Those of us refusing to adhere to the decency/deviancy binary “polite” society would like us to pledge fealty to, tend to bear the brunt of violent corrective action and are castigated into exile for embracing freedoms that threaten the larger patriarchal, conservative, capitalist project. One of our greatest tools to combat these trying times is a social revolution with sex no longer forced towards the periphery but rather, centered as a positive vehicle of change.

In short, we simply have to get freakier and far less apologetic about it. And in the spirit of both talking the talk and walking the walk, I’ve decided to crack open the vault of my sexcapades and adapt some for public viewing by way of erotic auto-fiction. All stories shared in this format are real vignettes with identifying information such as names, locations, etc. altered for privacy sake.

My hope in starting this series is to invite you, the reader, into my world for a spell and hopefully, support your further exploration into the role eroticism, sensuality, and desire can play in shaping our world for the better.

If I fail at that, at least you got some good smut out of it. So without further ado, I present Say It, an unabashed confession dressed up in a story.

I forgot to lock the door, and I couldn’t tell if I’d done that on purpose.

“You’re poaching my friends now?” Marcus asked as his hand mapped my jeans, grazing the skin of my hip with familiarity.

I parted with my jacket on an eye roll, walking him back towards the bed intending to ignore the question. His calves made contact with the mattress as he fell back gracefully, used to being crawled on. I refused to follow him. Despite the thrumming heat growing insistent in my blood, I took the opportunity to appraise him. His angular features and soft brown eyes that seemed to toast in the sun, the silvery scar cupping his jaw and the rich complexion of his skin; Marcus was my type, devastatingly so, and the right amount of affable to fuck semi frequently with ease.

“Did you know I was pulling up?” I did, though I’d never admit that to him. Men were known for mistaking eagerness for orgasms, for eagerness to see them, specifically.

“Too many questions tonight.” The smirk on his face suggested I gave him the answer he was looking for.

“It’s been a minute since we did this.” He offered, sitting up to grab my belt loop and pull me close enough for him to unzip me. I placed my hands on his shoulders, kicking off my black heeled boots and shimmying out of the denim as he dragged the fabric down my legs.

“Really? I don’t keep track.”

A bright sting flashed briefly across my ass, his way of calling me a liar. I straddled him without comment.

“It’s been a while, yeah.” Before he could respond, I grabbed hold of his face and kissed him. My lips, betraying the hunger I was too proud to communicate with words. Our tongues met tentatively at first, almost used to each other’s rhythm but not quite there yet. On impulse, my hips adjusted to settle further into his lap, fingers wandering towards his arm to guide its attention where I wanted it most. A hand slipped into the hairs at the nape of my neck, tightening at the roots for a second before drifting down my spine, my body loosened up on the edge of a sigh.

“We shouldn’t wait this long again.” He stated as he lifted my shirt over my head. The frigid blast of air drifting through an open window drew my nipples to hard points and wordlessly, I arched toward Marcus, his warm, wet tongue curling around the barbell pierced through my nipple. I pulled him further into me by the shoulders, my nails dug into the muscled flesh rippling beneath the soft, worn cotton that separated us.

“Off.” I mumbled, shoving his mouth away from my chest to paw at the hem of his t-shirt as if offended it hadn’t disappeared with a glare. The pounding bass of the music echoed through the house decibels too loud, preventing heavy sighs and breathy moans from reaching our ears. The sound pollution invited us to feel and see rather than hear each other.

Proficient fingers slipped assuredly down the front of my underwear and began to drag up and down my slit lazily, like we had all the time in the world. I pressed closer to him, my face falling against his as I panted my approval.

“There she is.” He cooed as I began to rock against his palm, seeking harder, faster friction he simply refused to give me.

“You fucking tease.” I chided through a clenched jaw.

“You love it.”

“I don’t love anything you do.”

“Right.” His tone had an indulgent quality to it, like letting me project this indifference was all a part of the game. My hands met his chest and pushed him down harder than necessary.

“Less talking, more eating.” I ordered as I lowered myself onto his face, the heat of his breath kissing my skin through the lacy fabric. His hands hooked under my thighs, spreading me further, my glistening lips exposed, curled around my panties. I grabbed his wrist, preventing him from moving them out of the way.

“Leave them, for now.”

“Yes ma’am.” The air seemed to buzz with a more severe energy, less playful as our desires became harder to ignore. The first stroke of his tongue was languid and unhurried, the flexing of his fingers against the skin of my inner thighs giving away his excitement. My head fell back, gaze towards the sky looking at nothing in particular as my hands came up to cup my breasts. I soon found myself in a rhythm, rocking against the flat expanse of his eager tongue, panties growing heavier with my arousal combined with his spit. He was good at giving head, more than good even and I resented him for it.

There was a reason our paths grazed each other’s but never quite collided— his redeeming qualities seemed only to appear when we were horizontal, or perhaps it was the only time I considered them.

“A little faster.” He took the command as permission to shift my panties out of the way, awakening me to the sensitivity of my pussy as his lips wrapped around my clit and began to suck in earnest.

“Fuck.” Escaped me before I could bite it back.

“Mhm.” A jolt of electricity zipped through me, the rumbling timber of his voice against my sex prompting me to clench down. Before the disappointment of being empty could settle in me, two fingers slipped inside, kneading at that spongy nub that made me see stars.

I leaned back, hands braced against his stomach as I began to watch him work me open in earnest. A shimmering display of my pleasure caught the light as his fingers dragged in and out of me, my gaze fixed on the juices running down his wrist. I was transfixed by the display, his pupils blown wide as he drank in as much of me as he could handle, the slick sounds of his fingers toying with my wet pussy finding their way to my ears. A libertine symphony for two.

“You can come like this.” He breathed out, presented as a statement rather than a question. As I opened my mouth to answer, a loud thud against the door shattered the spell of the moment. I paused, eyes cutting behind me as my posture straightened.

“Shit, how drunk are you?” Asked a disembodied voice drifting through the door, the mostly coherent conversation bringing awareness to the absence of music. I prepared to roll off of Marcus but was prevented by his arm tightening its grip on me as his fingers began to slowly resume their dance inside of me. We stared at each other for a long beat, his eyes presenting a challenge.

Something akin to you’re going to let this stop us?

It was low stakes enough— wouldn’t be the first time people got caught hooking up at a party except a small voice reminded me that some of the people capable of barging in on us had reason to believe we couldn’t stand each other. I couldn’t deny the excitement the risk brought me. The scandal exposure could cause would follow me to brunches and kickbacks, drunk cigarette chats and “remember when?” sessions for years, still, I wasn’t truly deterred.

“I don’t want to stop.” I admitted and was immediately rewarded with the presence of his tongue. My pulse, climbing once again as he coaxed me closer to release. The opening notes of a slow jam in the background teased my awareness as my grasp on control slipped when met with the demands of my body.

Catching a glimpse of movement in the corner of my eye, my gaze found a full length mirror hanging off a closet door that sat ajar. Our mindless tumble onto the bed left our reflections mostly out of view, a single thigh and forearm in my eye line. Without much thought, I began tracing the veins on the arm caging me in with a finger, oddly satisfied by the goosebumps that seemed to follow my exploration.

