In October 1992, a mere year before I was born, a white soldier near a U.S. military base in Dongducheon brutally raped and murdered a camptown “prostitute”1 named Yoon Geum Yi. He had forced the spear of an umbrella up her anus, and two beer bottles into her vagina. She was found battered and naked, slain after just 26 years of life. The perpetrator, Private Kenneth Lee Markle III, was originally sentenced to life in prison. He served 13 and a half before receiving parole.

Since the 1940s, the U.S. government has collaborated with the South Korean administration to establish military camptown prostitution sites across its vast footprint on the peninsula, trafficking about 20,000 Korean girls and women into state-sanctioned sexual slavery. “Public health” facilities were developed en masse, mandating twice-weekly STI testing. Those who tested negative wore tags, like cattle being marked for imminent slaughter. Those infected were jailed.

For over 700 days to date, activists have occupied one of these sites in Dongducheon, the city where Yoon Geum Yi lived, and perhaps, where she could have been incarcerated and died a different death: from a state-administered, forced penicillin overdose. She would have joined her sisters nearby, in a mass unmarked grave of over 3,000 camptown girls and women who were also murdered by the government—a burial site for ireum eopneun saram, or “people with no names.”

Organizers in the encampment demand that the “STD Control Center,” as it is euphemistically called, stay open. (According to Grace M. Cho writing for Lux Magazine, American soldiers in Dongducheon, on the other hand, called this facility the “Monkey House,” after the shrieking that could be heard from within, where the “monkeys” resisted and attempted to escape.)

Each and every one of the other 40 of its kind across the country have been abolished, a shameful attempt to erase definitive proof of South Korea’s willingness to hurl itself further into cultural amnesia from its tragic past, self-inflicted and not, as well as the age-old U.S. foreign policy of operationalizing sexual violence while scapegoating war. (The ongoing Korean War is the stated reason for the country’s honor of hosting the largest U.S. military base outside its own borders.)

During the Vietnam War, the Thai and U.S. governments collaborated to erect “Rest and Recreation” hubs throughout Thailand for American GIs, weary and lonely from combat. Estimates suggest that 400,000 Thai girls and women were trafficked through this trade.

Japan, itself a perpetrator of sexual war crimes (see: comfort women), was forced into American occupation after losing World War II. Okinawa now hosts the largest U.S. Air Force base in East Asia; the island is occupied by 30 U.S. military bases in sum.

Okinawa is another site of decades-long exploitation of Asian girls and women in service of U.S. militarymen, state-sanctioned and not. NPR found nearly a thousand reported cases of U.S. military sex crimes against local women between 1945 and 2021.2

There, in 1955, a white American soldier raped and murdered a five-year-old Japanese girl named Yumiko Nagayama.

In 1995, three U.S. soldiers kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl—also in Okinawa. Afterward, they claimed she “looked like she enjoyed it.”

Most recently, in 2012, again in Okinawa, two U.S. Navy members gang raped a 20-year-old Japanese woman.

Despite the best efforts of survivors and supporters, none of the governments involved in these war crimes have reckoned with their institutionalization of rape and violence against Asian girls and women. Many are in active denial, erasing what history remains preserved in books and classrooms.

In 2015, Kenneth Lee “Kenny” Markle died, ostensibly peacefully, in his own residence.3 His life was celebrated by friends and family at a funeral home in his hometown of Keyser, West Virginia. Markle’s obituary states:

“He was a US Navy veteran of World War II and was a life member of both Nancy Hanks Post 3518, VFW, Keyser and Kelly-Mansfield Post 52, American Legion, Piedmont, W.Va. He also was a member of Lodge 662, Loyal Order of Moose, Keyser and attended the Fairview Chapel United Methodist Church.”

Of course, there is no mention of his crimes, nor his decade plus spent in prison as a consequence.

I wonder if Markle died and went to heaven, or if there is justice, and he has met some version of hell. I think about the moment he looked at Yoon Geum Yi as he continued to penetrate and beat her. Did he place his hand near her throat, flirting with the idea of strangling her, instead sticking his fingers inside her mouth? What did he see when he looked down? Was it an oriental Jane Doe staring back, expressionless, potentially even enjoying it?

Where do men go to learn to simultaneously adore Asian women, to the point of fetishization, and hate us, to the point of murder? This ad suggests that it is no place in particular; it is simply in the water. While Equinox is no government actor, its campaign exemplifies mainstream American patriarchal culture, nurtured through decades of militarized sexual exploitation, that deems us sex objects: worthy of being fucked, but not of being allowed to live as equal mortals.

I would literally rather do anything other than waste hours of my one short life thinking and writing about a boring ad campaign by a private equity luxury gym, especially one as trashy and stupid as Equinox. Much has already been written and content-ified about this ad that Equinox ran since early this year, and has only recently rescinded, with a sorry-not-sorry “apology” that accused its critics of being wannabe content creators and clout chasers.

But I am writing because I do not know what else to do, because this image sparks genuine fear inside of me—not of racial stereotypes, or vague notions of “objectification” or “techno-orientalism,” as compelling as those phenomena are. What I am afraid of is violence, and even death. Is it so far-fetched, considering that five years ago, a 21-year-old white man murdered six Asian women and two additional victims in a 9-millimeter handgun shooting spree across Atlanta?

While talking heads of the time attributed the attacks to “Asian hate” (a term so imprecise as to be utterly useless), we know some things about Robert Aaron Long, the 21-year-old perpetrator, that suggest this was not an isolated incident, or one related to COVID anti-Asian hate crimes, but one in the long lineage of white men sexually abusing Asian women, and when dissatisfied, feeling empowered and vengeful enough to kill them.

We know that Long feared he was addicted to sex, and had potentially frequented the massage parlors the women worked at, or similar establishments in the area, to solicit it. We know he felt deep Christian guilt about his exploits and compulsions, and was motivated to commit murder against Asian women at these spas in an attempt to “eliminate the temptation”—for himself, and for others. A self-declared martyr, of sorts.

The next day, I stepped out during golden hour to meet one of those spring afternoons that New Yorkers dream of all winter. Hundreds had congregated in my neighborhood park to soak up the last hours of the sun that stuck around for a bit longer each day. Outdoor diners occupied large sections of the street, nursing carafes of chilled red wine. The scene abounded in white men.

It sounds like an exaggeration to myself, even as I type these words, but I know it to be true. That day, and for several weeks afterwards, I feared I was going to get shot by one, and die.

When I was 26, the age at which Yoon Geum Yi’s life was taken, I had a crush on an older white man. When we learned that he had slept with another East Asian girl two day prior, my friend, a white woman, turned to me, and winked. “Lucky you,” she said. “He must have a thing for Asian girls.”

I wonder if Kenneth Lee Markle, too, had a thing for Asian girls. It seems clear that Robert Aaron Long did, at the least, as have many men I have knowingly and unknowingly been with over the last decade of sexual activity.

Four years ago, I met a white man I had sex with a few times at a K-town chicken restaurant, where he told me he simply thought Asian girls were easier lays. He recalled a Korean girl he met on Tinder had shown up to his place with a suitcase packed. She lived there for days, being fucked by him and tidying up after him. Like some sort of sex slave, he joked.

I listened and smiled politely and paid the bill for the chicken I did not eat, and still briefly considered sleeping with him that night.

I spent the rest of my evening preoccupied, not with the man’s disgusting behavior and words, but with whether or not he liked me because of me, or simply because I reminded him of that other Korean woman. I told myself that I was different, likely hotter and way cooler, and that I would never be so sexually subservient to a white man. But wasn’t I?

I look at this ad and wonder how many times a white man has made this precise gesture with his hands and cum inside of me, eyes closed, imagining with all his horn-dogged might that I am the cyborg depicted just so. Nameless, faceless, voiceless. No particular desires of my own, no potential defense response to his violence, no body to speak of. Not any identifiable person in particular, but the platonic ideal of a woman, a prediction4 produced by an amalgamation of all the disembodied Asian girls and women who have been sexually maimed by white men.

On my bad days, I see myself this way, too. I remold myself in the image of “whoever you want me to be, baby.” I claim to have no needs during sex, as I derive pleasure through compersion; I am satisfied with my partner’s orgasm, and do not desire my own. My SSRIs make it hard for me, anyways, I mumble, attempting to make both of us comfortable by assuaging our anxiety about his selfishness or incompetence, instead placing the blame on myself. I remain silent in the face of explicitly disrespectful behavior.

At times I believe that if I am loved, it is not because of who I am; it is because my ethnicity and eyes (and pussy, because men continue to crudely insist, to me and others, that there is something anatomically different about our unnaturally tight, odorless, and “clean” vaginas5) evoke our collective imagination of who an Asian woman is: Madonna and whore, Lolita and sex slave, an object of affection and of contempt, so threatening of a temptation as to drive men to kill.

“Lucky you,” says an intrusive voice inside my head. “Thank you for the attention,” I say. How flattering it is to be considered beautiful by my captors.

Ever have a months long emotional affair with a C-list celebrity’s husband, only to hear that while he can spend hours a day texting you, he cannot make time in his busy schedule to meet and develop an actual relationship? Block him.

Ever have a lifelong friend ghost you after a drunken hookup, who today insists that you are the one who ghosted him? I only recently blocked him.

Ever have a situationship get married months after pursuing you and subsequently ghost you—except for the occasional Instagram story ‘like’ ostensibly to remind you that he still exists? I literally just blocked him.

Once, tired of hearing me complain about him, a friend told me to delete and block a man’s number. I responded defensively. I thought it was rude and un-adult to cut off communication by blocking someone, especially after months or years of intimacy building. Also, if I block his number, I joked, it gets harder to text him when I’m drunk.

She pointed out, correctly, that the man in question had not honored his end of the bargain in our relationship. There is no honor in waiting for someone to text me back when he has demonstrated he has no intention of meeting me with reciprocity. What I thought was rude to the other was actually a betrayal of myself. She insisted that I am not a public resource, available to be shared by all. Access should be limited for those who truly deserve it.

For over a decade of dating in adult life, I avoided blocking men. Instead, I kept their number, holding out hope that one day I would wake up and receive a message from them, learning that they have suddenly changed their mind. I dreamed (yes, literally dreamed) he would see the folly of his ways and ask for my forgiveness. He would change his schedule, his communication style, do whatever was needed to better our relationship.

My therapist advises me not to fantasize about other people changing; they rarely do. To expect a man to change because of me is even more delusional. Yet being delusional is better, to me, than the alternative: accepting that someone has left my life, missing explicit closure, and moving on.

Like many others with abandonment issues, I have trouble with endings. I don’t accept when they have arrived, and try, however I can, to extend some semblance of connection. This is hard when the abandonment is early or unexpected passing. (I can’t raise my grandmother and father back from the dead.)

It is easier in a breakup, when there are still access points to your ex, ways to keep lines of communication open. I have texted exes to no avail for weeks; I have shown up at their house to demand an explanation; I have avoided blocking them for decades. It doesn’t matter if we dated for days or years. If you were once in my life, I cannot let you out.

My partner has a helpful mantra to combat the inevitable, existential dread of endings. “Thank you and goodbye.” As in, sometimes we have to know when to leave the party, even if it is still bumping—with appreciation for all it was.

He whispered this to me as we sat like kids on a log, watching the sun rise over the canopy of pine trees sheltering us from its direct rays. The music festival was winding down, the sunrise set was over, and one by one, like diligent if weary soldiers, dancers left the stage and meandered toward their tent to pack up their things. We had made it through the night.

My legs had given out on me, but I desperately wanted to see the end of the festival through. Jared taught me then that I could say, "thank you and goodbye,” and move on. He said to me, hand cupped over my ear so I could hear him over the music, “It’s important to know when you need to do that, for yourself.”

Heeding his words, we followed the retreaters in suit, waltzing deep through the woods like enraptured zombies, dancing as much as our bodies could still muster to the ongoing set as we reluctantly returned to camp.

We had still not started packing up our tent when we heard the final song, playing four hours later than scheduled. Through the scores of branches and needles, we could make out the bass and melody. It was Sade, one of my favorites. I basked in the mid-day blaze with Jared, sweat gently glistening and pooling on our bodies. I felt happy and free, satisfied like a plump baby after feed. I felt safe. I am capable of enduring endings, when surrounded by those who make me feel secure.

Thank you. I said, finally. And goodbye.

In case it is not obvious, ‘him’ in this situation can be any he, she, they, or other person. ‘He’ is a genderless stand-in for all of the assholes out there who don’t honor stated boundaries, who want e-girlfriends but not IRL girlfriends, and who ultimately avoid conflict by avoiding you altogether. You know who you are.

I listened to the episode on my drive to H-Mart in Queens, and I briefly fell into the essential liberal trap: moralizing about individualized consumer choices. I felt guilt for owning a car in New York City, and for insisting on traversing to a grocery store 40 minutes away when I could subsist with basics from the Key Foods around the corner.

But the more overwhelming source of my uneasiness was in the interview’s cringey mediocrity. It simply was not a very rigorous conversation. Tolentino and Piker gave their stump speeches, that they have in many other forums, failing to engage substantively with each other or the topic area. No challenging of themselves and their ideas; just a one-upping contest on who employs more Marxist rhetoric or models better consumer behavior. All came in believing what left believing; nothing was learned or realized anew.

The interview features a lot of imprecise, lazy language. Spiegelman calls late United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson a “healthcare executive,” when he is, most accurately, a “health insurance executive.” (United Healthcare, despite its name, does not provide care. It is in the business of profiting from gambling on the odds of our illness and death.) “Microlooting” itself is a misapplication of the word, “looting,” which entails stealing during moments of sociopolitical upheaval. All of this lends the act a negative connotation over more neutral terms, like “shoplifting.”

