monologue about misogyny in The Godfather. Feel his rancid, male-saviory desperation.

That’s definitely a muncher.

So why can’t he get laid? Probably because Portia has some internalized misogyny she needs to work out.

Poor Albie :( If only his season wasn’t pre-Luigi Mangione! Then maybe she’d finally appreciate your Italian charm.

#3: TERF Fodder

While White Lotus doesn’t offer any trans woman, ladyboy, or kathoey representation, we DO get this white cis guy that fetishizes all three. And isn’t that close enough?

#2: I Promise It’s Ironic

Ruh roh, him again?? This season regular is back at Spot #2, except now he’s in Thailand!

Having learnt nothing from the material harm caused by Season 1, he’s brought the whole franchise to Southeast Asia, where white Americans have historically been so super benevolent.

But don’t worry. He’s aware of his own complicity in these decades of exploitation and white supremacy. That’s why his regurgitation of Asian woman tropes is totally, 100% satirical. As is his orientalist view of Buddhism as a catch-all escape from the evils of the West. And his repeated use of the “Third World Country yellow filter”.

In true ally form, he even praised Blackpink’s Lisa for not being “a tramp” – unlike all those other Asian actresses he has to work with. Thank God for that. How else would people know that some of us Asian women are actually sexually pure (and thus worthwhile)?

Of course, you might be wondering: where did he take the time to develop such a politically astute analysis?

Oh, yes – through his own medically-induced hallucinations, which he was certain would work so well with the “cultural themes” of Thailand.

Mike stikes again!

#2 (continued): Self-Expose

And you might be wondering – isn’t there something ironic about, I dunno, traveling to Thailand as a white guy, just to make fun of the white guys who travel to Thailand?

Well, luckily Mike has an answer for that too: “Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold.” So he just has to keep being complicit. Or else, what could he possibly make art about?

Thus, like a Catholic through confession, Mike White has absolved himself of all his colonial sins. I, as a Hamilton-loving liberal, speak for the Left when I forgive you of your shortcomings.

#2 (continued): white Mike

Last Mike White bit, I promise.

Because, jokes aside, I really have to hand it to him for taking on so many complex issues within one season. Like, a disturbing incest plot that ultimately goes nowhere. And a brief glance at age gap relationships in Thailand, without ever exploring their complex racial undertones. Not to mention, a shallow nod to the sex work industry, that makes no effort to humanize or combat white tourists’ perceptions of Asian sex workers.

And if that isn’t enough, he even maybe-almost added a brief, throw-away line about nonbinary rights!

white mike is a helluva guy. That’s why he places so highly.

#1: White Woman Tears

Finally, in a perfect encapsulation of all these liberals, I really have to hand the crown to Piper.

Thanks for keeping it real, girl.

You made absolutely zero effort at service, wealth redistribution, or mutual aid… but at least you feel bad about it. And that’s what counts in the end!

Ultimately, the lesson of White Lotus is that wealth and power don’t necessarily corrupt. You could be a bad guy, like Elon Musk, but you could also be a good guy, like Bill Gates!

The choice is yours. So what are you waiting for? Hop on that plane and start your colonization journey today!

You’ve heard of Dragon Ladies, China Dolls, and ABGs, but have you heard of WAACs? I’m coining it now. Weird Ass Asian Chicks.1

They’re everywhere.

Pitch Perfect’s Lilly/Esther, who “set[s] fires to feel joy”; Mantis, from Guardians of the Galaxy, with her off-putting bug-eyes; and, most recently, Severance’s Miss Casey, who exists purely to list facts about other people’s lives.

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Key features of these women include: a lack of social awareness, an emotional inscrutability, and a penchant for jarringly odd, out-of-place statements that throw viewers off beat.

Fat Amy: "How sexy and mysterious."

Lilly: "Like how all my teeth are from other people."

Lilly: [Cracks a smile].

- Pitch Perfect 2

Ms. Casey: "Upon request, I can also perform a hug."