I bit my lip, mindful of my volume against the thinning crowd as the function grew more intimate and subdued. The less indulgent side of my brain began to ring alarms, reminding me that the more the party cleared out, the harder it would be to slip back into the crowd unnoticed. As if sensing my split attention, Marcus’ fingers nearly stilled in me as his lips pulled away from my clit.

“Unh uh. Let me hear you.” I glared down at him, lightly testing his resolve with a rock of my hips that led to no greater satisfaction.

“You’re such a fuuuucc-” My voice drifted towards a moan as his fingers tapped my spot again.

“Why do you pretend like I don’t make this pretty pussy feel good, huh? Don’t you deserve it, baby?”

“We don’t do pet names.” I stammer out, my face growing hot under the scrutiny of his gaze.

“You don’t do pet names.” He corrected, returning to his task of bringing me almost close enough to the edge to taste it but never quite satisfying me. My hands drifted back to my nipples, licks of pain from pinching and twisting them assisted my ascent towards carnal bliss.

“I’m ready to come.” The announcements made through gritted teeth, my patience for his leisurely pace absent in the face of my desire.

“Not yet.” He said, fingers slipping out of me as he began to thumb my clit in firm circles.

“You have to say it first.”

“Say what?”

“That you love it.” With renewed fervor, he lapped at my pussy as his fingers found their place in me once again.

“You…love…my mouth…on…you.” Each word punctuated with a hard suck of my clit and fingers that finally seemed committed to bringing me to climax. The sincerity of his request, no demand became clear as he went to withdraw again.

“Wait! Just— if I say it, you’ll make me come?” I searched his face, cognizant of how wanton I must look: chest heaving, legs splayed, sheen of sweat coating my abdomen. My appearance offering submission where I tended to refuse to.

“When you say it, I’ll let you come.” The whimper that escaped my throat betrayed my interest, and made it abundantly clear he had me pinned with a single way out.

“I-iloveit!” I rushed through the words, my pride brittle but never entirely absent.

“You love what?” He reveled in my hesitation.

“I love when you finger me and eat me out until I come and make a mess all over your face.”

“I know, baby.” Like an animal suddenly released from a cage, he dove into my pussy like a starved man. It was as if my acquiescence had given him permission to enjoy the moment to the fullest extent. I ground down hard against him, chasing in case he planned to deny me again. My concerns about our lack of discretion suspended beyond my consciousness as the strength of my orgasm built to a crest.

“Please don’t stop, I’m really close.” My hands grasped around wildly, needing an anchor besides my own skin to latch onto as my vision thinned and a high keening sound tumbled out of my throat. Despite the incoherence of my brain, I could feel his piercing gaze staring up at my writhing form, as if committing it to memory. As tides followed each other and my pussy pulsated rhythmically around Marcus’ fingers, our gazes met for a single second and I felt more exposed than I ever had since this arrangement began.

“So fucking pretty like this.” His tone carried a reverence I wasn’t in any condition to read into or unpack though it produced an inexplicable warmth inside of me. My body twitched as he gently brought me down from the peak of my climax, sucks gave way to licks which gave way to fleeting kisses placed all across my swollen, glistening sex.

“Don’t make me wait this long again, aight?” His hand lazily swiped back and forth across my inner thigh.

“We’ll see.” I returned with a smile, lifting a leg to pivot to a seated position near him, willing my heart to stop pounding and my limbs to feel less hollow so I could redress and make my escape.

“Come home with me.” His hand reached up and lightly pinched my nipple, he chuckled as I swatted him away.

“Cause you’re hard?” I questioned, nudging my chin in the direction of the erection visibly straining against his pants.

“Cause I want you to come home with me.” A moment passed silently as he watched me deliberate.

As the seconds crawled by, I grew more aware of the sweat cooling against my skin, the sounds of the party came further into focus and my gaze did a full sweep of the room we’d just desecrated for the first time since entering it.

“I should get dressed.” I swung my legs down, finding my footing before collecting my clothes from the floor. Hesitantly, I slid a leg into my jeans, too aware of the damp, cool fabric of my panties against my center. I contemplated peeling them off, offering them as a souvenir to Marcus who sat patiently on the bed watching me fix my appearance silently, but, decided against it, punctuating my decision with the audible zip of my jeans.

“Going out shirtless?” I asked rhetorically, tossing him the missing article before rounding the front of the closet mirror, tinkering with my hair and cleavage hoping to appear less… mussed, somehow. My efforts yielded limited results and I crossed my fingers, hoping the dim lighting of the function would conceal the aftermath of my indulgence.

“I need like 20 minutes to show face and… y’know before I can leave.” I called over my shoulder, a hand gripping the doorknob but not yet turning it.

“I’ll text you when the Uber’s here.” We exchanged coy smiles, our secret rendezvous’s maintaining the delicious friction that led us into bed the first time.

With a nod, I slipped out of the bedroom, surveying the hallway for familiar faces and feeling relieved when I found none. I followed the music towards the living room, navigating a sea of bodies loitering sedately in egresses and cozy nooks. As I rounded the corner, the sound of my name echoing pulled my attention towards the kitchen where two of my close friends lounged against the sink, beckoning me towards them.

“We’ve been looking for you for damn near an hour.” Toya said, mild irritation present in her voice.

“My bad, I was in and out for a minute.” I looked to David, ignoring the suspicious glare Toya was giving me.

“Did Charlotte pull up?” I asked, knowing neither of them could resist the urge to gossip.

“Guess.” The glint in their eyes cluing me into a recent development in our convoluted friend group’s dramafest.

“You’re lyin’.”

“With her ex!” Toya supplied, stepping closer so we could adopt softer tones in case someone was ear hustlin’.

“Mind you…” I listened rapturously as they regaled me with the full tale, making a great effort of controlling my features when minutes later, my phone vibrated in my back pocket bringing my after party plans back into focus.

Thanks for giving this a read. I hope you enjoyed yourself. Go forth and be freaky.

Until next time!

“And then he…” her voice trailed off as she began to mime what she couldn’t bring herself to say.

“Oh yeah, the one where he fucks her with the gun.” I filled in as my friend’s face flushed in embarrassment. A nod in my direction the sole affirmation we were talking about the same novel.

It was a surprisingly warm Autumn night (climate change anyone?) as we sat at her dining room table catching up over dinner. We hadn’t seen each other in close to a year as circumstances dragged our lives in different directions. The last time we were together, she’d just gotten back into reading, and had yet to develop a taste for the kinds of stories she was attempting to conceal her excitement about.

We ended up discussing Haunting Adeline1 by H.D Carlton, the book she’d recently finished and one of the most popular in the dark romance genre, by far. Her interest came as no surprise to me, this is the same friend who called Fifty Shades of Grey “disgusting” at a girl’s night before admitting to owning the trilogy and loving it to me, in private. And though I have feelings about the way her shame causes her to project repulsion and yuck other people’s yums, I hear her out cause sometimes, you gotta be the openly perverted padded floor for your prudish friends to land on.

Most of my interests rest snugly between the erotic and the macabre and I make no attempts to hide that. If it’s psycho-sexual and depraved, the majority of the time, I’m all for it. My friend knows this about me which is why she opened the floor to discuss these stories thinking she’d find a comrade and though I was receptive to the conversation, I had no vested interest beyond my curiosity about her experience reading it. This was a bit baffling to her, my indifference and her confusion at my lack of interest compelled me to explain,

“I’m not shitting on it or anything, I can see the appeal for certain people. I’m just not the audience and honestly, the stories have always been like this— doesn’t feel as novel as we act like it is. But please, you said something about a chase…?”