Inconsistent thinking abounds. Both Piker and Tolentino were nominally dismissive of acts of resistance that aren’t labor-oriented “collective direct action,” but were also pro-microlooting. They were uniformly anti-destruction of employer property, in reference to the case of a worker who allegedly set a Kimberly-Clark warehouse on fire, on grounds of low wages. (They did, however, note that sabotage can be strategic, but didn’t elaborate on when or how.)

Tolentino criticized the action as unstrategic, accusing the worker of acting “primarily out of emotion” as a “disgruntled” employee. (Consider the fact that one of employers’ top PR tricks to alienate worker organizers is to present them to potential sympathizers as “disgruntled” employees.)

Finally, both Piker and Tolentino, when asked about the murder of Brian Thompson, stated that they didn’t approve. It was a strange turn to the interview; both seemed generally sympathetic of Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of the health insurance executive throughout, but either didn’t have the balls or the intellectual rigor to translate that into a final ‘yes’. (Piker cheekily says his lawyers advised him toward that response.)

The most disappointing part of Piker and Tolentino’s performance was the acceptance of the central question: Is “microlooting” OK? This is simply not an important moral discussion. What would do we do with the response? Jail those who steal lemons from Whole Foods? Or valorize their efforts through opinion pages of publications like The New York Times? Pat ourselves on the back for having a better moral judgement than others?

Socrates posited that good questioning leads to real knowledge, and that real knowledge necessitates action. If you really “knew” something, he believed, you’d act accordingly. Yet significant airtime during this interview was devoted to the self-admitted failures of Tolentino and the host to act in alignment with their own ethical code, choosing instead to continue to drink iced coffee in plastic, or order food delivery during a storm. Do they really “know” that these things are bad, if they are still doing it anyway?

The result of a bad question, like whether microlooting is morally good, is a lack of real knowledge. Since we’ve not gained real knowledge, we exhibit no actual change in behavior. Hence, Tolentino and Spiegelman’s failure to transform themselves in the image of the world they want to create. (It is a little intense to refer to Tolentino’s moral posture as “shooting and crying,” a phrase now mostly used to describe IDF soldiers’ moments of cathartic regret after murdering Palestinians, but Berg’s point stands: continuing to commit immoral acts with self-pity is a pretty useless act.) How might they ask better questions to achieve real knowledge, and thus, real change?

The question this podcast episode is trying to ask is how a person should be, especially in a political, economic, and social environment that is rigged to favor the top, at the expense of the rest of us all. Tolentino suggests one should spend three years working at Whole Foods in order to unionize the employees. Fair. Piker invokes militant labor action and structure. I don’t disagree. But for those of us in the majority that is not going to go unionize Whole Foods (including Tolentino), or work in a union to improve density and organization, how can we operate as morally good beings?

Whether or not you shoplift at Whole Foods really has no bearing on whether you are a good person. If I were to learn more about each of the people who have done this (including myself), I’m sure I would find a range of actual political predilections, situational contexts, and consequently, an even spread of people who I think are “good” or “bad.” Whether you adhere to your pledge to boycott The New York Times opinion section from six months ago, in opposition to the paper’s pro-Zionist propaganda, does tell me a lot about whether you are a “good” or “bad” person.

Having a thoughtful framework for how you think about social change, identifying your place in that, and committing to it, can make someone “good.” Tolentino participating in her local mutal aid group is compelling; so is Piker’s investment in leftist labor political structure through his bully pulpit and influence. I wish they had talked more about those commitments, rather than moralizing about others’ acts of sabotage and resistance (which, they might consider, achieve other necessary tactics for mass class solidaristic action, like consciousness-raising). It would have made for a much more illuminating, important conversation.

I am not the first to accuse k-pop of being engineered to perfection on aesthetics and brand, while steering clear of the thorny topics that art contends with (belonging, pleasure, grief, and so on). Sociologist John Lie asserts that Korea, and k-pop in particular, relies on cultural amnesia as a crutch to move past its traumatic, colonial past. Lie says, for Korea, “Tradition tends to get in the way of doing something new.” In other words, in order to move forward, forget the past.

The result is Arirang, a Frankenstein of pop producers’ beats, featuring many songs that simply sound the same: R&B trap paired with (clearly affected) trendy rap bits. The lyrics throughout, especially in English, are nonsensical genericisms. Each song is also, as my partner observed, timed at the perfect BPM for ARMY to wave light sticks in the air on the 4-count beats.

I love listening to it, and have done so at least a dozen times. Every song is endlessly streamable, designed for easy listening on repeat. Melodies stick with you for days after first run-through. This is, of course, k-pop at work.

While streaming the band’s live comeback performance on Netflix, I grooved back and forth, bouncing on my couch. I was simply in a good mood. On the second watch, I could recite at least 40% of the lyrics of every song, thanks to highly repetitive phrases and words, a key marketing hook in k-pop songwriting. (“SWIM,” the title song of the album, repeats the refrain, “Swim,” 38 times.)

BTS is undeniably good at singing, dancing, and performing; the band is also extremely good at being international k-pop stars. They are joyful, but decidedly apolitical. It seems they were born to be entertainers.

They were playfully anxious: j-hope fished, “We did have some concerns that we might be forgotten, or whether you would still remember us,” to which the audience screamed, “NOOOOOO OPPAAA!” Sometimes, they were caring: Jung Kook flirted, “You can’t get a cold, OK?” Sometimes, they were just fun: “This is so fun!” “We’re having so much fun!” or some version of this was exclaimed by at least four of the members.

Meanwhile, the production value is stunning. Flashing red lasers stretch across from audience to stage to palace, and projections of flowing ink, like calligraphy, flashed across Gwang-hwa-mun, the symbolic gates to the last great Korean dynasty.

Gwang-hwa-mun’s history, it is said, reflects the resilience of Korea. Erected in the 14th century, it was burned to ashes by the Japanese three centuries later, and reconstructed and destroyed several times thereafter. The current restoration was completed in 2010.

During the show, Arirang was sung by Korean women in hanbok, on traditional drum and harp, in front of the backlit gates. It could have been iconic, but it fell flat. The medley was disjointed and shallow.

That’s because Arirang is mixed into the bridge of “Body to Body,” the album’s opening number, which is a song about dancing close to, well, another body. The lyrics most often repeated include “I need some body to body. All of your body beside me” (two times each) and “Somebody like you” (fourteen times total). It has nothing to do with the spirit of Arirang at all.

It is unsurprising that the album concept was a last-minute decree from on high. In BTS: The Return, the group’s self-produced documentary about making Arirang, Bang Si-hyuk, chairman and CEO of HYBE, pushed it as a unifying theme—after nearly all the album’s songs were written, and without widespread approval from the group. V worried about the nationalist undertones. RM and others felt it was random, a clash of sounds and cultures. None of the members seemed to feel a genuine connection with the source material.

But what Bang says, goes. And so it went. In the documentary, a HYBE executive explains that a group of Korean boys in the 1890s traveled to the U.S., and gained notoriety for their musical talents. A white American ethnographer recorded them singing to produce the first-ever record of Arirang. The parallels are cute, and ultimately, aesthetic.

In BTS: The Return, it is clear that Bang sees this album as a part of his legacy beyond Korea. He fantasizes aloud about stadiums full of non-Koreans singing Arirang. SUGA complains that too many of the lyrics on the album are in English; the agency held its ground, politely explaining that lyrics needed to be English to reach a “global” audience.

For Bang, and thus, for BTS, to be Korean today is to orient oneself toward the west. Arirang is an exemplar of that posture. To encounter its future, Koreans believe, it has to forget its difficult history, personal and national alike. (Take, for example, the members’ perfect deflection away from press questions about conscription—the reason for their hiatus, and undoubtedly a formative life experience.) Tradition and the past is encumbering and complicated, unappealing and uninteresting to people other than ourselves.

Despite being about nothing, BTS’ Arirang does something. It demonstrates the modern Korean way of life, of coping: forget the painful past, and move forward for the sake of our survival, in order to maintain our collective chaemyeon, or social face, as a people. My grandmother would say it this way: “Why talk about things in the past that are bad?”

I do not know much about my grandmother, despite having been raised by her for the first 14 years of my life. Today, she is gone; so is her memory and mine. K-pop, as any other art form, has the potential to be a life-giving thing to yesterday and the day before, and all the people and experiences and ideas who were present then. It need not dwell or indulge in the past, but it can acknowledge, reflect, and honor. It would be made better for it.

While basking in the world’s spotlight, catapulted into a position of cultural hegemony, BTS has the room to explore its ancestry, history, and heritage. As the truism goes, the specific and authentic is also universal. And for the interests of mercenaries like Bang, HYBE, and the PR machine behind the band, it is also likely still highly marketable.

It had been dark for several hours already, but I had just gotten off from work. I was about a month into my deployment in Portland, tasked with canvassing its wealthy suburbs. I was relieved that I was pulling up to pursue a leisure activity, not a grueling three hour door-knocking shift to get my candidate elected president. I parked along a two-way street lined with lawns and townhouses a few blocks away from the hip bar where we were set to meet.

Reaching the entrance, I paused to send some final text messages to my then-partner. He was excited for me; we were testing our months-long fantasy of having other partners. And this night, in particular, would be the first time I would do so with a woman. My experience is common among millennial women I know: from the safety of a relationship with a man, we discovered, in our late 20s and 30s, that we are into women.

For the first 26 years of my life, I believed I was straight. I was one of those women who loudly and annoyingly lamented “wanting desperately to but just not” being into women and “simply loving dick” while complaining about the bad behavior of men. This was in spite of the fact that I decidedly am not that into dicks (sorry!)

I wasn’t just not into women; I was obsessed with men. Despite my complaints about them and ambivalence towards their genitals, boys and men have always had a stranglehold over me. I spent inordinate amounts of time in my youth meeting boys, writing about meeting boys, fantasizing about meeting boys, and plotting schemes so that I could meet boys. Friends would describe me as boy crazy. They would be correct.

There were signs of my affinity for women along the way—or at least, effeminate or androgynous men. This was my first love in k-pop, and in life:

This was my second:

And there was Danielle.1 We had an are-they-aren’t-they affair that women who come out later in life can all relate to. It was a codependent friendship characterized by aggressive possessiveness devolving into abusive tumult. Physical or sexual contact wasn’t part of the equation, but that didn’t detract from the relationship’s depth or importance. The whole episode was destructive and remains mostly unresolved.

I used to say it was life-altering and singularly significant; now I just think I was in love. Over a decade later, one thing is clear: our relationship was not a hundred percent platonic.

I never connected these dots in my head. There was no morning I jolted out of bed, suddenly aware that I liked women. It happened with little fanfare or intention. But one day in early 2020, I spontaneously downloaded Tinder and set my preferences to ‘Women.’ After exchanging a few messages with a woman named Brittany,2 I secured myself a date.

Part of the reason for my belated awakening is the hard-fought, rapid advancement of queer cultural acceptance. In a Gallup poll released last year, nearly 10% of the American population identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In 1992, just a year before I was born, that number was just 1.8. Many likely didn’t self-identify in the past because it wasn’t safe to; many didn’t because, like me, they didn’t realize that they were.

At the same time, within a society liberalizing its views on same sex relationships, it has become easier for wealthy (relative to the world) women like us to access therapy. It unraveled our internalized homophobia that didn’t allow us, for most of our lives, to entertain the possibility that we could be anything but straight.

Halfway into our first drink, Brittany and I mutually divulged that it was our first date with women. I had similar conversations in many of my early relationships. I think there are a lot of us around. These days, when I meet new women my age or younger, I assume they are bisexual.

Gallup confirms my anecdotal evidence:

“In the 12 years that Gallup has been tracking LGBTQ+ identification, it has nearly tripled, as those becoming adults during that period have been far more likely than their elders to say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The recent increase is largely due to more adults in their late teens, 20s and 30s -- particularly young women -- saying they are bisexual.” (emphasis mine)

Our collective inexperience is a huge relief. Coming out later in life is like regressing back to a 13-year-old anticipating your first kiss, with the knowledge that everyone else your age has already gone to second, third, and home base, and have likely even developed a few tricks along the way.

I was plagued with crippling, juvenile self-doubt that I seldom had in relations with men. How do I make a move? What do I do with my hands? What if they don’t like it, or I don’t? I would literally rather die than be caught fumbling around and failing to locate a clitoris the way I’d experienced countless boys and men do in my presence before.

Despite these anxieties, Brittany and I, especially after relieving our secrets about our respective virginities, had a lovely time. We loitered at the bar until it closed, and stumbled to her apartment, conveniently located just steps away, next to one of the city’s major hospitals.

We downed a few more drinks, and I shook off enough of my nerves to register that Brittany was objectively conventionally attractive. She was a tall, blonde woman, around my age, with a bubbly personality that no doubt aided her career in advertising. She gave a Brittany Snow-type of effervescent, well-adjusted energy that was disarming and impossible not to be a little bit jealous of. I was just happy to be along for the ride, flattered that she would think I was attractive too.

Still, for most of the night, I couldn’t tell if we were just girls having a fun night out, or if we were going to fuck. At around 1 AM, I checked my phone and felt a sense of urgency. Time relentlessly marched on, and I had an early morning on the job. My impatience getting the best of me, I made a move. I asked if I could kiss her; she happily obliged. Things progressed as they do: we took each other’s shirts off, moved from her couch to her bedroom, and started to undress completely.