- Severance, S1 Ep5

These WAACs function as comic relief by virtue of their sheer strangeness. Their uncanny one-liners elicit both surprise and amusement from the audience. The structure of their sentences, the content of their speech; both are so off-kilter that one can’t help but chuckle.

Notably, for these jokes to land, all three women are cast as visibly East Asian. Part of the humor’s effectiveness lies in the WAACs’ unnamed foreignness. Their awkwardness, incoherence, and social faux passes are not full jokes in themselves. They’re the punchlines to an unspoken set-up; that of failed cultural assimilation.

Mantis: I am Mantis.

Drax: What are you doing?

M: Smiling. I hear it is the thing to do to make people like you.

D: Not if you do it like that.

M: Oh. I was raised alone on Ego’s planet. I do not understand the intricacies of social interaction.

- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Unlike that of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, who are almost definitionally white, WAACs’ weirdness is not sexy, mysterious, nor a synecdoche for great depth. It’s just weird. Sometimes gross, sometimes laughable, but ultimately straightforward and shallow. It does not profess to be hiding a rich inner world, nor is it an indicator of mental illness, nor is it a clue to a dark, complicated past. WAACs are meant to be taken at face value: odd, eerie women that don’t fit into society, and who lack the required intrigue to be a central character, or even a desirable love interest.

Mantis: "Drax, Drax. Drax! Drax! We need to talk."

Drax: "I’m sorry. But I like a woman with some meat on her bones."

M: "What?"

D: "I tried to let you down easily by telling you I found you disgusting."

- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Take, as another example, S1 E5 of Severance. The episode follows its central romantic pairing, Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower), both of whom are white, as they evade the comically oblivious, emotionally detached Miss Casey (Dichen Lachman). It’s suggested, three episodes on [SPOILERS AHEAD], that Miss Casey has feelings for Mark S. (which Lower later confirms in a behind-the-scenes interview), but that she realizes her affection could never be returned; for, in her own words, “I know I'm... strange" (S1 E8).

While this stereotype seems a far-cry from the more common culprits of harmful Asian-femme caricatures (e.g. exotic sex-dolls, submissive pets, heartless femme fatales, etc.), the WAAC nonetheless has roots in an old, xenophobic cliché: that of the inscrutable Oriental.

Harking back to the late 1870s, when the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act was first proposed, Senator John F. Miller accused the Chinese of being “perfectly unimpressible” (read: emotionless); as “changeless, fixed, and unalterable”; as “machine-like in every physical characteristic”; and “as different from all other peoples in their characteristics, habits, methods, and appearance as if they were the inhabitants of another planet” (qtd. in Disaffected, p. 175-176, emphasis mine).

(Granted, the “alien” metaphor for racial minorities is nothing new to my readers. We saw it with the “Alien Enemies Act,” used to incarcerate Japanese Americans during WW2, and we see it today being deployed against innocent Venezuelans.)

This inscrutability was conveyed, by politicians like Miller, as a great threat to white Americans; who, unlike Asian immigrants, felt and expressed their emotions in a “normative,” predictable, and thus culturally acceptable way. Miller, among others, worried that Oriental inscrutability would spread like contagion (an earlier iteration of the “Kung Flu”) and incapacitate White citizens. As Xin Yao puts it:

Oriental inscrutability stands out as the primary expression (or lack of it) of the treacherous inhumanity of the Yellow Peril that threatens the good white American family and its health, its labor, and the foundation of its way of life.

- Xin Yao, Disaffected (2022), p. 175.

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And this racial construction didn’t end with the Exclusion Act. As Kyla Schuller and Cathy Park Hong have shown, it was continually deployed to bolster the narrative that Asians were biologically inferior to white people, as well as to justify the exploitation of Asian workers. After all, if Asians are unfeeling machines, then there’s no harm in their being overworked and underpaid.

Notably, we see this unsettling perception well and alive today in New York City, where – as of 2025 – the CPC have stolen 80 million dollars in wages from their Asian home workers.