Our conversation went on, the night progressed and for days after, I thought about dark romance. An easy task considering how often people talk about it, the market for these titles are booming2. Like many publishing trends in the last half decade, dark romance’s insurgence as the romantic subgenre was spawned via TikTok, #BookTok, to be specific. The earliest article I could find noting dark romance as it’s own unique subgenre with roots in TikTok, dates back to 2023 and was published by Paste Magazine, What is Dark Romance and Why is BookTok Obsessed With It?.

The writer gives a primer on its roots, how romantasy3, another recently coveted subgenre had made room for more tales of strapping male leads with elusive origins and morally duplicitous methods to getting what they want. The kind of stories where (oftentimes) pathologically vulnerable human FMC4’s are caught up in the politics and desires of oversized creatures re-imagined from childhood fantasies: elves and aliens, warlocks and necromancers of a hidden realm. In some regard, the single distinction between romantasy and dark romance is the absence of magic in the latter.

For many subgenres, dark romance, erotic horror5, romantasy, etc., the similarities they share cannot be helped because they’re all links in a centuries old chain. Perhaps these stories don’t move me because I’m too aware they’re not made for me, because like most modern romance media, these stories are distilled colonial captivity fantasies, white women’s colonial fantasies to be exact.

Whether shrouded in flowery language or offered plainly on page, the through line is clear. A waif of a woman who’s young, white (or light) and positively no match for the MMC whose cruelty she’ll learn to temper with care, if she doesn’t choose to just fully embrace it. Her agency is limited to access afforded by the men in her life, she has no privacy outside of her thoughts and succumbs to obsessive control, love, with all the grace of a saint.

A good girl with limited choices in life who falls in love with a bad man so who can really blame her? I know that story, we all do. It’s been the resounding narrative since the colonial era began, a liminal space where white women have obfuscated culpability with ease as they occupy the seat of the feminine [read: vulnerable and helpless in this context] with the armor of White Supremacy. Her dis-empowerment treated as permanent and all encompassing, colored by race as passively as possible and shared amongst all woman, a rather inclusive lie.

This isn’t to say white women experience no gendered hardship at all. Sexism, misogyny and patriarchy are proliferated through all layers of society and its co-conspirators transcend class, ability and gender, but once we account for race, and the sheer power commandeered under the scope of White Supremacy, the hardships of women become a more fungible entity than white women know how to reconcile with as a group. Simplifying complex relations in society to 1:1 power (in)balances that assert that somehow, gender can bridge the gap of racial power, treated as some double negative when confronted with variations less clear than their comfort would prefer.

This reframe isn’t accidental but rather historic, a bedrock used to justify cruelty and exacting violence on plantations, in fields and beyond imperial conquest. The belief that white women’s victimhood is so omnipresent, it can be equally exploited by any man, anyone really and anytime, is what provides cover from the arduous effort they put into maintaining and expanding the order white men have fallen on the sword for time and time again. It fully dismisses a starker truth that oftentimes, white women are as, if not more invested in colonial projects than their male counterparts. I spoke to this reality as it relates to current attacks on civil liberties and the rights of the marginalized in essays past, where I examined just how many efforts are explicitly spearheaded by women aware of the privileges their perceived fragility affords them.

The cultural is political after all, meaning we can’t disseminate ideals of romance, courtship and love from the group holding the power to shape such narratives in a way that benefits their agenda. At the heart of the genre are stories meant to sweep our attentions away from the political backdrop coloring these relationships while strengthening ideals of romance that serve few of us in the long run.

The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss6, lauded as the first modern bodice ripper7 centers an orphan who’s abducted by a sea captain set on sailing to the colonies after surviving an attempted assault by another man. Gone With The Wind8 by Margaret Mitchell was the top selling fiction novel in the country in 1936 & 1937, the same year Mitchell would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this work. The novel, later adapted to film, stars Scarlett O’Hara, a Georgian southern belle and eldest daughter of a wealthy plantation owner coming of age amidst the American Civil War. It’s the fourth9 most best-selling romance novel of all time.

They follow a similar narrative, gorgeous young women making a way with their wits, beauty and modesty, ingenues whose presence soften the world they exist within, making it easier to forget they have power still and exercise it without provocation. The same women who cashed in on public ignorance of the true scope of their involvement in the slave trade while alongside white men, peddling myths of gentle, empathetic mistresses and misses sexually besieged by enslaved Black men who despite enduring a constant specter of violence, supposedly took great risks to frequently ravage local white women, slave holding white women.

Around 40% of white women10 at the height of slavery in the Antebellum South were slave holding and listed as buyers/sellers on bill of sales for enslaved people. This is discussed extensively in They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers11, an investigative historical analysis that completely disrupts the myth of white female passivity as it relates to the transatlantic slave trade. The premium way white women (and by virtue of colonization, women of color), have learned to justify their desire and appetite for both sex and power is through crafting stories that arrest them of all agency and choice where any pleasure derived from certain acts is essentially, a betrayal of the body. A confused form. If the guardrails of womanhood and femininity don’t allow for active desire, than it must be introduced externally, a violent consumption that leads to a rapturous end.

If we place white womanhood into its earliest context, a valorized female form whose youth and modesty required violent maintenance by white men, then we understand how these hardly believable tales became the baseline understanding of racialized gender and sex. It’s easier to believe that white women lay asleep in the home, or camp or battlefront cocooned in ignorance of the world she lives in until she’s imposed upon by some brutish man belonging to an established underclass than the less polite truth which is: white women are capable of great thought and beliefs just like everyone else, meaning white women can be as bigoted, perverse and immoral as anyone else.

[I’d argue some of their violently voyeuristic inklings were diffused into the creation of the true crime craze that has swept women into its storm for decades now but that’s an entirely separate essay.]

In these stories, authors who are primarily white12 continuously sidestep the gravity of the decisions they have their heroines make to build a case for ignorance their heroines don’t actually display. Scarlett O’Hara raises money for the Confederacy multiple times in Gone With The Wind and marries a man who grew his riches off the war and fought for the South in it. Heather Simmons, the heroine of The Flame and the Flower, marries Brandon Birmingham who owns a plantation in South Carolina, where he runs a cotton mill. These women are presented as savvy enough to survive in the worst of odds and excel with the support of a loving man but somehow, are rendered feckless in the face of injustices they enabled and/or funded against other people.

The first film screened in the white house was Birth of a Nation13, a KKK recruitment film that depicted white men in blackface14 rampaging southern white communities post civil war with intent to rape and pillage their young as retribution. The klansmen are presented as literal white knights, galloping in on horseback to save the day donning hoods sewn by the very women they framed as sitting ducks in need of protection. At some point in the film, these women are captured riding alongside and in front of these men, there’s a lesson in that.

When I glance at the romance genre’s legacy in the US especially, I see waves of titles delicately walking a tightrope that allows them to engage with gender and cruelties unique to sexism while concealing their heroines capability of producing lateral violence towards other women or institutional violence towards people (namely men) of color. Whatever spunk and tenacity these FMC’s have is defunct outside of relations with her man, as that’s what the plot (and colonial gender rules) allow.