The thing that struck me, above all, was not anatomical. It was the noticeable quiet in the anxious part of my brain that would, in sexual encounters with men, fire jolts of warnings throughout my nervous system. For most of my life, I dissociated during sex. It wasn’t always that way, but after a decade of traumatic experiences, sex became a ritual I chased despite the fact that I didn’t feel very much pleasure, and I almost never came.

But with Brittany, sex was fun. It’s amazing how nice sex can be when you don’t instinctually fear that the other person will, at any point, get upset with you and try to rape and kill you. When you don’t have to stay vigilant about every gesture and movement they are making in order to protect some invisible boundary you have drawn for yourself.

Maybe I can be more explicit here: You can’t stop a man from reaching into your pants if you’re not paying attention, and you don’t move quickly enough. I can tell you this confidently, from experience.

I knew I wasn’t in love with Brittany, and I didn’t want her in the same way I had wanted men sexually in the past. In the beginning, I didn’t find that the particular sex acts I performed toward women inherently made me horny, or that they quenched some deep thirst I had for pussy, for ass, or for boobs. (Though now, I am proudly a Boob Girl.) I was confused, marveling at the novelty yet familiarity of navigating a woman’s body.

I didn’t have that moment of unlock that some describe about their first queer experiences. There was no divine reawakening in which I felt as though all of my previous sexual experiences had been facsimiles of real desire. That this, to be with women, and not men, is what my body was made to do. This uncertainty left me to question myself for years. Was I was really attracted to women, or was I reveling in queer stolen valor rooted in my desperate need to be contrarian, or to appear liberated?

Even after several more sexual experiences with women, and relationships with a few, I don’t call myself queer or bisexual proactively. I do, when forced to on dating apps, self-select in those terms. I don’t correct people in social situations who assume otherwise. Many do assume otherwise, because I am a cis femme woman, living with a man.

It’s true—I don’t love women the same way I love men. I love men mostly because I hate them, and I actually really want to kill them and wear their skin. I want to move in the world the way men do, and see each moment as an opportunity to conquer, not a threat against survival. I love men because I know how men work, and I know how to get men to love me. I love men because society has taught me to value adulation and protection by men, not because there is anything inherent to men that I desire.

Danielle and I used to joke that we would fall in love with any man who was good at literally anything. This is because I never thought myself good at anything in particular, and I wanted to live out my artistic fantasies through my partner as proxy. I often thought I desired men I wanted to be—usually white, wealthy, intellectual types.

When dating men, I play a character that is cool and unflappable to a fault. But with women, I am different. With women, I am more neurotic, possessive, and jealous. Just this past year, I endured a breakup that I handled, not with grace, but with drunken trash talk about her new lover at a mutual’s wedding. I surprised myself with that social faux pas, even though I mostly find it funny now. With women, I continue to surprise myself.

I want to accept that this is wonderfully, deeply human: the infinite possibility of assuming a different dynamic to others, and the openings it creates to access the full diversity of experiences we can in this lifetime.

I have to pursue women, while I am mostly pursued by men. I am consequently rejected by women way more often. I have been accused by women of not being very emotionally available, communicative, and open about my thoughts and feelings; I have, embarrassingly, many times, wagered these same critiques against men.

I love women because they represent the best versions of who I can be. Because they are soft and hard all at once, and because they are more compassionate and thoughtful and courageous than men could ever dream of being. I love women because they transform me for the better, as if by osmosis, from proximity to their brilliance and passion and grace. I love women because they listen, and have known sacrifice, and take nothing for granted.

Writing to you, I am trying to reconcile this dissonance. Just because I love men and women differently, it does not mean I cannot love them both. I repeat this like a mantra. Just because I love men and women differently, it does not mean I cannot love them both.

Above all, I want to be given permission to feel what I feel. I hope translating these feelings into words on a screen, and toward you, will make real what I so desperately want to but can’t on my own. I never had a formal coming out, and many near and far to me will never read this, so I guess this is the closest thing. I wasn’t born this way. But it’s real, how I feel. I hope that’s okay.

Grace eemo was with me, and maybe some others. The model-scouts must have passed us a card with their number on it, possibly an email address, too. I can’t remember the details. I don’t remember a lot from this day, or most of my childhood years. My memory is hazy, and I’m not sure which stories are real, and which are self-manufactured, etched into my brain through repetition. That’s the most gracious thing about trauma—it gives your mind the gift of forgetting the moments that could continue to haunt you the most.

The night before we went to the mall, our 1,200 square-foot home in Carlstadt, New Jersey was bursting with church members. My brother and I spent most of the late afternoon and evening hovering upstairs, trying to distract ourselves from the commotion downstairs. My grandmother was directing a team of the woman jipsahnim-deul to flip the various jeons over multiple plug-in electric burners while the men milled about, attempting but failing at casual conversation to distract from the colossal elephant in the room.

Then, our house phone rang. I think my grandmother picked up, or she couldn’t bring herself to, so another church member did in her stead. My brother and I ran partway downstairs, hiding in the shadowy parts of the staircase. As we watched, jipsahnim, or grandma, whoever it was, hung up the phone. She didn’t need to say a word. Her silence betrayed her.

That evening, my dad was proclaimed dead.

+

The first day we were able to come up for air—after the funeral, church gatherings, the moving out of furniture and medical equipment—my brother and I stood in the room where my father had been bedridden for six years. It was empty. But more noticeably, we remarked, it was silent.

When things get bad, especially towards the end, illness has a sound. The respirator supporting the essential but now-impossible task of breathing. The oxygen running from the tank, through the plastic tube, directly into a hole cut through a throat. The medical monitor beeping regularly to inform others of one’s ongoing vitality. Or the industrial grade saliva suction machine, used to absorb saliva every 10-15 minutes, in order to prevent choking on the accumulating liquid.

For us, the end lasted for six years. For six years, our family dutifully ran the suction machine every 15 minutes, at all hours of the day, swiping around our dad’s mouth to dry it out because he couldn’t swallow on his own.

When I was a baby, rather than being fed by my father, I was taught how to feed him—how to open up cans of shelf-stable predecessors of Soylent; wholly unnatural, highly processed liquids that contain a full meal’s worth of necessary calories and nutrients—and how to inject them slowly into a tube that protruded through his stomach.

All the while, we held out hope. Not that science would advance to discover a cure for my father’s disease, or that he could enter a trial with a promising new drug. We believed, instead, that God would heal my father.

For six years, instead of embracing the time to spiritually prepare for my dad’s impending death, we subsisted on the perpetual high of faith; we deluded ourselves into a myth of a greater power with the capability to both sicken and to heal.

My dad died believing God might intervene to allow him to live. As the nurses disconnected his respirator from his throat, my dad’s final breaths escaped him. Respiratory muscles ravaged by illness, and unable to support oxygen circulation on their own, he was quickly forced to surrender to death.

At least, this is what I guess happened. I wasn’t present in those final moments; only my mother was. I was with the rest of our family, and our community, at home. I still don’t know what happened. My mother has never shared this with me, and I have never asked.

As he gasped for air, did my dad’s eyes cry out for help? Did she have the urge to reconnect the tube? How was it possible for her to resist? I also wonder things my mother also couldn’t possibly know: In those moments, did my father regret his decision? Or did he believe, until the very end, that God would intervene?

After not hearing from God for six years, despite their insistent prayers for his healing powers, my parents felt they had to force God’s hand toward action: either life unencumbered by such a debilitating illness, or death.

‘Voluntary passive euthanasia’ is the medical and legal term for how my dad ultimately left. It’s illegal in many countries; in South Korea, it was only legalized in 2018. Euphemisms aside, ‘voluntary passive euthanasia’ can be simply understood as suicide.

How my parents would describe it, however, is different. They believed they were simply letting go and letting God, as the saying goes. Their theory was that if we prayed hard enough, God might enable my father’s breathing, sans respirator. In other words, he would be healed.

Or, as the Christian doctrine suggests, if we didn’t pray enough, there was a chance it would actually be within God’s plan for my father to simply die. In that case, it was our job to accept his fate and maintain our trust in His omnipotence and ultimate plan.

It only now occurs to me that my 9-year-old brain was unequipped to hold this extreme, delusional hope somehow uprooted from the brutally harsh material reality of our daily lives.

After I was first informed about the plan for dad’s ‘voluntary passive euthanasia,’ I ran into the hospital bathroom abutting his in-patient room, locked the door, and blacked out. I don’t know if I was in the bathroom for 5 minutes or several hours. I don’t know if I cried; if I crumbled to the floor or stayed upright.

I have a vague memory of knocking at the door, my grandmother or my mother calling my name, pleading with me to open up. I think I stayed quiet, unmoving. It is not lost on me this is not dissimilar to my stress response today: recede, hide, and dissociate in silence.

+

Mere months after my dad died, I officially booked my first modeling job. I was to showcase Hilary Duff’s latest clothing and accessory line for Target. To my disappointment, Duff herself was not onsite, and was instead later photoshopped in next to our perfectly racially representative lineup. Next to me, in the final magazine advertisement, was a Black girl, a Latina girl, and a blonde girl.

While comical at first, my clear tokenization as an “Asian girl” (rather than just ‘girl’) remained a consistent presence throughout my short-lived modeling career. When I modeled for a pattern-making company, I was cast alongside a younger model who was supposed to be my sister. She was half-Asian, and looked the part. The rest of the lineup was, unremarkably, white.

I was also, to no one’s surprise, not a very good model. I was painfully shy as a child, and couldn’t dance enthusiastically enough to book a video commercial job for Scholastic; despite persistent coaching from an audio producer, I couldn’t muster sufficient range in my inflection and emotion to book the Disney voiceover casting call.

Then, I booked a job that seemed like it would officially re-launch my flailing career: I was being photographed by Hasbro, the preeminent toy company, and was told my pictures would make it to Times Square.

It was fall by the time the Hasbro spread was set to debut. My grandmother, brother, mother, and I piled into our peach-toned Toyota Camry from 2003, and made the commute into the big city. We found a spot to idle, climbed out of the car, and looked around.

We waited for other slides of toy ads to cycle through on the various billboards surrounding the now defunct Toys R’ Us store on Broadway, loitering on the corner of 7th Ave and 44th St.

Ten minutes passed, and I started to panic. Where was the ad? Had it been cut last minute, or had I been cut from the campaign? We were silent, letting the disappointment settle in as the questions subsided along with the hope that my ad would somehow appear amidst the same set of toy ad slides that had already repeated a dozen times, in the same order.

I don’t remember who noticed it first: it may have been my brother. There was an advertisement for the doll set that I was shooting for—but I wasn’t noticeably present. The ad depicted a girl passing a note to a friend during class, but didn’t show any other part of their bodies: the shot was zoomed in to only feature the hands and the note. My likeness, including my face, or the rest of my body, was entirely cut.

I laughed out loud in relief. I was in the ad, but only the most unrecognizable parts of me: my fingers. The rest of my family slowly looked at me, relieved at my reaction. They set aside their disappointment to embrace the unshakeable humor of the situation. I had loaded so much onto this moment: the viability of modeling as a successful extracurricular activity; a potential moment of hope and triumph in the years after my father’s death.

My modeling career collapsed shortly thereafter. My mom, racing back and forth between two jobs, one in Queens and the other in North Jersey, could hardly manage the responsibilities of a momager: something that was necessary, not a nice-to-have, as a minor-model. And I wasn’t booking enough jobs to make the money worth it. No one blamed me for it, but I blamed myself.

After all, my family and community had sunk so much time and money into it; my dad’s best friend gifted me $2,000 to pay for my mom and my trip to Florida for our first modeling convention, where I met my manager and my agency for the first time. A fashionable and well-connected church eemo who worked at Bloomingdales somehow produced a rack of clothing for me to wear for my first headshot photoshoot; Yoon jeepsahneem-deul who did all of our dry cleaning, so we could return the clothing we certainly couldn’t afford and kept the tags on, for free.

Sometimes I feel silly about it all: a group of adults coming together to scheme a middle schooler’s obviously unviable modeling gig. But then, I remember what’s likely the truth. My family just needed something to feel good about. To engage in that was not mourning. To move forward. And maybe that’s why our church members pitched in too: because what wouldn’t you do to make life a little bit easier for those you see as family suffering around you?

+

Over the years, some have asked me what it feels like to have grown up without a dad. It’s always struck me as a bizarre question. I would just never ask an only child what it was like not having siblings, or the child of a gay couple what it was like never having a mom. The answer is simple: I do not know, because I have functionally never had a father.

On paper, my dad was alive until I was nine. Yet when I was just three years old, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a disease that has most infamously plagued Lou Gehrig and Steven Hawking. The disease moved quickly inside my dad’s nerves, cutting off their circulation to disengage the muscular parts of him that help him move; eat; eventually, to breathe.

But what does it mean to have had a father if you don’t remember his voice? If you’re the caretaker for him, burdened by his dependency on your assistance to shit and shower?

For a long time after he died, I hated my dad. I abhorred our daily chores: suctioning his spit, feeding him through his tube. When I was really angry, I would withhold the suction machine, or refuse to change the TV channel upon his request, and revel at the sight of him choking on his own spit, or boring him of his only form of entertainment as a fully paralyzed, bedridden man.

Years later, into my twenties, I felt this admission was at my throat, thrashing and begging to be released. On a trip together abroad, I tried to casually introduce a question to my friends, over a round of beer: What is one secret that no one knows about you? I volunteered first, clearly prepared with my own response. “I’ve wished my father would die, well before he actually did.” My admission was met by silence, and then near-dismissal.