And we might see it reflected in the fictional case of Miss Casey, whose entire life – in keeping with the overarching theme of Severance – is constituted, down to every last second, by labor.

Unlike her non-Asian counterparts, Miss Casey does not get to experience friendship, romance, or any other kind of relational fulfillment. Her whole world is limited to the 30-minute “therapy” sessions she provides to a rotating door of employees, who are required to mirror her stoic, immovable demeanor for the duration of each conversation. There is no element of human interaction across her cold, sanitary existence, in part because she, as a automaton Oriental, seems incapable of genuine warmth.

Thus, until the end of Season 1, Miss Casey exists purely as an extension of her employers’ insidious projects, and as a comedic prop to the “main storyline” unfolding several rooms away. She’s denied empathy from either the audience or her fellow characters, until – as Season 2 shows – it’s almost too late.

And therein lies the key danger of being perceived as a WAAC: its inherent dehumanization.

Once you’re assigned the role of WAAC, it becomes impossible to take you seriously. Your words are pre-emptively undermined by virtue of who you are. They’re dismissed in a variety of ways, ranging from full alienation (“She creeps us out”), to infantilization (“Oh! How kooky and random!”), to overt sexualization.

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In real life, these tropes act to reproduce the boundaries of social acceptability, cultural relevance, and political authority, from which WAACs are permanently excluded. In order to be read as a legible person, one must either be either fully, successfully assimilated, and culturally articulate (think Severance’s Gemma, whose PhD in Russian Literature provides a stark contrast to her innie’s grammatical awkwardness; but also real-life figures, like Mayor Michelle Wu, who’s recently made headlines for her sharp, Harvard-educated rebuttal of the president), or entirely foreign and deliberately unreachable (think White Lotus’ Mook, but also our newfound adoration for K-Pop stars like Jennie and aespa, who were both featured in Billboard’s Women of 2025).

While these latter celebrities are, perhaps, not revered in quite the same light as Western-ized stars like Sandra Oh, Michelle Yeoh, or Greta Lee, they’re nevertheless afforded a dignity that hybrid Asian/Western artists aren’t. Their opacity is a deliberate product of their foreignness; not, as with Miss Casey, Mantis, or Lilly, an indicator of failed assimilation.

In other words, if you can’t succeed at Westernization, it’s best not to attempt it at all. For if you fail and fall, you’ll end up in the zone of WAAC. Weird Ass Asian Chicks, straddling the uncanny valley of a cultural in-between; consigned to being misunderstood, try-hards, and uncomfortably strange.

As a real-life example, consider the amount of hate that Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono received (and still receives) for her transnationally inspired avant garde work. Just a quick google search leads to page after page of (mostly white) people calling her talentless, uncreative, and strange.

Or, as a more modern counterpart, the response received by Japanese-American Mitski, who pivots between being constantly misunderstood, flattened out and oversimplified, or simply (if kindly) dubbed strange and cryptic.

It’s in this way that the WAAC stereotype bleeds out to obscure our vision of real, flesh-and-blood Asian femmes, whose genius and depth is overwritten by the oddity of their presentation, mannerisms, and speech. Oriental inscrutability (or, in my terms, Weirdness) thus becomes a way to capture and ridicule a foreignness that exceeds the bounds of Western predictability.

Against this minimization, what might it mean to reclaim our own weirdness, our own inscrutability, as a form of Asiatic fugitivity; to exploit this illegibility as a form of concealment for radical, political ends? This and more will be the topic of my next essay in this series, so subscribe and stay tuned 😉

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Once it’s complete, the officer reads it over, eyebrows furrowed together. “I don’t understand. These kids stole your phone from you?”

“Um, no.” I stare at my feet. “I let them borrow it.”

“With your banking app unlocked?”

“Yes.”

The officer looks between the form in his hands and the person who filled it. I knew that, were he to meet me in any other circumstance, I’d come across as a bright, young woman, described by her professors as “possessing a critical eye, sharp tongue, and lucid understanding of how this world works.”