This… re imagining of the function of the white female experience while simultaneously ignoring its legacy, explains the friction we see when aged romance media is revamped for contemporary audiences with more diverse cast.

I think frequently of the icy reception Regé Jean Page15 received when it was announced he’d be joining the cast of Bridgerton as Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, the most desirable bachelor in the first installment of a regency romance series written by Julia Quinn. Book fans made their displeasure at his casting well known, flooding social media to scold Netflix, Shondaland (the executive producers of Bridgerton) and Julia Quinn herself as well as creating #NotMyDuke16, a hashtag filled with openly racist protestations at the race bending the show had taken on. The love story fans so desperately wanted to preserve in all its white glory includes a pregnancy born of marital rape after Daphne, the female protagonist, mounts a drunk, barely conscious Simon and forces him to finish inside her, as he tries to bat her off and reject her advances. What a gem she was.

Many of these stories are deeply problematic and their dubious content is written off as the human desire to reconcile with a convoluted society rife with inequality. We tell the stories to cope with the reality, a sentiment I could understand if awareness of the reality were present and if it is, I fail to see it. Some of my favorite genres excel at presenting these conflicts adeptly. Gothic horror, speculative fiction and sci-fi, to name a few, all engage with the seedier parts of life, and ask us to lean into the discomfort we experience in their worlds. The mortal flaw of romance time and time again is the refusal by the culture, the consumers and dare I say, the authors themselves, to take romance seriously. I imagine the hesitation to assert romance as a genre worthy of critique and prestige like the others comes from the knowledge that taking romance seriously means changing how we engage with stories about love altogether and I think that’s more inconceivable than anything.

Taking a look at any best rom-coms of all time list makes it abundantly clear that the zeitgeist may have abandoned the parasols, dowries and lack of women’s suffrage of earlier days but the sentiments have remained the same. Deception, wacky hijinks and meddlesome family and friends accompany us on a runtime where all is fair in love and war, even crimes! You know what they don’t say, one woman’s fairy tale is another’s police report.

Of the 10 highest grossing rom-coms of all time17, only one leaves me hopeful about love, companionship and romance, which is ironic considering said film’s premise is built around the discerning yet lucrative business of a pick up artist. Shoutout to Hitch. The rest involved layers of betrayal, stealthing and other sex crimes, as well as overbearing patriarchs reluctantly handing over their adult daughters with all the grace of an angry bull. The women are hypercritical and Type A, too neurotic to get out of their own way or flighty and disaffected maneaters in need of humbling while the men are simply too comfortable with bachelorhood to settle down or absolute losers who refuse to take no for an answer and are ultimately rewarded for their persistence. Literacy in the origin of these modernized colonial fantasies doesn’t require daily admonishment of its descendants but rather, at minimum, awareness.

The Bookworm and the Jock. The Mafioso and the Waitress. The Debutante and the Rake. The Mistress and the Bull. The Housewife and the Pool Boy. The Pop Star and the Bodyguard. We go ‘round and ‘round, replicating the same ideals expecting wisdom and encountering confusion instead.

If you pay attention long enough, the contradictions start to feel formulaic and intentional in the same vein the tales of conquered white women on the frontier, plantation or battlefront persisted. A deflection and way to keep the sexes (and other groups) at odds with each other as they’re misled about what to find healthy or aspirational in partnership. How could we ever truly decolonize our minds when the stories we escape into rest firmly in our oppressors imagination? Divestment from these narratives goes beyond the interpersonal, it’s cultural and the inheritance we leave the world.

If we’re being honest, the refusal to abandon the tropes and stories that built our cultural memory of romance continues because beginning anew requires courage and curiosity about humanity and the ways we make each other feel. An insistence that we might not know shit and our predecessors didn’t leave much for us to work with. That what is broken today can be whole tomorrow.

I think love, like any worthy endeavor, assumes risks and we’re in a highly risk averse time where people are endeared to assurances love simply can’t make. It’s why we see the rabid reinvestment in the beauty capital, desirability politics and broad sweeping adoption of incel logic on/offline in an attempt to insure these coveted relationships go the distance. Tell the Bees wrote a great piece about this.

We deserve better romance because things that inspire us to great emotion should be treated with care and explored to its furthest extent. I’ve never once had to ask myself "how much worse can it get?” when discussing pursuits of love and romance because we’ve asked and answered that question tenfold. Dark romance and the other subgenres supporting romance and the publishing industry, writ large freely engage with the worst however sexy it’s presented, it’s its singular appeal to consumers. I have however, found myself asking “how good could love get?” “what’s possible when we care to learn each other?” and found fewer references to seek insight from, more uncharted ground.

The playbook is warped, pages have yellowed from age, some stuck together and missing from the book entirely. It served its masters and if we want them to truly perish, we have to retire their playbook and come up with a new one. In order to do that though, we must reconsider what’s survived the colonial era with a critical lens, ask why and how best to cast it out of society, romantic ideals included.

Despite the tone of this essay, you must know I remain hopeful for what could be. People are educating themselves daily about the horrors of colonization, making it easier to connect the cultural dots. Women are choosing not to mindlessly commiserate with discontent wives whose husbands openly hate them on the internet as if it’s relatable and thus, immutable anymore. (Of course I read that article in The Cut and you can right here.) The questioning is slow going but it’s happening.

I long for us collectively, to bore of nostalgia and claim a page in a fresh book full of possibilities, without blushing dames and brooding alphas and colonial backdrops looming in the distance. I don’t profess to know the recipe for a great love story but I imagine it includes laughter, emotional stability, profound intimacy, and all the orgasms a girl could want, then one more, just in case. And I reckon, that’s as good a place to start as any.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a full essay to share. Life’s been hectic, I’m not alone in that and I hope everyone is taking care of themselves and each other as best they can, considering. The writing bug hit me pretty hard so expect more essays and vignettes soon.

Take Care,

Nia Òla

So as you listen to this episode where I make a rather impassioned argument about why monogamy is flubbing up the natural course of most of your relationships, know these are the vibes in the room where it happened.

I don’t profess to be an expert in relationships, but I would consider myself an expert in desire (full credit to the job) which means I so often see a longing no one is allowed to name fester until it degrades all the relationships that ill fitted one impacts. Sometimes the best friend you’ll ever have needed to want you in a different way first for you to arrive at the place that made you the best of friends. Sometimes, we earn our enemies after hubris or distance or lack of character leads to a falling out that makes a continued relationship untenable. When we’re married to restraint first and foremost, we’re not capable of showing up fully in any of our relationships because we’re not really allowed to play with the confines of them to see what the best fit truly is.

Monogamy as it stands currently, doesn’t reward your curiosity about all the ways intimacy, depth and consideration shows up in your life, it discourages this exploration. To commit to any public deviation from the belief that relationships are supposed to look a certain way forever is to admit to some deficit of character according to our current social contract. All of the tenderness and sincerity you ever expressed is called into question because real love, true love doesn’t question; it knows that this is your person and there are no doubts or questions when it’s real. This belief was the center of an essay I wrote in the spring.

Not only do I find the way we partner currently wholly unnatural, it’s also just far less fun. Dating became this bigseriousthing™️ when it stopped being fun and I’d argue the contradictions and guardrails of monogamy have left us restless, yearning for real fun and that restlessness is spilling out in all sorts of problematic and just generally messy ways. Maybe if we allowed relationships to spool out over time like threading a sewing machine, we can construct something beautiful together. Let the tapestry of life be filled in by many people in a myriad of ways we couldn’t predict. Give the origin story we tell folks who marvel at it on the wall some heft, let it be unforgettable.