Of course I wished that, my friends reassured me. My behavior was cruel but not unusual, and my therapist says I should forgive myself. I should forgive myself. I haven’t yet.

They say that hatred and love are two sides of the same coin; the only way I understand this is through my feelings toward my father. I wonder if it’s possible to love someone I never really knew. I wonder if I really ever loved him, if I forget about him most days when I wake up or go to sleep.

I know a few things about him, but I don’t know a lot. Like what his childhood was like. What he wanted to be when he grew up (he died in his early forties). Whether he liked eating spicy food. And corn, like the rest of our family.

The tattoo I dedicated to him, my very first, exists for this reason: I don’t ever want to forget. Because if I forget him, that might mean he is really gone, for good. Because maybe if I keep him alive in my memory, I’m able to extend his spiritual life beyond his physical. I could recite more lines I have read from books about grief and still never convince myself.

Despite having left organized religion, I maintain my belief in Heaven. This is mostly because this belief helps me wake up each morning and opt into continuing to live life on this Earth: I only do so with the hope that one day, I will reunite with my father, and my grandmother, and that we will all live together, healthy and free, for as long as ever.

Maybe I will finally get to know my father then: his personality, his likes and dislikes, his history and life back on this plane before he got sick. Maybe I will finally fill the hole that therapists, psychics, and pastors alike have diagnosed me with, who have all peddled me their own products and services to address, but none of whom have been successful yet. Maybe I’ll finally find a resolution to my daddy issues.

The breathless resultant reporting was confused, echoing the initial sheriff’s claims that the murders were “not racially motivated,” and rather that he was afflicted from “sex addiction.” This was it, the frenzied follow on statements and coverage insisted, the true motivation for the man’s crimes: he was carrying out an attempt to “eliminate” the “temptation.”

It isn’t a coincidence that the temptation he tried to eliminate was East Asian women working at his local vaguely-Asian-but-not-sure-from-where-exactly foot/massage spas.

It is not a coincidence his targets were these spas in particular, not for example, a local luxury white-owned and wealthy-targeted hotel spa, but Young's Asian Massage, Gold Massage Spa, and Aromatherapy Spa, where sexual favors may or may not be offered, depending on who you are and how you ask. The white man likely garnered these favors at these specific spas at some point; a New York Times article reports:

Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County said the suspect may have “frequented these places in the past and may have been lashing out.”

In another source:

“He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” Baker said.

A bad day indeed.

Since then, some more thoughtful coverage has suggested that this massacre was, indeed, “racially motivated”—but in a similar way to those cited by the Stop AAPI Hate campaign, born of hate crimes against those the white Western hegemony insisted were responsible for the production, spread, and death toll of COVID-19.

Of course, the man in question, the shooter, wasn’t peeved about COVID, but was afflicted by another pandemic: yellow fever. Mainstream media proved depressingly incapable of any nuanced analysis of the sources and kinds of racist tropes, as well as resultant hate crimes.

“Asian-Americans were targeted in nearly 3,800 hate incidents in the past year,” cites the New York Times article, as if this statistic were in any way relevant to this particular story.

I’m not aware of any other incidents that year which specifically were targeted toward Asian woman sex workers, perpetrated by white men—not as retribution for the spread of a disease, but a side effect of another pandemic altogether: one that leads to adulation and fetishism and obsession (with Asian women, with anime, with Japan, with k-pop, with East Asian Studies), and also to flashes of racist and misogynistic rage that necessarily accompany what can be misdisagnosed as genuine appreciation and love.

This insidious and arguably more common flavor of racism, I would argue, is distinct but not unrelated to that of the COVID-19 Red Scare. After all, reporters at BuzzFeed News found that Cherokee Sheriff's Captain Jay Baker, who participated in the “not racially motivated” press conference, had posted these images on his personal Facebook:

I still remember the day I first learned about these spas. I was in my room, covertly browsing the internet from the MacBook I borrowed from my best friend Christina. I had somehow come across this VICE article (from the golden, depraved era), profiling RubMaps, a “Yelp for happy endings”. I entered my zip code, and to my horror, was served a map, as promised, dotted with massage parlors in my area that would supposedly oblige to a rub n’ tug.

Of course, I knew exactly which spots these were. Lining Broad Avenue (the main drag in our little square-mile suburb) and Edsall Avenue (the gateway to Route 46 and George Washington Bridge), these seedy joints were always windowless, existing glass obscured by tinted treatments or papered over with posters of generic (what one would now assume AI-generated) women lying on their stomachs, enjoying a massage, with a fuchsia hibiscus flower delicately tucked behind her ear.

Despite my naiveté, I always subconsciously knew that the posters didn’t necessarily reflect what was happening inside—if they did, why the layer of obscurity? Why not open the blinds and let the sun in?

The answer, I found on RubMaps, was simple: these were (illicit) massage parlors that might perform sex acts if requested. Many of these, I found, have signs out front with some variant of this message: “Massage Only, No Sexual Services.”

Among the broad-based community of middle-aged Korean women in my family’s community throughout my youth, and the poor to working class ranks that we occupied through church networks, I realize now I must have known some aunties who worked, or work, at these spas.

After all, our small town is not a cosmopolitan metropolis, but is the densest Koreatown in the country. And today, RubMaps confirms that someone we knew had to be employed at one of these numerous ventures.

The scene behind one of the spas looks not unlike those behind the homes and laundromats and beauty wholesales stores of Korean immigrants, and women in particular, for generations. They grew tomatoes, red leaf lettuce, and perilla leaves—just like my mom does, and my grandmother did before her.

The tragedy, of course, is that this occupation rendered my Church aunties as sinful offenders among the worst kind; in Southern Baptism, or Independent Baptism (somehow even more fundamentalist, conservative, and cultish than its Southern brethren), sex was shameful, dirty, and forbidden. Intermarital sex for the explicit purpose of child bearing was acceptable. All others: Extramarital sex, sex work, sex for pleasure, were all desires of the flesh. Indulgence was sin; too much indulgence might even render one ineligible to enter the pearly gates.

In high school, one of my youth pastors, suspicious that I was dating another youth group member (I was), gifted me a book called “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” The book confidently advocates not just for abstinence before marriage, but near total celibacy as the highest moral cause, the ultimate test of devotion to God as a sole lover and bride-groom.

Authored by Joshua Harris, a white man who has since apologized for and recanted the book’s contents, in particular for harms to women and queer and trans communities, the book tormented me from my bookshelf for years.

Because being a Christian, and a young Christian woman at that, is to triage a barrage of messages that teach us to hate ourselves—to view ourselves as essentially and unavoidably dirty, soiled, and sinful—but that also encourages us to try, as futile as the task may be, to retain as much of our purity as we can physically muster.

My mother encouraged me not to wear short skirts. “Men can’t help themselves—they are visual creatures. It’s your job not to send them the wrong idea by showing too much of your body.”

My Sunday School teacher (who was never promoted to a pastoral position because to this day, Baptist doctrine forbids women from holding such positions in the clergy) taught us about “setting boundaries” with boys if we could not resist the temptation to date them. These boundaries were not about protecting our own comfort and desires; rather, they were about creating arbitrary rules to self-police any sexual contact under the guise of piety.

During my sophomore year of high school, I remember spending weeks in a shame spiral about how I continued to allow my own boundaries to be breached: I told God during Friday Night Bible Study that I wouldn’t let my boyfriend take my pants off. After I caved the following week, I vowed during Sunday service, between genuine sobs of regret and shame, not to allow my shirt to be removed.

When I breached that too, I continued to cede incremental limbs and sexual escalations to God, and then to my boyfriend, but mostly to my own temptation, which ultimately, the religion taught me, has always been myself.

In Blue Sun Palace, a 2024 film by Constance Tsang, after an aggrieved customer shoots and kills a massage worker, her boyfriend (who met her at the spa) continues to visit, developing a new relationship with another worker who was the murdered woman’s work wife (and, the film suggests, lesbian lover). While watching, I wept.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Atlanta spa shooter. I wonder what he felt when he looked into each of the workers’ eyes and killed them. I wonder if he had seen these women before, even received services from any of them individually. I wonder if any of them recognized him, and if he did, whether he hesitated.

One of my core beliefs in life is the random, arbitrary nature of my good fortune: that today I am in a place of safety, stability, and health not because of any actions of my own, but rather that our life circumstances are dictated by serendipitous interactions among ineffable particles in the universe, and that one small rupture in this grand scheme could have changed the course of my life wholly.

I don’t just mean the victims and their mothers. I could have been the shooter, a victim of a system much greater than us, that has provoked war and genocide and occupation. Christianity drives us to hate ourselves so much when caught in sin, and that hatred can manifest in a multitude of violent ways—even through a rampage across multiple Asian spas in a city in the South. I too, have wanted to eliminate the temptation. I too, have wondered: how do I rid me of myself?

It turns out the shooter was a member of the Southern Baptist Church as well. A devoted one, per comments from his youth group pastor; he was a member of the church’s Student Ministry Team in 2018. He learned narratives not dissimilar from those I did on Fridays and Sundays; he may even have had a copy of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” himself.

There’s too much more to say here. What of the historical use of sexual violence against women in Asian countries—especially of those perpetrated by white men? What about the comfort women, the camptown sex workers, or the ladies of red light districts that power economies across Asia?

For now, one thing is clear. I would have never been able to remain in the church. it would have destroyed me. Because the church sees me as a plague unto myself.

For now, I pray for sexual violence over death; I walk in the streets and anticipate that a shooter will pull out an assault rifle from his New Yorker tote bag. I suspect every white man that smiles at me, waiting for the inevitable moment their affection and adulation turns to rage when rejected. There is no winning in this game, but there is survival. And for survival, I have long trained and endured. That much, I know, I can continue to do.

Rest In Peace And Power:

Delaina Ashley Yaun González, 33

Xiaojie Tan (谭晓洁)

Daoyou Feng (冯道有)

Paul Andre Michels

Hyun Jung Grant (김현정)

Suncha Kim (김선자)

Soon Chung Park (박순청)

Yong Ae Yue (유영애)

I stumble to the kitchen, where I throw back my 4 antidepressants and antipsychotic, topped with a probiotic (because our modern lives are incompatible with my bowel’s whims).

I go to the cafe, where two coffees with tip cost $10. I sip up my cold beverage as quickly as possible, waiting for the caffeine to hit.

I read the news. There are more people in jail. More people being deported. She could have been me. More cuts to essential care. More tax cuts.

“We want to kill you,” the politicians seethe through their toothy smiles, while we happily hand them our votes anyways.

I open Instagram.

Someone is engaged.

Someone is married.

Someone has died.

I log onto BlueSky.

Buildings full of people are dead.

Babies’ bodies are mangled.

I donate to the GoFundMe, which to my knowledge, is the only way aid is getting into Gaza. Prominent BlueSky users attempt to “verify” BlueSky accounts that circulate these GFMs. BlueSky, meanwhile, is in an all-out assault against such pages. They are flagged and banned within minutes.

I sit and think about this fact. As an international order, we are relying on GoFundMe for direct aid.

“Who is writing about this?” is my first response.

No one is writing about it.

“Why? Should I write it?”

Even if you did, nobody would publish it.

“But there is a people literally being exterminated, right? This is crazy, right?”

Silence. Zoom. “I hope you’re hanging in.”

Zoom.

Microsoft Word.

Zoom.

I order delivery for food. A worker arrives, having dodged drivers, cops, other workers, and the rain. I try to make sure to tip after he leaves. It’s unlikely that people actually leave tips after they receive delivery. (DoorDash and Uber moved tipping to the end of the user experience in retaliation to pro-worker legislation in NYC).

I scroll through Netflix. The shows are a blur, but at least there is a bright, loud distraction to absorb my attention. Sometime I just run my index finger across the trackball to slowly scroll through the short previews that play upon hover. Sometimes the TV itself times out, goes into screensaver mode, and turns off.

I am too busy scrolling through the news. Another executive order. Another meeting with a foreign dignitary.

Another GoFundMe.

AI is apparently replacing us in 50 years.

Scroll.

No, 20.

Scroll.

Eric Schmidt has been saying 10.

Rinse.

Scroll.

Repeat.

You’ve probably watched it already: that White Lotus monologue. In which Sam Rockwell waxes poetic about Buddhism, desire, and ladyboys—all while sipping on a chamomile tea. (He’s sober now, but it isn’t as hard as being celibate. He still misses “that pussy,” he tells his scene partner, Walten Goggins.)

Rockwell starts his story like any washed up LBH in Southeast Asia would, self-indulgently confessing his Asian girl-fetish, which after he moved to Thailand, quickly devolved into a sex-fueled existential crisis: “The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? Because she's the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could fuck a million women, I'd still never be satisfied.”

It seems, for a moment, as though we are about to witness some trajectory-altering insight that leads Rockwell toward enlightenment.

But then, he takes a hard left turn. “Maybe what I really want… is to be one of these Asian girls,” he wonders. Goggins is in disbelief.

Rockwell continues his story about being fucked by a ladyboy, liking it, realizing that he what he really wanted was to be an Asian girl getting fucked by himself, hiring a man who looked like him to fuck him while he dressed up as an Asian girl, and then hiring an Asian girl to watch the spectacle from the corner.

Substacks, Reddit threads, and shitty internet listicles detailing this scene abound, offering interpretations that range from truly absurd (that this scene heralds Rockwell’s character coming out as trans) to thinly considered regurgitation of the season’s major themes: identity and desire.

(Some that deal with men’s sexual repression are more plausible—consider that Rockwell’s character is fundamentally unable to engage with homosexuality or kink outside the frame of heteronormativity: if he is being fucked, then he cannot be himself, or even a man—he must be an Asian girl.)