Right now, however, I just look like a dumbass that got robbed 5,000 dollars. Outside of the classroom, it seems like I actually have no idea how this world works.

The next question the officer asks is the obvious one. “Why the hell would you do that?”

My voice is very small when I reply. “Because they said they needed money for food. And that they were only gonna transfer themselves twenty bucks.”

What I don’t say is: “Of course I suspected it was a scam. Who wouldn’t? Except, instead of trusting my instinct, I chided myself for having classist thoughts about children. They’re only high schoolers! I wanted, so badly, to believe in them, that I forced myself to hand over the phone.

“And besides, I figured that even if it was a scam, they probably needed the money more than me. So it would be fine.

“I just didn’t expect them to take so much.”

They’d transferred not 20 dollars, but 5 whopping thousand.

The officer sighs. “Well, right then. Did you call your bank?”

“Of course. I called them immediately.” After all, I’d never have gone to the cops if the bank hadn’t demanded a police report in the first place. They told me that they needed “evidence” of real distress. It wasn’t enough, apparently, that I’d been sobbing throughout their whole phone call.

Now that I’ve made the report, can I leave?

“Not so fast,” the officer says. “You say this happened an hour ago?”

Yessuh.

“Well then, those kids might still be at the park. How about you hop into the car, and we’ll drive some rounds; see if you can identify them?”

It felt like a balloon had blown up in my throat. Me? With you? Please! I’d rather be stripped and strung naked in the heart of Times Square, have my nudes leaked to Reddit, and my old Wattpad exposed before teaming up with you, little piggy. Oink oink.

Except, not really, because I really need my 5,000 back.

It’s thus that I swallow my dignity, silence my worldview, and pretend this doesn’t go against everything I stand for. Like a good, obedient child, I climb into the car.

Dear leftist: Can you still call yourself a “leftist” if you’re partnered with a cop who, despite your whining protest, keeps driving up to every group of Black people he sees and asks, “Was it these guys that took your money?”

I keep saying that, No, the kids that scammed me couldn’t have been older than 16. And also, I really, really, really don’t need to find them. I just need a police report on file, so that my bank will reverse the transaction.

And another thing: could you maybe stop playing Kendrick so loud? You don’t think it’s a little ironic, being a police officer and all that?

But the officer is unmoved by either plea, and he keeps driving in circles, blasting GNX, as if he’s got nothing better to do than interrupt perfectly lovely picnics. With my police report held hostage, and shame burning the skin of my face, I secretly pray for the earth to swallow me whole. I will not need my 5,000 dollars back if I just cease to exist. Problem solved!

It gets so bad that I’m almost relieved when his walkie-talkie goes off with a crisis more urgent than mine. Robbery, 3 blocks north. Sweet Hallelujah, a man is robbing a Walmart! Thank the Lord; we can now shift tracks from this flagrantly obvious racial profiling.

My new best friend flicks on the sirens, and we’re off! Wailing and speeding down the streets of Brooklyn, taking turns so sharp it makes my stomach flip. Once at Walmart, he screeches to a halt, jumps out of the car, and chases the robber halfway down a street. It’s clear that the man has no grandmaster plan; he’s stuffed half a sack’s worth of stolen goods down his ratty, worn out joggers, all of which fall out his pantholes when he runs, like a trail of breadcrumbs for the policeman to follow. It’s not long before my cop has him caught and cuffed.

As this goes on, at least six more police vans show up to the scene, sirens blaring. Cops pour out, like clowns from a clown car, and swarm the single, sickly looking robber. I lose sight of my cop amid the crowds. He is just another man in blue.

I am wondering, at this point, whether or not I can make an Irish exit and still get my police report back. Surely no one will notice if, in all this chaos, I climb out the car and quietly leave?