As a public educator, I understand the gravity of offering information, advice, and education. I try to make the spaces where I offer those things as structured but ultimately approachable as possible. For a long time, I held Whoreoscopes to that standard which impacted my ability to show up for it. I love podcasting, truly, but I find difficulty in maintaining another space where I have to show up refined and scripted 24/7. The reason I named the Shaking Sheets podcast 3.0 (OG’s know I’ve been on/off podcasting for 6ish years) Whoreoscopes was because ultimately, I’m just a whore with a microphone and far too many words.

As my online presence has grown over the years, (a reality that troubles me if we’re being transparent with each other), I’ve been told many times that I feel like the big sister or auntie people never had. It’s a gracious compliment, one I’m not the best at taking though I appreciate it all the same. The trust folks choose to give me is humbling and I never want to abuse it. I bear the weight of responsibility easily which makes showing up more informally a task for me. This episode, and subsequently what I hope to do with the podcast moving forward is exposure therapy of sorts. A way to meet you all a little more casually while continuing to discuss the things that matter.

Sex is a large part of my life, perhaps the biggest part even. And I’d like to talk about it more, if that’s cool with everybody. I won’t guarantee it’ll always be done in a delicate way or even serve to elevate larger conversations about sex in the abstract but it’ll be honest, maybe even a little vulnerable. Hopefully that interest you.

If you listened to this episode and enjoyed it or even hated it, please let me know. If you find this informal, conversational format engaging, let me hear it.

You know, the titan1 damned to carrying the heavens on his back for supporting his siblings rebellion against the Olympians. Aside from his interactions with Perseus and Heracles, Hercules to the Romans, the fans of the Greek Pantheon (and the larger public aware of these stories), pay him little mind. If we’re to indulge the myth as truth for a second, the implications are hefty; the day Atlas steps from under the heavens, it’ll collide with Earth and all life, here and in the sky, would be destroyed. It’s a punishment laced with ineffable power, suitable for a primordial being I suppose. Atlas’ story, is close to 3,000 years old according to my rudimentary math, a long time to comply. In illustrations and sculptures of this tale, Atlas always looks so haggard, neck and shoulders straining with the effort and I often wonder what makes it worth it. If the world beneath him ended, would he unburden himself? Take a big step to the left consequences be damned? Should he?

Atlas is incapable of answering these questions of mine. He’s dead or never existed or unreachable cause he’s holding the fucking heavens. In his absence however, I believe we, humanity that is, have been trying to answer this for years, and our favorite medium for doing so is having a bit of a renaissance currently because of it.

We’re primed to tell stories. According to our limited understanding of human life since it’s inception, we’ve been telling stories longer than we’ve been writing them. There’s something very grounding about spinning a tale, allowing both the corporeal and the mystical to intertwine in a way that invites wonder and awe, or fear and dread. Stories are life changing and have shifted the tides socioculturally more than a few times. The tech evolves, but the purpose of the tale remains the same: sharing a vision with all those willing to listen, we put our loves and hopes and pain and anxieties into them. And if we’re lucky, someone chooses to make it their favorite thing in the world, or attempt to write a short yet perfectly quippy review of it on Letterboxd.

As a collective, we tend to tell stories in waves. There’s a genre and subgenre everyone can’t get enough of and it floods our screens and bookshelves with little thought beyond “everyone has been raving about this and I need to know why!”. I, however, haven’t had a carefree day in my life so I’m cursed to ponder endlessly about the substance of our stories and why we tell them. Our lives and the media informed by them, don’t exist in a vacuum and that’s no more evident than in times of crisis.

My favorite genre is horror, has been since I was a small child. The story goes like this: I was the youngest sibling and only girl in a house full of older brothers and cousins and family friends we all called cousins who found entertainment in exposing me to things meant to scare me. I was sat in front of a buzzing box tv and introduced to all the icons, Jason Voorhees, Chucky, Micheal Meyers and Freddy Kruger yet instead of cowering away, I leaned in. The blood and gore and scream queens that raised me offered me solace, a place to pack away my anxieties about the world; everyday, I felt like bad things were gonna happen and having a medium affirm that nudge was oddly soothing in a way. It’s falsity never mattered to me because for that runtime such a world existed and I got to experience it— dread made sense there, I made sense there. We take our comforts where we can get them.

Some years ago on TikTok, I made a video discussing white folks using film, namely YA Dystopia, to work through rapture anxiety induced by the Obama Administration well… happening. For roughly a decade, we got a new movie about a world shattering event fumbled by incompetent, dubious leaders every few months. Considering there had been very public fears about Obama bringing on the apocalypse or installing Sharia Law2, it all felt a bit, overstated. This isn’t to say the filmmakers and writers whose work was oftentimes adapted did so with the express intent on addressing and abating these anxieties specifically, but they did engage with them, willfully or naively. The obsession with (mostly) white teens saving the world coincidentally dried up at the butt end of Obama’s second term and monster movies (the oldest allegory for great replacement fears, migration and communism) saw a resurgence. Shocker.

If you talk to anyone in the media space who covers movies and television, they’ll tell you that haggard and reluctant heroes staring down the barrel of the apocalypse are all the rage. We have The Last of Us, Station Eleven, Silo, Severance, Paradise, The Walking Dead and it’s many spin offs, the thirst for meaning at the end of the world (or the world as we know it) is unquenchable. We seek dystopian and post apocalyptic media for the same reasons we seek horror, to make sense of what feels inevitable. The fear of death looms over many of us, about a fifth of the US population in most circumstances. For the disabled and those who’ve contracted COVID-19, that number more than doubles3, even though death comes for us all eventually, ones descent towards it isn’t indiscriminate.

In these stories, our protagonist are often dealt a bad hand in a cruel world that takes many prisoners and we’re endeared to them because of their attempt to game the system, stage an uprising or simply live to see another day. We discuss their odysseys in group chats and threads on social media pontificating about what they should have done or couldn’t help but do. After an episode of Z Nation4, a close friend of mine turned to me and simply said,

“There’s no point of surviving an apocalypse, I wouldn’t even try.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard a lot. There’s even been trends on TikTok affirming this notion, that some things just aren’t worth surviving.

@jessrodenzJust getting my bunker nice and secure 😭 #funny #funnyvideos #darkhumour #itsajoke #relatable #zombies #zombieapocalypse #walkers #apocalypse #whosready #foryou #fyp #fypシ

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Though I’m convinced the unwillingness to see through horrible times is in some cases, a uniquely western issue (considering the Global South experiences derivatives of our most outlandish stories frequently due to all the isms), the resistance to seeing an apocalypse through is deeply rooted in the same paranoia that keeps the surveillance state trudging along. No matter the offered reasons for abstaining from survival, most if not all, are rooted in a shared ideology: that given the circumstances and timing, we’d rather kill each other than save each other and you’d be a fool to stick around for that. Somewhere along the way, it was decided that violence and the inclination towards it, is more human than communing, than seeing ourselves in each other and preserving what little spirit we maintain in the darkest times.