These theories, however, are limited in their conception of this monologue as existing in a vacuum; a placeless, race-less space. They do not contend with the specific dynamics of this scene: two middle-aged white men, both flush with cash from likely illegal activity in their backgrounds, are reunited in Bangkok, the heart of a country with a bustling sex trade and work economy (which analysts estimate make up 3-12% of Thailand’s GDP): typically of Thai girls, for white men with profiles exactly like Rockwell and Goggins’ characters.

This is the first time White Lotus addresses the topic of sex work in Thailand head-on, apart from lewd asides about ladyboys from the cartoonishly preppy Schwarzenegger. I shrieked at the TV throughout the scene, and have not stopped professing its merits as one of the best recent commentaries on white male/Asian woman dynamics in pop culture.

Here’s why:

Mike White, through this monologue, articulates a sinister undercurrent of most white man/Asian woman pairings I have observed, and in particular those that involve sex work: the white man’s insistence that his desire for the Asian girl comes not from a dark, patrilineally inherited tendency toward domination and oppression, but rather from a place of insecurity, weakness, and envy.

If the white man wants an Asian girl, not because he wants to exert his power over her, but because he actually wants to be her, the white man can evade culpability and accountability for whatever abuses he perpetrates while using her toward his aims, even inviting pity and empathy from the Asian girl for how he is misunderstood, for how obscure and complicated his dysmorphia is. He is the victim in this situation, not her.

Luckily, for the white man, escaping one’s identity, oft-cited as the characters’ core pursuits in this season, is a real choice. Rockwell asks, “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” He can hire white men and ladyboys and Asian girls to play out his fantasy, to make his desired identity real for him.

For the Asian girl, no such choice exists. The Asian girl is allowed, by the white man, slight variations on a theme: to be “petite,” “chubby,” or “older” (as described by Rockwell, while detailing his nameless, faceless binges of Asian girls). But Asian girl she will remain.

Rich white men are allowed to search for themselves, or in Goggins’ character’s case, for closure from their fathers’ deaths, in Thailand; meanwhile, the Asian girl is used and discarded as an exotic set piece in white men’s never-ending journeys toward self-actualization. The Asian girl is the metaphor, the punchline, the plot device—an accessory to, but never subject herself.

Beyond this, White’s commentary on the white man/Asian woman serves as an allegory for the way in which white people’s self-pursuits are almost always consumptive. It is not enough for a white man to pay for sex with an Asian girl; he must become her, consume her, wear her skin.

For to a white person, is Thailand itself, nay Asia as whole, any different from an Asian girl, legs open to be bought and paid for on a journey of self-improvement, but devoid of individuality or agency—a mere vessel for projected desire, fulfillment, escape, revenge, or peace?

This, after all, is the central plot of White Lotus: the white and wealthy stomp through foreign lands with recklessness, as though children in an exotic playground. They are on a mission: they are looking for or running from themselves, defining and redefining their identities, and playing out their own fantasy Bildungsroman—all without any meditation on their extraction from local communities, limited resources, sacred cultural heritage, and, of course, the workers at the White Lotus hotels.

But each season, after the bodies are buried and the visitors return home from the White Lotus, how transformed are the characters really? Rockwell, at the least, returns to exactly who he was, pre-Buddhism, sobriety, and celibacy. We last see him with Goggins, drinking, doing drugs, and partying with girls once more.

After all of that hand-wringing about desire, identity, and “detaching from self,” we find him in his final form: a rich, white man in Thailand who just has “a thing” for Asian girls.

Shapiros’s reporting primarily recounts the experience of one young woman who first built a friendly, even somewhat romantic, relationship with Gaiman’s then-wife, musician Amanda Palmer. While growing closer to Palmer and her family, and through being “hired” (but not paid) as a babysitter to their young child, this young woman was subject to years of sexual abuse by Gaiman in acts that are some of the most graphic and disgusting I have ever encountered—including episodes of assault in the presence of Palmer and Gaiman’s young son.

What may be confusing, to some, is that the young woman, even after these incidents of assault, returned to Gaiman and Palmer. Over and over and over again. Once Gaiman and Palmer received news of the young woman’s potential public out-ing of Gaiman, she even sent text messages reassuring Gaiman that her experiences with him were “consensual (and wonderful)!”

Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t she immediately report Gaiman’s behavior after the first incident of rape? Why did she continue to maintain an intimate relationship with Palmer and her family for years?

Shapiro provides an answer: “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do.”

Every time a new reprise of the Me Too storyline emerges, I become obsessive. I read the articles exposing the powerful and wealthy perpetrator’s bad behavior. I focus on the details of the assault: Was there forced penetration? Did the survivor explicitly, verbally, say ‘no’? How do they understand their assault in legal terms: sexual abuse, sexual violence, sex crime, rape?

What I am looking for in these highly public examples of sexual assault is an answer to a personal question: What is it, really, that happened to me? Was I assaulted, abused, or raped?

When I read these articles, I think about Varun, a man I befriended in October 2017, mere weeks before my 23rd birthday. We first met at a popular ex-pat bar called J’s, Varun’s place of work. I saw him from across the room, and a friend dared me to ask him out. After several cocktails, she struck up conversation with him, invited him to our table, and then extended an invitation to our second location for the night.

After that night, despite our cultural differences, I had fun with Varun. We frequented bars, clubs, and restaurants in the city where he seemed to know almost everyone. It felt like a fever dream of partying with free booze, indoor smoking, and flashing lights.

One night, I was working into the evening without time to eat or rest; Varun kindly delivered me a pie of pizza. I invited him to stay for a minute; we soon ended up in bed. After we started hooking up, I asked him if he had a condom. He didn’t. He asked to have sex anyway; I refused. He protested and eventually persuaded me. Fine, I said, as long as he pulled out.

The sex was totally unremarkable—boring, even. By my early twenties, I had already become accustomed to (wrongly) viewing sex as act of power over men, not as an experience of pleasure and intimacy. I was used to dissociating, going through the correct motions with my mind and heart elsewhere. I didn’t mind, I told myself. This was empowering, I insisted to myself.

The next morning, I received a text message from Varun. He had not, in fact, pulled out. He recommended that I find emergency contraception. He was very sorry.

I panicked. I was in a conservative, foreign country, where the last gynecologist I visited scolded me for having premarital sex. I did not know where to find contraceptives—and if he had lied to me about pulling out, what else had he lied about? Had he transmitted any infections to me?

After a short bout of anger towards him, for weeks after the incident, I continued to see Varun. I had felt lied to, but not violated or severely wronged; after all, I had agreed to the sex. We continued the eating, the drinking, and the partying, until his temporary gig in Nairobi ended, and he was due to fly back home.

One night, I revisited a club where many of Varun’s friends worked. One bartender pulled me aside and told me Varun had left him my number. Varun said you’re down to have fun, he told me, winking. Would I wait for him until his shift ended, he asked. Did I then want to go to his place, he suggested.

In that moment, I understood how Varun had truly seen me: a mere body, an accessory, to him, to be toyed with and passed around among his groups of friends. I stopped engaging in nightlife because Varun’s friends—while previously protective, polite, and kind, became aggressive, possessive, and coercive. Nairobi no longer felt expansive, light, and full of joy. It felt dark and scary, unpredictable and ugly.

In “I May Destroy You,” a TV series written and directed by Michaela Coel, the protagonist, a young writer, is assaulted twice: one time violently, after being drugged, in a bar bathroom stall; the second time, much less aggressively, during a sex act that seemed consensual, until it wasn’t. The second time, her sexual partner, during consensual sex, took off his condom without her knowledge or consent. When she learned this fact, she was angry, but eventually, the two reconciled.

That is, until the protagonist starts sleuthing in a manner no different from mine. She read Reddit forums about ‘stealthing,’ a type of sexual assault when someone, without their partner’s consent, removes their condom. During an industry event in which both she and her perpetrator were in attendance, the protagonist publicly accused the man of rape. “He’s not rape-adjacent or a bit rapey, he’s a rapist under U.K. law,” she declared on stage.

‘Nonconsensual insemination,’ as the act Varun performed is called, is also considered rape in the UK.

Four years later, in October 2021, I went on a date with Oswald, a man I met on the internet. During our first date, we took a walk through Green-Wood Cemetery. He was soft-spoken and gentle, shared about his strained relationships with his family, and told me about his job working with children in the New York Public Library system.

For our second date, he invited me to his place. He had prepared a liter of wine, which he barely touched; however, he diligently ensured my glass was always full. Throughout the evening, he periodically kissed me. He was a bit aggressive for my taste, but I was drunk, and didn’t think much of it. He led me to his bed, where we started hooking up. I asked him to put a condom on; he did. He sucked on my neck, pulled my hair, and penetrated me in a violent manner. I dissociated, as I am wont to do in sexual situations I feel I cannot control. I wondered how long this would go on. I looked over to the window, and saw a used condom along with its wrapper. I stopped and asked why he wasn’t using it. He thought I knew that he had taken his condom off, he insisted.

Immediately, my body went into flight. I think I yelled something like, what the fuck is wrong with you?—but I’m not sure. I quickly put on my clothes and packed my things while he cycled through apologies, accusations, and appeals. I ran out of his apartment, called a car, and cried on the way home.

When I looked in the mirror back at my apartment, my entire neck and chest was black and blue. It appeared as though someone had strangled me over and over again. I took pictures, at the encouragement of loved ones, in case I wanted to press charges.

He texted me long paragraphs later that evening. It was not an apology; it was an absolution of guilt. It read as though it were crafted to be recorded in a police report. He attempted to recount the events of the night from his point of view, and insisted that I had consented to everything that happened; he had done nothing wrong. Still, he immediately blocked me on every social media platform, and changed his name and avatar to go incognito.

I couldn’t go to work for two weeks; there was no way for me to cover my bruises or explain what had happened. For months, I couldn’t have sex without crying or freezing up. Even now, I have trouble having sex sober. I leave my body and the moment. Even with trusted partners, my body performs in all the ‘right’ ways, but my mind is vacant.

I hate this about myself, and want but don’t know how to fix it.

When I read articles about public allegations of sexual assault, I mine for the intricate details of these acts because I am desperately searching to make meaning of my own experiences. I still feel guilt and shame for allowing myself to enter and endure these situations; to saying yes to sex; in the case of Varun, for continuing to see and engage with him.

The questions I ask myself repeatedly are, if it’s not considered rape here in the US, was it actually that bad? If I originally said yes to sex, am I really to blame anyone else for fault? Am I over dramatizing things, making much of incidents that surely happen all the time? Is rape ‘worse’ than ‘just’ sexual assault? When cases of sexual assault are in the ‘gray area’—not quite pin-you-against-the-wall-and-penetrate-you-while-you-scream bad—what do you do with that? How do you understand yourself, and how do you heal?

I want to tell myself that these tedious definitions don’t matter. That they only matter in the court of law, and that even so the law is arbitrary, and in many cases, ethically and morally inept. That sexual abuse, assault, and rape, are all bad, and it is unproductive to compare them against one another, or impose limitations on how bad I am allowed to feel for myself based on their distinctions.

When I am feeling especially doubtful of myself—of my own memory and level of complicity in these episodes—I return to Google. “took off condom no consent rape US,” “ejaculation without consent sexual assault definition,” I search. There is a BBC article from 2013 that I have visited, read, and re-read over a dozen times since 2017.

It reads:

Judges were told that the man had "ejaculated before she could say or do anything about it", and she had become pregnant.

Lord Judge, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Mr Justice Fulford and Mr Justice Sweeney at a High Court hearing in London, added: "She was deprived of choice relating to the crucial feature on which her original consent to sexual intercourse was based.

"Accordingly her consent was negated.

"Contrary to her wishes, and knowing that she would not have consented, and did not consent to penetration or the continuation of penetration if she had any inkling of his intention, he deliberately ejaculated within her vagina.

"In law, this combination of circumstances falls within the statutory definition of rape."

Instead of feeling validated by this ruling, that indeed what I have experienced is considered rape and worthy of hurt and anger, my mind only continues to doubt itself: if I didn’t get pregnant from the incident, was it really that bad in the end? Does it still count as rape?

this is not the end of the world. the world goes on. it will go on, for decades and centuries beyond us. the earth will keep spinning around the sun, and in the meantime, for many more years, we will have to live under the full might of a fascist trifecta running the global epicenter of capital and empire.

this being “the end of the world” is a fantasy that allows us to absolve ourselves of responsibility and agency in this moment. we did this. a majority of Americans saw who Donald Trump was during his first tenure as president, marched to the polls yesterday, and said, “may I have some more, please?”

we have fucked around, and now we will have to find out.

there’s no escape hatch here, no magical happy ending that will save us from ourselves. we will have to wade through some of the most heinous, life-desecrating rhetoric, policy, and politics we have ever seen. life is going to get worse for all of us who are not absurdly wealthy or powerful; the least resilient among us being the likely first and biggest targets. we will fail to make climate progress; we will be busy fighting its active destruction.

Democrats argued that the culprits who pushed us here in 2016 were “MAGA Republicans” and their agenda to destroy our democracy. that the reason that we become more conservative, more Fascist-curious every few years, is that there is a vast, right-wing conspiracy to undermine our democratic institutions.

this explanation doesn’t pass the smell test, and voters yesterday called bullshit.

there is a conspiracy at play—but Democratic party elites play a critical role in it as well. and it is this:

for decades, the wealthy and powerful have colluded to make life worse and worse for workers—and better and better for themselves. together, this group has dominated not only the economy, but also our government and our media. together, this group spans all political persuasion, using bipartisanship and a two-party electoral system as theatre plots to lull us into an illusion of choice. either way, under either party, the rest of us lose. sophie’s choice.