Except, it is now that a white leftist boy, with a sexy little pornstache, decides to insert himself into the scene. Rushing into the horde of cops, he spreads his arms out, as if to protect the robber from a volley of bullets. “Hey, don’t tell ‘em anything, man,” he says. “You don’t have to tell these pigs nothing!” It’s admirable, if a little dumb. In an alternate timeline, where I’m not so busy licking the underside of a boot, this white boy is me.

I am afraid that, if I choose now to leave the police car, he will see me and know that I’m a political traitor. So, instead, I slouch down in my seat, low enough that he can’t see my eyes through the window.

It feels like an eternity before the whole thing dissolves. The white leftist boy is made to stand aside, the cops push the robber into a vehicle, and my original cop-driver returns to the wheel. He turns to me and snickers. “What did you think of Mr White Savior over there?”

The officer, who is Black, laughs like he’s told a great joke, then reverses the car and pulls back into the street.

My narratives are getting slippery. I’m losing the thread of the plot. Am I going to get my money back? Was this even about money in the first place? Is this meant to be a vignette of our broken judicial system, which prioritizes property over people; and which cares more about inventing a “guilty party” than just getting the bank transaction reversed? I.e. a reaffirmation of, yes, ACAB!

Or, is this the very opposite: a humanization of our police officers, who are well-meaning people unconsciously upholding a broken system, and who can (and must) be rehabilitated toward our collective liberation? Leftist organizer-theorists, such as Adrienne Maree and Autumn Brown, have been openly teasing out these ideas for a while, arguing that our movements must make room for civilian-cop solidarity, if only because police forces are comprised of community members too. As one friend put it, “cops need to know that, if and when they leave the force, they can lean on their community to support them. Or else, how are they ever going to leave?”

As I’m thinking this over, my cop-partner shows me the finalized police report. “Alright, Zoe,” he says, because I guess we’re on first-name basis now. “We’re going to digitize this report, and it’ll be available for you and your bank in a business day or so.” Having forgiven the faux pass of my ACAB shirt and sneering politics, he passes me a business card with his name and badge number. “Just keep me posted if anything new happens.” He does not say it unkindly.

Granted, I’m smart enough to know that a positive interaction, between a police officer and myself, is not a synecdoche for a whole system. Not to mention that this story might have gone very differently if I wasn’t an East Asian, cisgender girl with class privilege beaming out her ass.

Still. For what it’s worth, I thank him and leave.

“I can’t believe you let those boys take your phone.”

I’m with my friends now, and the tips of my ears are burning. “I knowwwww,” I whine. “I’ve learned my lesson, okay? No more trusting people!”

He snorts. “I mean, I don’t think that’s the lesson.”

“Okay, smartass. What’s the lesson, then?”

With a sympathetic sigh, he pats my shoulder awkwardly. “There’s a difference between creating new systems and just pretending that you’re already living in them, you know. Like, there’s nothing wrong with having ideals. Except you have to actually, like, create the conditions where they become possible.”

I shrug him off with a huff, but deep down, I know he’s right. There’s nothing virtuous, or politically useful, in blundering around the world as if everything is already fair. I want to co-develop communities of care, in which I don’t have to worry about 5k being stolen; both because I don’t need it to subsist, and because no one else does either. I want to live in a world where I don’t have to go through systems of policing, surveillance, and punishment, just to earn back the bare necessities of survival. I want to live in a world where children, young kids, are not conditioned toward greed and theft; where their victory is not premised on my loss.

But desire alone does not a praxis make.

To actually get there, I figure, the path is neither straightforward nor clear. It’s gonna require compromise, imperfection, and an abundance of mistakes. Not to mention some deeply uncomfortable alliances. At this moment in time, I’m just not sure which of these sins I’m willing to make.

You say you want free speech? We have that right here! A long list of slurs you can say without fear. And you don’t need “schooling” to learn them, they’re all posted online! Along with top ten hate crimes that can be done DIY. Go ahead, try them, they’re fun for all ages. Put it on X, and we’ll turn a blind eye. For as pro-cop as we are, we’re not the wokeness police! We won’t “cancel” you for saying what you honestly think, we’ll just cut off your funding if you step out of line.