It’s tragic, how easily we’ve tricked ourselves into believing that this is our way. As if the origins of humanity, the intimate hunter-gatherer tribes and fiercely egalitarian way of life was a fluke—some blip in our design that got worked out as we became more “civilized”. As if the reward for coming to our senses was the blade, our fingers wrapped tightly around it, aching for a bloody sacrifice. As wretched as I find this belief, it’s the only logical conclusion one could arrive to living in our society. Where trust and privacy seem like juvenile ideals and we scrutinize each other endlessly, awaiting betrayal and violence like a birthright. The kind of place that’s only safe if we surveil and punish preemptively. As I always say, the cultural is political and as our leaders have fortified a surveillance state reliant on aggressive and frequent intrusions into the most banal aspects of our lives, they’ve married us to it culturally.

There’s only a decade between then President Ronald Reagan signing executive order 12,3335, which granted intelligence agencies extensive powers to surveil citizens and foreign nationals within domestic borders, and the premiere of The Real World. An unscripted show on MTV which would begin the renaissance of reality television that pervades society currently. According to Realitytvworld.com6, there are over 600 reality tv shows and counting, some have been on television for decades now and the thirst for them has only grown more vicious. Having people live their entire lives on camera has eroded the desire for privacy and taught us that even the most mundane of tasks are valuable, if for no other reason than to be consumed by others. A form of social cannibalism disguised as sharing. In a surveillance state, all press is good press because any press at all means you’re being seen, that others are watching you.

I sometimes believe people can’t imagine a post-apocalyptic existence because they’re already living one. One where the apocalypse was colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, capitalism and it’s innate brutality, the one where evil prevailed and they’re paying the toll for it. Given those circumstances, what does survival ensure? More hardship? Fewer peaceful days with even less comforts than you were afforded in the past? When all you know is struggle and pain, betting on the formation of a better, more just world can feel like taking the long shot, and that’s not a gamble anyone wants to lose.

With nothing material to strive towards, I’ll admit, it can all seem for naught. The systems destruction on its face serves as further proof of our intrinsic dysfunction, that even evil gets tired of itself, I reckon it’s what most of our heroes believe at the start of their tales as well. Eventually, however, there’s a light in the darkness— a friend or lover, children too young to understand and too good to purposefully fail. In every story that cautions us against staying alive is an alternate point of view, one that asks, why do we attempt to live in the first place?

A Quiet Place, one of the freshest and dearly beloved horror movie of the 2010’s, asked and answered this question simply. John Krasinski, director and star of the film, came across the script for a horror movie that he lightly revised to center his growing fears as a new parent.

“Like so many new parents, Krasinski was terrified that he might not be able to protect his children, and he saw the potential for a horror story anchored in this primal fear. He revised the script to amplify the plight of a family trying to survive in a world where alien creatures with heightened hearing attack at the slightest sound.” 7

In many an interview on the press junket for the first film, (it’s since become a franchise), Krasinski and Blunt had reiterated the heart of the story was rooted in familial love and the unrelenting drive of parents to protect their young against all odds. Across our runtime, we see our family live, love, laugh and mourn under a blanket of silence required to avoid the attentions of the alien species voraciously hunting life on Earth. The pubic found the tale so compelling in fact, it became a beacon for the “pro-life”8 (anti abortion) movement. An editorialized display of all the values anti abortionist profess to have. Their perception of their cause is hardly moving in a country using Black women’s corpses as incubators9 to appease the desires of said “pro-lifers” but, as we’ve established, all press is good press.

When visiting these tales, trudging along for the sake of a child is as common as sacrificing oneself for one. The events that kick the rebellion and ultimately successful revolution into gear within The Hunger Games trilogy, is Katniss Everdeen, our reluctant protagonist, volunteering as a tribute to spare her younger sister, Prim, from attempting to survive a multi-day gladiatorial event televised to the Capitol’s delight. That selfless act, done intuitively changed their world forever. It broke the apocalypse they lived in and offered the dawn of a new day, free of tyranny, which came at a cost, of course. At the end of the trilogy, Plutarch Heavensbee, head Gamemaker, has a letter delivered to Katniss detailing how given the success of the rebellion and liberation of Panem, he’d do it all over again, no matter the toll it took on Katniss and others. Evil doesn’t have the monopoly on a Machiavellian spirit it would appear.

When explaining complex systems to people, I tend to compare them to a prism. A fixed object with many sides capable of refracting light in a variety of ways depending on multiple factors. Strategically placed on a sunny day, it could start a fire. In that same spot, useless due to an overcast. The issue never lies with the light or the prism itself but rather, how it’s used and by whom. Even without words, we understand this naturally, it’s the root of our post apocalyptic anxieties. The light may have been controlled, but you knew who held it and what they posed to gain by controlling you with it, the same cannot be said for a different world. Sometimes, believing the light can never be held differently is more humane than allowing real hope to fester— courting the devil you know and such.

Being primed to think of each other as enemies waiting for activation makes imagining a world beyond having the need for enemies seem impossible. We tend to carry our baggage (and biases) into the world after this world as well. There’s no clearer example than hit video game and now, HBO series, The Last of Us, about a smuggler turned caregiver Joel and his charge, Ellie, the only known person immune to the cordyceps induced zombie virus that’s been ravaging the globe. A journey set 20 years into the apocalypse found itself littered with deep seated biases of it’s creator, Neil Druckmann, an Israeli who created the perfect nest for his Zionist worldview in The Last of Us Part II10, where our characters seek revenge amidst the backdrop of a turf war in the ruins of Seattle between a technologically advanced & militarized WLF and the Seraphites, a feverish cult with an archaic way of life.

In this story, Druckmann presents these disputes as inevitable. The broken remains of society that we refuse to shake off. This view provides some comfort I imagine, if you believe disharmony to be natural for humans, than condoning the violence your people exercise with impunity against another group seems sensible. It reminds me of something Harmony Cobel says in the first episode of Severance to Mark, our severed protagonist.

“The good news is hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.”11

You only need to take a good look around (or crack open a history book) to understand why so many of us are only able to imagine more terror, more violence, more cruelty after a cataclysmic event rocks the world than peace and unity. But if we truly can imagine the worst of odds and of each other, then create it, who’s to say we can’t envision a world with the best of circumstances, void of suffering? Maybe whoever holds the prism seems moot because we never got to see it up close, decide with trial and error all the ways it can bring us new shapes and waves of light.

What if we’ve been trained to see the apocalypse as world ending as opposed to world building to prevent us from dreaming of its possibilities?

The potential exists for both outcomes, the most basic laws of physics tells us this. An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Shout out to Newton12. For too long, our stories have served a bleak narrative, designed to beat us and our spirit down before we even get to try. Contrary to what the powers that be would like us to believe, humans aren’t born seeking to harm one another and in order to rid ourselves of systems that have developed invasive technologies hinging on this conviction as truth, we must disabuse any notions that support it.

In Turn This World Inside Out13, Nora Samaran says that “violence is nurturance turned backwards.” I’d have to agree. We’re a pro social species, us humans. We yearn to commune and belong and rest our shoulders against each other on a cold day for warmth. We take care of our wounded, we bury our dead with care, we play peek a boo with babies we don’t know in lines at the supermarket because a child’s laughter inspires a universal joy. People die shielding another from impending doom, who’d choose to craft their last moments dying for another if it were not our natural inclination? Is it possible that we’ve shied so far away from our nature due to years of imaginations limited to barbarity forced on us by the few who sought power, that it feels foreign to dream in our native tongue? The one that looks at a stranger and says “Hello. I see you. We have enough in common to care to each other’s survival and that’s all that matters.”?