I wish I could bring myself to be more optimistic. I wish I could offer encouraging words about the power of organizing.

I wish I had a plan. I wish people smarter than me had a plan. I wish anyone had a plan.

I’ve been haunted by this recurring image—I think it started about a year ago. I’m screaming and screaming, but there is no noise coming from my mouth. I am silent. nobody can hear me. I can’t tell you whether it’s a dream, a fantasy, or a vision.

many probably feel similarly now: voicelessness. powerless. lost.

what is true is this: we have been silenced before, and we will be silenced again. the world turns. it does not end. we have fought back for our voices before. we can do it again. we always have, and we always will.

Despite what this statement might lead you to believe about her political stances, Susan Zhuang, of Council District 43 in south Brooklyn, is not an ACAB leftist. She is, in fact, a rabid supporter of the police––so much so that despite this obviously egregious assault of a police officer, she has been largely excused by Eric Adams (NYC’s cop-in-chief), the police force head, as well as, mostly importantly, her constituents.

Zhuang’s retelling of the incident paints her in an admirable, even heroic light: She claims she was protecting a constituent, an elder who had fallen to the ground in a scuffle with the police. The cause of the scuffle? A well-attended and organized protest by Asian Americans of Bensonhurst against a homeless shelter for mostly Black single men slated to be built in their neighborhood.

There are elements of this story that are altogether predictable. For decades, the NIMBY movement has sparked lively protest and political discourse about where low-income housing and social services, including homeless shelters, can and should be built. Of course, Chinese residents of Bensonhurst would not self-identify as a part of (typically understood as a white, wealthy movement of) NIMBYism. Rather, they would posit, they are simply working for “Equal Justice for All”––a slogan that, as Hellgate reporter Esther Wang suggests, is rhetorically so anodyne as to be rendered meaningless.

Then there are the obvious racial dynamics and fear mongering at play. Racism is rampant among East Asian and Asian American circles, and manifests in casual colorist comments (“You look black and dirty,” my mom would say of my hard-won summer tan) as it does in politically charged, highly consequential movements (see: movement to free Peter Liang, a Chinese American cop whose ricocheting bullet shot and killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old, unarmed Black man).

All of this is not to excuse this movement for its racist analysis of what a Black men homeless shelter could do to a community. (In fact, research shows that after a shelter opened in Ozone Park, the overall crime rate in the community decreased.) Rather, it is to garner a bit of empathy that even sympathetic reporters lack in covering issues related to East Asians, and in particular, the Chinese. While Wang writes most sympathetically about this movement and its cause, she goes so far as to claim, in reporting from a scene of protest, “I could almost sympathize [with the police]—it really was loud.”

What does this reporter not understand about the point of protest: to disrupt business as usual, bring attention to a cause, and demonstrate power in numbers?

What’s most alarming about the coverage of this incident, however, is its lack of situation within developing racial politics in New York City, a microcosm of the national rightward drift of people of color, immigrants, and Asians in particular.

As some online influencers have noted, Bensonhurst has experienced a dramatic shift in its racial identity over the past years. Once a stronghold for white Americans, the district is now squarely Chinese-American.

Simultaneously, we are witnessing the making of an Asian American right-wing movement. In 2020, much ado was made of the Asian American support for Curtis Silwa, a Republican candidate for New York City mayor who ran against Democrat Eric Adams, and in favor of issues like keeping “gifted and talented” programs in the city, as well as preserving other standardized tests that tend to be better-performing for Asian Americans, and according to proponents, lend themselves to greater “equality” in education.

Nationally, since 2016, pundits have latched onto the political question of what motivates people of color and immigrants to want to support Donald Trump. Since then, however, his support among these groups have only burgeoned: recent polls show 17 percent of Black voters would vote for Donald Trump today––more than twice (!) the number in 2016. Other polls found 46 percent of Asian Americans would vote for Biden (when he was still the Democratic nominee): a trend downwards from 2020, when 54 percent of Asian Americans said they would vote for Biden.

Yet what has been reported, but not interrogated, is the level of organization in this specific movement. Wang of Hellgate rightfully points to the mastermind of these protests: John Chan, through a deceptively-named group called “Coalition for Asian American Civil Rights,” which has organized movements from the Free Peter Liang protests to anti-shelter organizing in Sunset Park and Flushing.

This begs the question: What is our answer to John Chan? What is our plan to translate the values of democracy, autonomy, accountability, community trust and care, and solidarity, that our elders fought to realize in their home countries, pre-diaspora?

Is there something in the water in the Atlantic, or the Pacific, that radicalizes immigrants to see themselves as fundamentally different and apart from other immigrants, or other racialized or minoritized groups? Have we allowed the model minority myth get to our heads? Have we fully realized racial triangulation, a theory which describes Asians’ tenuous and oppositional relationship to our darker-skinned siblings, through increased alignment with whites?

Of course, the answers to these questions are not simplistic. Rising housing and living costs are edging Asian Americans out of New York City into suburbs; according to a study by the Pew Research Center, 1 in 10 Asian American live in poverty. Increased violence and anti-Asian discrimination, harassment, and assault, which gained ascendancy during the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, persists. Who can forget the cherubin headshots of Christina Yuna Lee, and Michelle Go, two Asian American women who were killed in New York City within two months?

And, of course, there are the less excusable motivations: a belief that others should be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps as we did; a dedication to better education, which many came to this country to achieve; an inherent aversion to any resemblance of communism, which many of us became stateless to escape; a fear of those darker-skinned than us, who due to the legacy of this country’s racialized capitalism, are oft-afflicted with mental illness, economic precarity, brushes with law enforcement and social services.

So what do we do about this?

Consistent organizing among the Asian American left is needed to prevent the rise of an Asian American right, which already has a stranglehold on many. This involves a dedicated, deep-canvassing arm to understand the motivations of our constituents; a carefully tested and researched narrative and messaging campaign to persuade and move our community on issues from education to housing to policing; an organized and mobilized base that can wield its power to pressure politicians to represent the will of their interests.

That’s a lot of political jargon to communicate one thing: we have to try something.

For as long as we stay out of the fight to organize our own, we risk losing our entire communities to a liberal understanding of the world that centers the self above community––or even worse, an authoritarian and fascist movement that is sweeping other racialized minorities and working class whites as well.

The future of not only our communities, but our country at large, depends on it.

To recruit interviewees for this essay, I posted a job application to clean my house on one of the growing number of websites that match hospitality, cleaning, warehousing, and retail employers with gig workers. On GigSmart, 138 workers applied to my job in just seventeen days. As I reviewed applicants’ résumés, I realized the people doing house cleaning gigs today are not the trade housekeepers of yesterday. Speaking to several of these workers from GigSmart revealed a much more complex picture than that of hotel cleaners transitioning to on-demand shifts as gig corporations encroach into their industry. What I found were three myths that undergird the gig economy at large—false narratives about companies like Uber, DoorDash, and GigSmart that benefit those corporations, at the expense of consumers and workers alike.

I. The Work Is Not a “Gig”

The first myth that buttresses the gig economy is in its name: the word “gig.” “Gig” is a word that was first used to describe jazz acts at clubs in the ’20s—a far cry from the type of work that 41 million people in the US engage with today. Today, for most, gig work is not a fun hobby, an optional extracurricular, or a side hustle to earn extra pocket money. In fact, for more than two-thirds of workers on these apps, the job is a full-time haul. Most gig workers I spoke to work overtime, meaning the patchwork of jobs from apps they can cobble together often overtakes the forty hours we typically associate with a workweek.

The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories. In Hustle and Gig, sociologist Alexandrea Ravenelle details past labor struggles that afforded many workers protections like the forty-hour workweek. She puts gig workers’ exclusion from these protections plainly: “Gig economy workers are often second class citizens in the labor world, denied many of the same rights taken for granted by workers in the mainstream economy.”

Shawnta, one GigSmart worker I interviewed, is active on four different apps—Instawork, GigSmart, Wonolo, and WorkWhile—through which she does a range of work, from housekeeping to birthday party setup to warehousing. She told me she clocks in about fifty to sixty hours each week. Jay, another GigSmart worker, similarly has done gigs as diverse as college food service and even a dinosaur-suit performance. They don’t particularly enjoy the jobs, and wouldn’t recommend them to friends, but admit, “It’s a good thing if you need fifty bucks today.” 

Gig workers turn to the work because they don’t have much other choice for one or many reasons, including their immigration status, limitations on time and energy from their primary or day jobs, caregiving duties, or because their desired or former profession has been subsumed by the gig corporations themselves. Gig work thus preys on migrants, the poor working class, the ill, and their caretakers, many of whom are also Black and Latinx. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 42 percent of workers for gig companies are Black and Latinx, even though the two populations make up less than 29 percent of the workforce. Sixty-six percent of the workers who applied to my job on GigSmart were Black, including Jay and Shawnta.

Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too many family health appointments to attend to. Her younger brother is autistic with a brain aneurysm. Her mother has problems with her knees and circulation. Her sister, after a bad accident, has a knee injury. She also sustains scoliosis and is currently managing an addiction to opioids. Shawnta herself has health issues to manage; she has Grave’s disease, a thyroid condition that causes her weight to fluctuate and brought on early menopause at the age of only thirty-three. While juggling medical appointments for four family members, including herself, it is no wonder that Shawnta cannot hold down a full-time job. That’s why she turned to the gig economy—though the twelve-hour warehousing shifts she picks up through the apps could hardly be called part time.

Amber, the third GigSmart worker I interviewed, has a disability. Six years ago, she was paralyzed. A UTI had spread, moving to and causing masses to grow in her spinal cord. Amber is still experiencing symptoms from the paralysis today and now has a new ailment that she has yet to be able to diagnose. She is currently on disability assistance but needs to work to supplement it. However, she cannot work a full-time job because of her current physical illness. For Amber, the “gig” is a necessity.

Yet it behooves the companies to maintain that their workers are part of the “gig” economy. It affords them positive connotations with the word “gig” (flexible, independent) and allows them to continue to shirk their responsibilities as employers to their workers. Corporations considered part of the gig economy misclassify their workers as independent contractors, circumventing legal obligations to provide benefits and protections. 

II. Gig Companies Are Not Tech Companies

Thus, we encounter the second myth of the gig economy: despite their insistence that they are technology-driven companies, gig companies are not high-tech corporations. Edward Ongweso Jr., a writer who covers the gig economy, and the European Court of Justice agree: Uber, one of the first gig corporations in the industry, is “just another taxi company.” Uber’s premier innovation was not in connecting taxis with riders, which taxi companies had successfully done for decades. Rather, Uber’s real innovation was relieving itself from employer status, thereby abandoning its responsibilities to its drivers. This is, in fact, gig corporations’ primary innovation: the misclassification model, which deprives workers of job security, benefits, and protections on the job, including the right to organize. Silicon Valley excels in absolving itself of blame from any harm the technology it creates inflicts on people or the planet; Uber and Lyft’s insistence that they are not employers is the same play in a different costume. It is an entirely self-serving ploy to get these corporations off the hook for any liability or accountability to their workers.

This disruption of the labor model pushes people into deep economic insecurity. Shawnta, despite working fifty to sixty hours on GigSmart and other apps each week, doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to pay her bills next week. She receives public assistance (a mere $68.50 every two weeks), as well as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. She hates living in “the projects,” as she calls them. “It’s depressing,” she admits, and laments having to share a two-bedroom apartment with her two sons, aged twenty-four and twenty-eight—but prefers this housing situation to the alternative: being unhoused and in a shelter, as she was just six years ago. Shawnta’s older son drives for Uber but can’t make rent on his own because he’s also forced to lease the car through the company—a predatory scheme that persists despite its economic unviability for workers.

Jay is grappling with their own economic insecurity. They admitted partway into our interview that they are currently living out of their car—“car camping,” as Jay would say.

Amber has been in a women’s shelter since she arrived in New York three months ago.

Amber, Jay, and Shawnta are not alone in their precarity. Forty percent of gig workers in New York, 37 percent in Seattle, and 30 percent in the Bay Area rely on public assistance through Medicaid. Forty percent of gig workers in New York also receive SNAP benefits—three times higher than the share of other self-employed workers and employees who rely on the food assistance program. A nationwide survey of gig workers in 2020 found that one in five gig workers had gone hungry because they couldn’t afford food, and nearly one-third of gig workers couldn’t pay their full utility bill amount in the month before the survey.

While there are several studies that illustrate the economic precarity of gig workers, what’s still under-researched is how gig companies’ lack of transparency exacerbates unstable and impoverished working conditions. Accessing research on this topic is difficult by design: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig corporations are notoriously opaque because they benefit from information asymmetries, and thus power asymmetries, against workers, consumers, and the public. To fight back against one of these asymmetries, the Colorado Independent Drivers United is organizing to pass a bill that would require rideshare apps to show customers how much the driver and the company are receiving from their fare and, crucially, to show drivers the fare, distance, and direction of a ride before they are forced to accept one. This basic information will empower drivers with information to continue organizing toward fair rideshare rates and give individual drivers an informed choice about whether to accept rides––a fundamental exercise of worker power of which rideshare drivers have been, to date, deprived.

The technology that corporations like Uber and GigSmart use is to the benefit of the corporation, and the detriment of workers. Through this technology, gig companies surveil workers’ every movement, commit algorithmic wage discrimination, and ruthlessly punish workers through deactivations. In fact, unfair deactivations are among the most salient pain points of gig workers––especially among drivers of color. In a 2023 survey of gig rideshare drivers, 69 percent of drivers of color experienced some form of deactivation, compared to 57 percent of drivers who identify as white.