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Also, good news! We’ve banned half the books! Now there’s nothing on gender or sex or (ew) DEI. Why did we do this? Out of love for our kids! We don’t want brown kids or trans kids to know they’re oppressed. We know they can’t change it, and it’d just make them depressed. Instead, we’re reviving the ol’ American dream, where working real hard is the way to ascend, where money is glory, so pull up your bootstraps and get on with the story. You can always, in theory, outearn the dark shade of your skin. I know it’s unlikely, but I’d rather fuel hope than woke education!

The less critical thinking, the more joyful the nation. Ignorance is the prevention and salve to all hurt. It can’t feel bad to lose your rights and your freedom when you don’t know their worth. After all, look at y’all! Learnt and well read and real clever thinkers, and where did it get you? When all’s done and said, your vibes make me sad. This mood’s a real stinker. Smile, be glad. Clear those thoughts from your head, wipe that frown from your face. The order is changing, accept it with grace.

And what’s that? You’re worried about the shutdown of Title I schools? You mean those places for poor kids? We’ve planned for that too! We’ve expanded the prisons, with all new designs; these are built perfect for bodies aged five up to nine. The prisons make profit and kids learn a trade. It costs zero tax dollars, ‘cuz their work goes unpaid! You’ve heard of sweatshops, and this is kind of the same. You might’ve known it under a more PC name: the Dems like to call it a school-to-prison pipeline, but we’ve got rid of the school and kept none of the pipes. Now it’s a more direct shot, with no chances at life.

What, you don’t think it’s fair? They should’ve thought about that before being poor! This country’s for billionaires, whose wealth funds our wars. We have no resources to spare on fee waivers, teacher wages, or free, reduced lunch. Because, to be real with you, when it comes to the crunch: education is more than just a waste of our cash. As these kids grow more critical, they’re a real pain in the ass.

It’s best for the country if we keep them naive, and if we spoonfeed them everything they’re meant to believe. It’s for these reasons and more that we’re shutting the doors to the Department of Ed. If you have questions, don’t bother, try submission instead!

I’ve washed the dishes and fed the dogs and made dinner just right, and you saved the world in the meantime. I’m sorry for not doing my share.

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You regale me with witty stories of all the people you met and cops you outmaneuvered, as well as the graffiti you sprayed on the walls, but all I can think about is that dinner’s gone cold. You really showed them, you say; those capitalist, parasitical, leech sucking pigs. You taught them a lesson they won’t soon forget. And you’ve let dinner go cold.

It took me all day to cook it. I sweat and I ached and I bent my neck strange just to sear everything in the way that you’d like, so that by the time you got home, it’d be perfect.

You didn’t answer my calls, or reply to my texts, like, Holy shit, where are you? Are you safe, are you dead? It took you ‘til 10 to pick up the phone and say [deep voice], Hey babe, gotta raincheck.

Shit’s gone down in the city, and you have to show up; it’s a matter of justice, it’s a matter of saving the world. It’s a matter of being there for your community, surely I get it? And on one hand I do, but on the other, I miss when I was your community too.

Before I slept with you, before we dated, before I did your laundry and kept your house clean, I was community. Before I got weighed down by the drag of your bills and your chores and your unending needs, before I was dulled down by the wear of repetition. Before you got bored of my face and sick of my touch; before you could take me for granted, I was the comrade you loved, the icon you put on a pedestal. And who would’ve thought, dearest, that you’d leave me up here to dry?

And now you resent me, ‘cause I represent all the aching predictability of the life we said we’d never lead: of the unhappy couple, with their white picket fence. You resent me ‘cause I’ve become this caricature of a sad, naggy housewife, but darling, it was you that made me her.

And now dinner’s gone cold. And you try to pass a joint between us, but love, there’s nothing between us, and you say we remind you of your parents, and that’s how I know it’s done.