Stories matter, they always have. In their earliest days and beyond, we’ve found utility for them. I’d like to believe we’ll start telling better stories someday soon, we have in the past, but in the meantime, it’s enough if we view the stories told today with a different lens. The power to write new, inspiring and truly imaginative tales about the coming world, an apocalypse only for those who’ve subjugated us in this one, requires perverting the lesson we’re sold currently for our own gain. Instead of seeing every rugged tale of survival in a near or distant dystopia as proof of our depravity and inability to set aside our arms, I insist we sharpen our gaze towards the spirit prompting us to survive more.

The world doesn’t end when empires fall or systems become obsolete, it ends when we refuse to keep going in spite of the hardship and strife surrounding us. Walking into the gorge unaware of what awaits you on the other side but doing so hand in hand with others is the bravest thing of all and ultimately, what makes us most human.

Is that not what we attempt to preserve, even in our most bleak tales?

I’m currently working on a few projects as one does and I could use some help! As you know, I spend a lot of time online discussing community and preaching its gospel if you will. Oftentimes, I’ll get waves of comments, DMs and emails detailing a genuine desire for community but inability to find ones folks can settle into or pessimism brought on by prior efforts not being rewarded. I empathize with that plight and as a chronic thinker turned fixer, I’m invested in helping to bridge a pathway (to the best of my abilities) for folks seeking community. Whether it be related to their politic, hobbies, skills or a combination of multiple factors, I’m curious what people are faced with currently and what they’ve observed makes these efforts easier and harder.

So I created a survey. It’s a little over 20 questions with multiple choice, sliding scale and short essay style questions. Shouldn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes. The only truly personal data collected on you is your email and some demographics (age group, ethnicity, etc.), you don’t even have to tell me your name. The raw data will only be seen by my eyes and kept in an encrypted local drive on my external storage. This will later be aggregated into charts and metrics that will be accessible to the public, your email address will not be shared, ever. I’m looking for the broad strokes, not your nitty gritty (no offense).

If that’s something you’d like to help me with? Amazing! If not? No hard feelings! I am seeking as much data as possible, in the survey game, more data is good data so share the link with whoever else is willing in your circles. The people have served and cared for me so well over the years (which includes you btw) and I want to pay it forward! The joy, optimism, and peace I experience in the spaces most dear to me should be accessible to all those seeking, I genuinely believe that and this is a step in my attempt to clear the road for these spaces to thrive and with you in them.

Thanks in advance and I’ll keep you posted on the larger results.

Be Well,

Nia Òla

https://s.surveyplanet.com/7nju7lg8

Though most of the titles shared here are from Bookshop.org, I receive no commission from your purchases if you do so through them— using one site just proved to be more efficient when scourging up the titles.

Personally, I’m partial to Haymarket Books

Ideally, you can find some of these books online for free or you’re able to loan these texts from the library and if unable to, I urge you to support indie bookstores! These are all books within my personal library but they alone are not a representation of my politic or worldview, it’s all cumulative so take what you can digest and be critical of it all. Neither I, nor these authors are infallible and that should be top of mind.

One of my favorite videos on the internet is almost 20 years old. It’s an animated “parody”1 music video simply titled Read A Book2. You should give it a watch, it’s not a waste of time I promise. Anyway, the existence of that video and the fact that it’s imparted on my brain shows how impactful it was to me.

I was already a voracious reader 17 years ago when it dropped (she’s aging herself), so it served as affirmation more than inspiration. However, in light of the growing literacy crisis we’re in, over 54% of US adults are functionally illiterate and read below a 6th grade level3, and rise in generative AI that’s not only polluting finite clean drinking water sources4, but also draining your cognitive skills the more task you offload to it5… It bears repeating how important reading is not just to me, but to the world. As my friend Ismatu has reminded us time and time again in their essays6, imagining and partaking in new world making requires access to literacy. Reading is a tool of revolution.

So in that spirit, and considering I’m frequently asked for the titles that fill my shelves, I’ve compiled non-exhaustive lists (I literally own hundreds, perhaps thousands of books we’d be here all day) grouped in a way that makes sense to me and will attempt to update periodically. You’ll only get the email/notification once, but I’ll try to remind folks when I fill it up more. Enough talk, let’s get into the books!

Black Shit

(Afropessimism, fabrications of race and it’s social, cultural & economic function)

Slavery & The Social Death- Orlando Patterson

Black Ghost of Empire - Kris Manjapra

Blood In My Eye - George Jackson

Afropessimism - Frank B. Wilderson

Negroes with Guns - Robert F. Williams

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Lose Your Mother - Saidiya Hartman

Scenes of Subjection - Saidiya Hartman

Negroland - Margo Jefferson

Caste - Isabel Wilkerson

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Not "A Nation of Immigrants" - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Wake - Rebecca Hall

Belly of the Beast - Da'shaun L. Harrison

Black Women Writers at Work- Claudia Tate

This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed - Charles E. Cobbs Jr.

Force and Freedom - Kellie Carter Jackson

Black on Both Sides - C.Riley Snorton

Racecraft - Barbara J. Fields & Karen Fields

Tip of the Spear - Orisanmi Burton

Black Scare / Red Scare - Charisse Burden-Stelly

Medical Apartheid - Harriet A. Washington

Working the Roots - Michele Elizabeth Lee

Freedom is a Constant Struggle - Angela Davis

Hood Feminism - Mikki Kendall

Bad Fat Black Girl - Sesali Bowen

An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Organizing

(for labor and beyond)

We Do This 'Til We Free Us - Mariame Kaba

Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence - Edited by Aizeki, Schuper & Mahmoudi

No More Police - Mariame Kaba & Andrea Ritchie

We Will Not Cancel Us - Adrienne Marie Brown

Mutual Aid - Dean Spade

Reconsidering Reparations - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Fresh Banana Leaves - Jessica Hernandez

Freedom Dreams - Robin D.G. Kelley

The Devil is Here in These Hills - James Green

There is Power in a Union - Philip Dray

At the Hands of Persons Unknown - Philip Dray

Fight Like Hell - Kim Kelly

Abolish Rent - Tracey Rosenthal & Leonardo Vichis

Why We Fight - Shane Burley

Let This Radicalize You - Mariame Kaba & Kelly Hayes

The Red Deal - The Red Nation

We Grow the World Together - edited by Maya Schenwar & Kim Wilson

Strike - Sarah E. Bond

Back to Black - Kehinde Andrews

Decolonial Marxism - Walter Rodney

Left of Karl Marx - Carol Boyce Davies

Palante - The Young Lords

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Border Crossed Us - Justin Akers Chacon

The Nation of No Map - William C. Anderson

Country Queers - Rae Garringer

Radicalism at the Crossroads - Dayo F. Gore

A Soldier's Story - Kuwasi Balagoon

The Colored Conventions Movement - Foreman, Casey & Patterson

Sex

(its work, politic and function)