Jay has experienced firsthand deactivations from Instawork, just for being ill. They told me: 

There’s no option to cancel twelve hours [before a shift] without penalty. Sometimes I waited too long because I thought I would go in, but then I’m like, “You should not power through this. You’re about to cough up a lung. Or at least a tonsil. You should not be around food.”

By caring for the health of others, Jay was punished. They recalled, 

The last time I drove to the college to be like, “Hey, I’m reporting for my shift, but I shouldn’t be here. I’m very sick and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he didn’t cancel the shift, which got a mark against my account. That happened maybe once or twice. Then I got kicked off the platform.

Shawnta recalled an instance in which she couldn’t make her shift to a warehouse three hours away from her—trains were shut down during a harsh storm. As a penalty, Shawnta received a “breach point.” This barred her from applying to gigs on one of the apps for thirty days, effectively barring her from earning an income for a month—a draconian punishment for a situation wholly outside her control.

Amber was also blocked from Instawork and has yet to be able to find out why.

This level of punitive discipline is not unlike public assistance “sanctions,” or penalties for supposed noncompliance with requirements of such programs. Over time, the US has dropped state requirements for “conciliation processes,” or methods of recourse that allow beneficiaries to appeal sanctions. The lack of such a process is reminiscent of the lack of due process and appeal to which gig workers are subject—and against which they are fighting back.

III. The Gig Economy Wants You

The third myth of the gig economy is that it is a self-contained entity. In reality, the gig economy bleeds and butts further into the rest of the economy each day. The misclassification model is cheaper and easier to sustain for employers, in part because it allows them to pass on their burden of compensation to state social safety net programs in the same way low-wage employers (like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Amazon) do. It is no surprise, then, that employers in new industries are feeling its pull. Virtually no job is safe from the encroachment of the gig work model: gig corporations are misclassifying healthcare workers and educators alike.

As a result, the number and kind of gig apps only continue to grow and diversify. While the dominant firms in the industry remain rideshare and food delivery apps, consider the countless apps there are specifically for jobs ranging from pet sitting to plumbing (see Rover and Handy, respectively). Newer gig apps like Instawork, Qwick, and GigSmart attract a well-rounded pool of workers ready for a varied set of jobs, ranging from hospitality to warehousing. Non-gig work jobs, too, are increasingly subject to the threat of “precarization,” similar to that of gigification. Academia, for example, dumps the burden of the important work of educating onto precarious workers like adjuncts, who are subject to declining pay, reduced benefits and protections, and lack of voice and organized power on the job.

The expansion of the gig-misclassification model poses a threat not only to individuals but also to worker rights at large. As a prime example, labor union Unite Here’s strikes in the Los Angeles area were recently broken by hotels who hired workers through Instawork in a ploy to fill the jobs that strikers abandoned—all unbeknownst to the hired gig workers.

What’s more, the gig economy’s employment model can be isolating for workers who may not only crave the camaraderie and community of a shared workplace and workforce but also may want to organize. The solitary nature of gig work, intentionally designed by gig corporations to be facilitated through the app without human interactions, makes it difficult for workers to get together, talk about their issues, and take action to fight for better conditions. Even if workers could overcome these barriers and attempt to take collective action, workers in the gig economy are not afforded protections from the right to organize, because of their legal “independent contractor” status (i.e., the misclassification model).

Despite these challenges, gig workers are fighting back. Workers on these apps have been organizing across the country for over a decade, and their resultant victories abound. As of writing, Minneapolis’s city council, after years of worker activism, passed a minimum pay standard for the rideshare industry, and, in a petty act of retaliation, Uber and Lyft claimed they would leave the city. Instead of kowtowing to their interests after the corporations’ tantrum, the city announced it is considering funding small-business alternatives to the rideshare companies. In New York City, as a result of worker-led organizing campaigns like Los Deliveristas Unidos, the municipal government passed a minimum pay standard for food delivery workers on gig apps. Committees of gig app workers are active and organizing in Chicago, the DC area, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and more. Thousands across some of these cities went on strike this past Valentine’s Day. Their demands include a living wage, transparency over pay, and an end to unfair deactivations from the platform. Most of these organizing efforts are not driven by a unionization effort; because of their “independent contractor” employment status, gig workers are not entitled to the right to unionize.

In the meantime, for both Jay and Amber, the “gig” fills a need they can’t afford not to take advantage of. When asked if they would take on a full-time job again, Jay replied, 

I wouldn’t go back to, as I call them, regular, regular jobs. I wouldn’t do that. Just because I’m an artist. I’m an artist of the theater. That is my being, my calling. That’s all I have to be in order to survive and want to breathe. 

Amber, who is also an artist, told me she would even recommend GigSmart to her friends. She said, “I don’t want to live off the government. I work so hard at getting things together.” Working on GigSmart is helping her do that. Amber and Jay share this reality with other gig workers: they accept gig work because it’s the best they can find given their limitations. It’s the best option that exists.

Structurally, aspects of gig work make it inherently accessible to more people. In this way, the gig economy accepts workers that traditional employers have rejected, welcoming workers regardless of (dis)ability, health, entanglement with the social safety net, incarceration history, immigration status, (self-)caretaking work, or need to work multiple jobs.

Thus, our mandate is not simply to convert gig work into traditional full-time work. Rather, our mandate is to reenvision what a job means, does, and provides. We must build a world not only where we convert what Ravenelle calls the “second-class citizen” (i.e., gig worker) into the “first class”; we must also reimagine what “first class” means, making it inclusive of those who are not accepted in the formal economy. We can reject the gig work model, which segregates a class of workers wading through structural precarity, discrimination, racism, and a revolving door through public assistance. At the same time, we must address the discriminatory nature of the formal full-time employment model. We can and must build better ways of work and living that can accommodate workers’ needs, constraints, desires, and also provide them with a stable, secure, and dignified life.

I wish these pathways existed for my family when we were juggling multiple jobs, including cleaning—only to continue being mired in debt and economic disarray. That is why, in memory and honor of my father, grandmother, and mother, I work to build a better world with a plentitude of dignified work opportunities. Building that better world is something we can do only together, by organizing through solidarity across workers and consumers. To start, we must develop a clear-eyed view of the “gig economy” and recognize its myths for the corporate scams they are.

Read and subscribe to Logic(s) here.

it boils down to a simple sentiment: when the President of the United States, who was democratically elected, and who is supposedly accountable to the media, two other branches of government, and the court of public opinion, says something—we should believe it.

but today, this core tenet of liberalism is crumbling, and we are awakening to the reality that unites both the political left and the right: we are being lied to. powerful people, corporations, and institutions are colluding to ensure that their power and wealth is sustained—even if this requires a nearly pathological level of deception.

a common radicalizing incident for non-Black Americans against the police, for example, involves realizing that cops lie all the time, and in particular when it comes to their racist overpolicing, harassment, abuse, and even murder of Black Americans. many came to this realization in the summer of 2020 following Derek Chauvin’s brutal, illegal, and unconscionable murder of George Floyd.

most notable recent examples surround Israel’s calculated genocide against Palestinians. Joe Biden continues to insist that Israel’s massacres are a “mistake,” are “within Israel’s rights to defend itself,”—and notably, that they are not a genocide. elite universities are siccing cops on its own students, creating media blackouts from which they can lie about their brutality and maintain airs of liberalism and free-thought while protecting their interests and the wishes of their donors and University boards.

what all of the lying and deception amounts to, in sum total, is a shared feeling of unease that makes us question, “am I crazy?” I am reminded of the slew of articles post-2016 about the Trump presidency—and specifically, the influential piece that defined that cultural period, a Teen Vogue article by Lauren Duca called, “Trump is Gaslighting America.” in it, Duca describes gaslighting as “psychologically manipulat[ing] a person to the point where they question their own sanity.” she goes on to laundry-list the various bare-faced lies Donald Trump has spun out throughout the years.

in a Democratic presidency, with supposedly the most progressive president in the history of the country, I am struck by how much Duca’s article resonates. in fact, her essay describes a moment not unlike that in which we find ourselves in today. while Joe Biden may not lie about his opponents’ national origins, his business dealings, or his history of sexual assault (oh wait…), I have deeply questioned my sanity hundreds of times since the onslaught of Israel’s genocide on October 8, 2023.

ultimately, the buck stops not with Netanyahu, but with Joe Biden: the supposed leader of the free will who continues not only to send bombs and war chests of cash, but also provides political, social, and cultural cover to Bibi’s genocidal campaign.

it is not coincidental, I believe, that while Americans were on holiday, Israel decided to massacre children, women, and men at a refugee camp in Rafah. there are photos of beheaded babies. local Palestinians report that the smell of burnt flesh and hair lingers in the air. meanwhile, the front page of the New York Times merely suggests “easy summer recipes” are more important than this massacre.

with a photo of the beheaded baby circulating on the internet, I have to believe that something has changed. something in the American psyche has to have irreparably broken. and though this should have happened the moment Israel’s genocidal regime openly declared their intention of eradicating the Palestinian people, with an attack so gruesome as to be launched on refugees, and involving the same misdeed Hamas was (wrongly) accused of, I have to believe something is shifting.

everyday Americans are waking up and wondering why Joe Biden refuses to call a spade a spade—or in this case, a genocide, a genocide. media organizations take his cue, aligning itself with the Israeli Zionist regime instead of performing their public duty to information and truth-telling. young people are being teargassed and beat by police on the very grounds they are expected to call “home” for four years. Palestinians are being sent on an unconscionable goose chase, told to evacuate into one area just to be bombed and starved upon arrival.

as the world watches, the false premise of neoliberalism is crumbling. in its wake, we get to decide what we build. we can build a world that does not automatically assign trustworthiness to a few powerful people and groups—but rather one that entrusts individuals and collectives to create our own shared humanity, truth, and prosperity. we can build a world where Israel’s genocide against Palestinians is stopped today due to sheer political pressure from bodies in the street, stoppages at work, withholding of votes and dollars, and, a healthy dose of sabotage.

we can, we must, and we will.

we were exiting some establishment in Brooklyn, my mother, grandmother, and I. it was raining. yet my grandmother ran into the street, smiling with her teeth. this struck me because she never smiled with her teeth; she was self conscious of her overlapping, crooked sets she never had means to cosmetically realign. I had never seen her so happy. I told her so.

she grabbed my hand, and we skipped down the street in the rain, like kids. “잘 걷지도 못한는 분이 어떡해 이렇게 뛸수 있으셔?” I teased. “how can someone who can’t even walk well skip with such vigor?”

of course, I knew how she could. she is dead, and somewhere better now—somewhere she can smile with her teeth and move at her will, doing all of the things she wasn’t able to do for decades here on earth.

*

this dream is implausible for more than one reason. my grandmother has never been to Brooklyn, has no idea about the life I have built for myself in this city. at some point after she left the States and moved back to Korea, she started losing her faculty to retain things as distant to her as what I was doing with my life.

phone calls with her were brief. “우리 똑순이 잘 있지?” she asked. “how’s my little smartass doing—well, right?” well, of course, I’d respond. after all, whose smartass was I? I wished her well, good health, and told her I loved her, repeating the same refrain I had for years.

the truth is, intimate relationships don’t require the sharing of full details of someone’s life. through intimacy, we know, without having to ask, how we are, and who we are—the words in between are ancillary. we know, without having to say it, how much we cherish each other. the short phone calls are a mere reminder.

I think my grandmother would be proud of who I am today. she wouldn’t give a shit about the fancy school, the degree, or the career. she would give a shit that I try, mostly, to be a good person to those around me, holding them tight and close, just the way she taught me to.

*

my grandmother was not a Political person. she was mostly apathetic to the goings on of the world.

I am adamant about the fact that apathy is not necessarily a moral failing or lack. people who provide full time home care to a paralyzed patient, while raising and rearing two children—living in fear of deportation, and teetering on the edge of financial insecurity—simply may not have the capacity to care beyond their community. my grandmother was one of these people.

my grandmother surrendered her life fully to those around her. she cooked communal meals for the church even though we ourselves didn’t have much, and always kept an open door to our home, winning love and admiration from everyone she met. she was popular. she had an incredible sense of humor, and a cool, impenetrable attitude that would have been intimidating had she not been so kind and warm.

at church, they called her 권사님, even though she hadn’t completed the types of Bible Study courses required of someone with such a distinguished title. they knew that she was a woman of faith, and that she knew the Bible (and God, I might dare say) better than the rest of them. she proved it each day through her devotion, her self-erasure in service of others. and really, what in the world is more radical or political than that.

*

when I visited my grandmother last, several years ago, she broke my heart. we’d already undergone a misunderstanding due to her escalating dementia. (she’d called me in a panic days before my visit, thinking that I had already been staying with her, stepped out, and never returned.)

she welcomed me in and said, “have you eaten?” she didn’t wait for a response before shuffling through her refrigerator, pulling out white, knockoff Wonder bread, American slices of Kraft cheese, and whole milk. “I prepared all of your favorite foods for you,” she said, beaming. I didn’t have it in me to tell her that I was now lactose intolerant, and was too bougie to be caught dead eating sliced bread and plain cheese.

when I told my mother later, she was surprised. my grandmother wasn’t in any shape to go to the supermarket on her own; she mostly relied on uncles and church ladies to deliver her food. she must have made the trek to the market just for you, my mother said. it’s a wonder she made it back intact, we agreed. she was stubborn, just like us.

*

they say it gets hard for children to start seeing their parents as fallible, mortal beings. among friends who have given care for sick parents, we commiserate about how difficult it is to transition into spoon-feeding the hands that once fed us. about how enlightening it is to realize that in the end, our parents are mere sacks of water and skin too, with insecurities and neuroses as complicated, if not worse, than our own.

I only realize now, writing this, that my grandmother must have spent her later years afraid. when my mother last visited her, she took my grandmother on a road trip through the country. but for some reason, my mother reported, my grandmother did not enjoy herself. she spent car rides and sleepless nights anxious.

when my mother confronted her, my grandmother accused, “aren’t you going to leave me somewhere out here, alone?” she thought my mother was making much ado of a long trip, hiding her intention of ultimately trashing my grandmother on the side of the street.

when I heard this story, I ran into my bed and wept. it turns out abandonment issues are not singular to me. maybe, in the end, we all spend our days afraid of being left by the people we love the most.

*

when I was younger, my grandmother picked me up each day from school. as she got older, and couldn’t swing the strenuous walk up and down the hill to our home, she waited at the top of the hill instead. because of her elevation, there was a clear sightline to her when I walked out of Lindbergh Elementary. I would scurry up the hill to her, as she watched the whole way.

when I imagine it now, I see her standing with her arms outstretched, ready to receive me. I think about the song we learned in Sunday School, about seeing Jesus dying, hanging on a tree.

“He had arms wide open, a heart exposed

Arms wide open; He was bleeding, bleeding—

Love’s definition, love’s definition was looking at me

Looking at Him, hanging on a tree

I began to weep and weep and weep and weep

This is how I know what love is, this is how I know what love is.”

I realize now that my grandmother taught me what love is—after all, I realize, she was herself, the definition of love.

I think, what if my grandmother was some version of God all along?

*

when my grandmother died, a part of my mom died with her. she spent hours looking through videos and photos of my grandmother, wailing, “엄마, 엄마, 엄마, 우리 엄마.” at some point, my brother and I had to grab her, hold her tight, nearly restraining her, to calm her, and to make her feel less alone.

for some time after, my mother would send us messages chronicling her grief. we couldn’t make it out to Korea in time for the funeral, so they sent us pictures. the days leading up to the service were rainy, but on that particular day, the sky cleared, and revealed two double rainbows. my mother forwarded us the photos.

my stepfather offered that through the rainbows, my grandmother was telling us that she’s okay. my mother added, referring to the sky, “this is where grandma is now…”

*

on their last road trip, my mother discovered something new about my grandmother: she knew how to speak Japanese. this made sense, we later agreed. she’d lived under the occupation for decades—how could she not know a bit of the imperialist tongue? but I could sense in my mother that something about this learning disturbed her; how much more was there about her mother she didn’t know?

I don’t know much about my grandmother’s life. any time we asked, she’d brush us off, throwing away sentiments like, “why rehash the bad?” I knew she’d had a hard life, full of betrayal, illness, sacrifice, and loss. I only recently learned that my grandmother watched her first husband die, lined up in front of a Japanese firing squad.

I wonder how much more there is of my grandmother I couldn’t know. how much pain she hid within herself in order to be able to wake up each day. I wonder if it ever bubbled up inside of her, her grief, the way it bubbles up in me now.

*

that song I learned in Sunday School says something about knowing:

“I saw him there, hanging on a tree, looking at me

He was looking at me, looking at Him, staring through me.

I could not escape those beautiful eyes.”

I now imagine my God/grandmother staring straight through me, with the beautiful eyes she never saw as such. (she’d had a stroke that left one side of her face without feeling and shape.)

my grandmother knew me. she knows me now. she might even be watching me, reading over my shoulder, scolding me for being so sentimental. there are plenty of things about my grandmother I don’t know, and never will. but what a true honor it is to have bore witness to the small parts I did.

*

I heard somewhere once that grief is meant to be shared. I’m not a big sharer, so it surprises me that after I woke from my dream, this idea plagued me.

and so, puffy-eyed and full of snot, I share this grief with you now—reluctantly—in the hopes that someday soon, I will be okay too.

Then there was the halftime show. Watching Usher, Alicia Keys, Lil Jon, and Luda, I sang and swayed around an imaginary pole, transported back to middle school years of yearning and thick desire. I was reminded of what an incredible performer Usher is, and importantly, how many bangers he has bestowed on us throughout his decades in action.

But the next morning, I felt hungover, heavy and sick like after nights eating too much sour candy — thick film rimming my teeth as a reminder of my excesses the night before. Soon, as I went online for the day, I was able to figure out why.

While I was invested in the heartwarming story of boy-genius Christian McCaffrey and his incredible trajectory toward excellence and stardom, Israel had started to bomb Rafah. (Yes, that’s the southern part of Gaza that Israel had been exiling Palestinians to as a supposed “safe zone”.) After rounding up the sheep, Israel had decided to execute them all.

Suddenly, a range of memories made me nauseous. What about Colin Kaepernick? He has unofficially been blackballed from the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem, in silent dissent to bring awareness to the vicious murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by the police. Kaepernick, a starting quarterback, has yet to find work since 2016.

And the celebrities who purportedly turned down the Super Bowl halftime show gig in solidarity with Kaepernick? Rihanna, who refused in 2019, ultimately played the halftime show last year. In 2017, Beyoncé presented Kaepernick with Sports Illustrated’s Person of the Year award, thanking him for his “selfless heart”. Knowles not only attended this year’s game, but also announced the drop of new music during a mid-game Verizon ad, for which she was likely paid millions.

And what about CTE (don’t ask me what it stands for)? Years ago, scientists and reporters raised the alarm about the degenerative disease caused by head trauma, highly prevalent and even fatal among football players. It turns out that throwing back beers while cheering on Black bodies ramming against one another in a stadium does have long term impacts on those bodies (to the enrichment, of course, of white coaches, franchise owners, and fans).

What about Usher, who settled several multi-million dollar cases for spreading STIs to former sex partners without their knowledge? And the thousands of private jets that flew into Vegas for the night including that of Taylor Swift, who made a quick hike over from a concert she held the night before in Tokyo? And are we not going to talk about that one NFL ad about its football camps in the Global South, from where the League will eventually recruit and traffick in promising players?

The list is endless. It’s depressing. It almost feels as though, in modern times, we can’t have nice things. This is, in fact, by design. The forms of entertainment we rely on (predatory sports, celebrity culture) are all mediated through the exchange of money among numerous hands, scaffolding up to a house of cards that casts a grand, hypnotic trance over us all. Entertainment feeds us drops of steady dopamine while numbing our other faculties including empathy, critical thinking, and, crucially, memory.

What is the Super Bowl if not a scheme invented to profit from indenturing and slowly degrading Black and working class bodies, packaged up and marketed as the ultimate American holiday? In propagating these cultural events, or moments of collective amnesia, the capitalist class relies on our eyes glazing over, our glands thirsting for sugar, and our critical capacity faltering.

That’s why Israel chose the Super Bowl as the time to bomb Rafah. Israel is committing genocide while our eyes are averted, occupied instead with 7-layer dip and Beyoncé’s new bops.

If it seems like I’m arguing the NFL is in cahoots with the Israeli military, I am. Because the interests of the capitalist class — to make us poor, sick, and helpless — while they continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor — is their raison d’être. It is why they exist. The Super Bowl is just another tool in the box full of entertaining spectacle, used to distract us, like rattlers for fussy babies.

None of this is our fault. But that doesn’t absolve us from responsibility for it. We can hold multiple things at once — that Usher has been a bad sexual actor, and that he produces objective bangers. Can we bring him to account, however, for the former, before continuing to laud and enrich him for the latter?

The difficulty of navigating these muddy waters is simply a part of engaging with modern life. The better we get at doing it, the more we can enjoy nice things without subjecting others, especially the least among us, to more backbreaking labor, deaths at the hands of police, sexual violence—and of course, genocide.

We can be forgiven for watching and enjoying the Super Bowl, but we cannot be forgiven for forsaking Palestinian lives. We must draw a line somewhere, and this is the most forgiving one we can morally make.

In the beginning, it was about what I believed. Coming into my personal second wave of feminism, I rejected the idea that I was expected to have a child. All because I was born into a body with a vagina, with 15 extra pounds of stomach fat for the express purpose of swaddling my future baby.

Last September, I Googled frantically how much it costs to freeze my eggs. 

Last night, I watched that girl on YouTube tell her “pregnancy story”, and sobbed like a baby. I don’t know why. I don’t even like that girl.

Last August, my grandmother died. She was about double my age when she came state-side. She came to take care of us. My grandmother gave up her life for her baby. And her baby’s baby.

My mom had me when she was about my age. My brother, six years prior. Last Christmas we looked at old photos of her, just about 30, with a frizzy pixie and shoulder-padded blazer.

I once had this friend. I thought she was my soulmate. Only egomaniacs have children, we’d tell each other. How could anyone be so vain, as to want a carbon copy of themself for posterity? An avatar that renders them immortal?

What got me about that girl’s video, I think, was her parents’ reaction to her cheesy baby announcement. And how my mom would react, if I were the one telling her the good news. She’d fall to her knees and praise God. I’d feel happy, I think.

I wouldn’t be good at it, I tell myself. Not all are meant to be pastors, for example. Not all are meant to be care givers. Not all, I emphatically believe, are meant to be mothers. We should stick to our lanes.

Then of course, there is the cost. I only realize as I write now: Having had so little growing up makes me afraid. Afraid of the possibility I’d be unable to provide for my future baby.

Parts of myself I love most are parts of my mother and her mother.

If I had a child, I’d want to give her the world.

I dated this guy for a while. I loved watching him with his god-daughter. What if it could heal me, I thought. Watching a functional father-daughter relationship.

When I was a kid, my pastor told me a vision he had. I was standing on a ledge somewhere, or on a countertop. I was looking around, searching. Until I saw God. He had his arms outstretched toward me, encouraging me to jump. I’ve got you, my child, he said, according to my pastor.

To be a woman is to be a slave to one’s body. Our bodies grow to betray us more, warping themselves to create a hospitable environment for babies, prioritizing that mission above all comfort and sanity. My body betrays me each month during my period, when I scream and cry and lie, constipated, clutching the uterus that will, one day, carry my future baby.

What’s so bad about filial piety, anyway?

A top-voted Quora answer says your child can, indeed, be your soulmate.

What if I don’t want to be a slave to my body, anymore?

What if I’m not so special, after all?

Stripped and devoid of context, The Cut’s treatise on polyamory doesn’t delve into all the weird and wonderful reasons why people pursue polyamory. Despite the framing of this disastrous listicle-as-journalism, as my dear friend and fellow polyamory practitioner points out, “Maybe polyamory really isn’t about rich people spicing up their marriages.”

The first conversation you should have about polyamory is with yourself. It should be a brutally honest one—about what you want, why, and whether polyamory is the real solution, or just a stop along a long, thorny road to chaotic relationship hell. When you bring that conversation to a (potential) partner, it should be an open exploratory one, centered around why you want (or don’t want to) try it out. Queer and anarchist theory offer some good reasons:

• You reject the primacy of a single partner in monogamous relationships; instead, you want to invest in a community of relationships that grow through communication, commitment, and intimacy (physical and emotional).

• You and your partner are excited about the possibility of dating and having sex with other people, together or separately, as a way to more deeply connect with each other and people outside of your partnership.

• You get off on seeing or hearing about your partner being with others.

These are some bad reasons to try polyamory:

• You’re looking for an exit from your relationship but can’t bring yourself to break it off.

• You want to feel desirable, but don’t in your current relationship.

• You don’t want commitment, and monogamy seems like hard work.

• You feel empty, but you’re not quite sure why.

• You want to fool around without accountability to anyone.

• You read about it in The Cut.

Polyamory is fucking hard.

Relationships are hard work. Polyamory is no exception. In fact, it can be “harder” than monogamy. Not only do you need time to date each one of your partners; you need to plan those dates, communicate about your relationship on a consistent basis with all parties involved, and reflect by yourself (and a therapist ideally) on how your relationships are meeting (or not meeting) your needs and boundaries.

In addition to time, you also need a tremendous amount of emotional capacity to healthily engage in polyamory. You should be ready to hold space for the emotions of not just one partner, but for all of them. Jealousy is bound to occur at some point in one direction or another. And despite what popular text might have you think, its occurrence does not necessarily mean you should abort the mission immediately. What matters is how you and your partner(s) address the jealousy, and commit to finding ways to make each person feel secure, safe, and loved.

Lastly, “there’s no way to do polyamory the right way” is bullshit.

There is no limit on the number of ways there are to do polyamory right. In fact, one of the most beautiful things about polyamory is the flexibility and freedom to create relationships and communities outside hetero patriarchal norms. Of course, you and your partner(s) make the rules. Of course, polyamory can be fluid. You’re allowed to change your mind about what you want along your journey, as long as you respectfully communicate that to all privileged parties. And you’re allowed to change the structure and “rules” of your relationships, again, with full informed consent from everyone else.

However, I’ve witnessed countless unhealthy approaches to polyamory. These can include a lack of reciprocity (i.e. I can see other people but you can’t; I can see people of any gender but you’re only allowed to see women) or mutual respect (i.e. We’re primary partners so what matters is how we feel, not how our partners feel.) A lot of times, these approaches fail to see all partners (not just your primary, if you have one) as people you are committed to, and treat others as means to your end, whatever that may be—feeling wanted, stoking unhealthy jealousy, or solely prioritizing your needs and wants.

There are many bad ways to do polyamory. The first step to doing it right, is accepting that.