Holy Harlots - Kelly Hayes

Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts - Kate Lister

Saving Our Own Lives - Shira Hassan

A Curious History of Sex - Kate Lister

Revolting Prostitutes - Molly Smith & Juno Mac

Playing the Whore - Melissa Gira Grant

Labor of Love - Moira Weigel

Not Your Rescue Project - Chanelle Gallant, Elene Lam & Robyn Maynard

Sex at Dawn - Calcida Jetha & Christopher Ryan

How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex - Samantha Cole

Sexual Justice - Alexandra Brodsky

All Our Trials - Emily L. Thuma

Bonk - Mary Roach

The Perfumed Garden - Sheik Nefzawi

What Pornography Knows - Kathleen Lubey

The Soft City - Terry Williams

For the Love of Men - Liz Plank

The Almond - Nedjma

A Taste for Brown Sugar - Mirielle Miller-Young

Come As You Are - Emily Nagoski

Lower Than the Angels - Diarmaid MacCulloch

Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialsim - Kristen R. Ghodsee

Ace - Angela Chen

A Lover's Pinch - Peter Tupper

Preppy Shit

(For those of us preparing for the end… whatever it looks like)

The Forager's Harvest - Samuel Thayer

The Backyard Homestead - Carleen Madigan

The Urban Prepper's Guide - Jim Cobb

The Healing Garden - Juliet Bankenspoor

If you can believe it, this is still not the entirely of my library or total sum of books I greatly enjoy. I limited this list to non-fiction because I find the info more cogent in this form, especially in regards to conceptualizing both the means at which you’re oppressed and the blueprint towards your liberation. As I’ve been putting this together in the last few weeks, I frequently grew tearful and I couldn’t articulate why at first. It wasn’t until now, the day this list goes out that it dawned on me: reading saved my life.

Whether it was my days at the dining table every Sunday afternoon as a child, writing reports on Black radical thought my mother required we digest to increase our survival into adulthood, or the fiction novels I escaped into for hours at a time making the poverty, the violence and abuse I experienced distant in mind while lost in those stories or the emails ripe with opportunities to feed myself well and be securely housed for another month if I accepted this booking— the written word, communication at large saved my life. And as I’ve aged, I’ve always hoped I could pay it forward through my own writings and teachings and fellowship. That dream felt impossible for many years but today, it feels closer than ever.

And I have you to thank for it.

“Would things be easier if there was a right way? Honey there is no right way.”

- Someone New, Hozier

I remember the first time I watched Indecent Proposal, an erotic drama that captivated me both with it’s premise and execution. I was a preteen, crowded around a box television in my uncle’s den hyper vigilant of every sound in the house, lest he catch me in the act. I couldn’t gauge all the reasons he’d disapprove of the film but I knew the central plot would be one of them. It’s simple really: high school sweethearts turned spouses down on their luck head to Vegas hoping to turn it all around, and the opportunity to do so arises with John Gage, a billionaire so enraptured with Diana’s aloofness towards him, that he makes a proposition only men used to getting what they want would. If you allow me one night with you, I’ll give you a million dollars.

It’s the civilian’s1 imagination of a hooker’s dream really (much like Pretty Woman was), and they’re not that far off.

It’s angsty and sexy and uncommitted in it’s cynicism about love. I found myself revisiting it over the years for reasons I couldn’t quite place until reading the Robert Ebert review,

“Indecent Proposal” is in a very old tradition, in which love is put to the test of need and desire and triumphs in the end, although not without a great many moments when it seems quite willing to cave in to passion.2

The story though assuming the traditional 3 act structure can be cleaved into halves, before the proposal and after. In many ways, partnership can be catalogued this way as well.

A request. Rumination. A decision. And how one lives with it.

The most human thing about us is our propensity to wonder, to continue to asks questions with an answer already tucked in our pocket. Since the dawn of time, sentient beings have been needlessly seeking: comfort, security, food, community, what makes a cold night pass easier and a hot day more bearable. Despite knowing this about ourselves, an expectation arises in society, one that asks we suspend every inch of curiosity our species demands to prove our love is earnest and true. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this was the function of love, or really, marriage for that matter.

Generally speaking, at the core of every great love story and its auxiliary heartbreaks is the question of marriage. Do we do it? Are we doing it well? Should we have done it at all? Considering how we discuss marriage currently, you’d think love is and has always been its primary motivating factor which lends a rather ahistorical account to it’s hows and whys. Though many marry for love today, it wasn’t always like this actually, it just started being like this. Marriage is sociopolitical and based on its origins, designed to assert ownership over property which were women and children post agricultural revolution. There’s functional ownership baked into marriage and was meant to reaffirm power structures that punished a refusal to conform, it’s the very reason marriage eligibility exists at all.

And despite recent history suggesting otherwise, marriage never lost its bite. No-fault divorce3 is younger than my parents. Women’s ability to independently own credit cards and access lines of credit4 is even younger than that. Marital rape wasn’t recognized as an assault and thus crime until 1993 in the US5. The specter of violence within the marital apparatus has been taken out of public view, namely due to marriage’s rebrand as a love commitment, we can thank marketers for that.

In media exploring marriages, we’re inundated with the idea that marriage as an exercise of love is superior because it sands down the rough edges of its practical function. Like sleight of hand performed by a magician, we’re meant to think only of its benefits and perhaps more importantly, believe the benefits capable of excising ourselves of further meditation on the decision, and what we’ve let go of to make it. Love is damn near incapable of being partitioned from marriage because marriage is considered the principle expression of love. To question your marriage, is to question the sanctity of love itself.

The central tension in all erotic and romantic dramas come from our protagonists deviating from their unquestioning. As a society, we can be painfully idealistic about love and it’s power. It’s meant to be opaque in its uncertainties and very romantic about its virtues. The perfect escape. A cushy landing in an otherwise cruel and inconsiderate world so what does it say when even long time companionship finds itself under examination still?

The rom-com doesn’t answer these questions, but rather leans in to the opposing view, that true love requires no questions, the answer is your person.

Screenwriting couple, Celine Song and Justin Kuritzkes took film by storm last year when Past Lives & Challengers released barely two months apart asking similar questions about marriage, love, desire and the potential of connections. The films couldn’t be more different in their approach and even in how they attempt to answer the question but the questioning itself, by a married couple no less, led to public deliberations about the quality of their marriage and whether their respective film plots were meant to indicate troubled waters.

The nosiness of the public is always to be expected, especially in the social media age which has democratized voyeurism and corroded social etiquette in relation to personal privacy. The boundaries are porous and the desire to pry into the couples personal life is in part promoted by Song’s affirmation that Past Lives is a work of auto fiction. She too is a Korean-Canadian-American writer who passed on her childhood sweetheart to settle in New York with her white Jewish-American writer husband. It was all the fuel people needed to run with the idea that these movies are functioning as couple’s therapy or perhaps a confession by the respective screenwriters. Multiple publications wrote about it, some demanding the public drop the fixation, while others fed it.

• Stop Looking for the Challengers/Past Lives Third - Vulture

• Challengers and Past Lives are engaged in a secret, sexy conversation - Decider

Through tastefully placed flashbacks and double speak in the current timelines, we see six people (between both films) reconcile with a shared and distant past, restless with uncertainty. It’s the age old trope rom-coms choose to cart around unabashedly: the first love v. the (presumed to be) last. While these characters reflect on the role they’ve played in each other’s lives, moments that would otherwise feel pedestrian are elevated by a clock, because questions demand answers, love demands answers.

In Past Lives, Nora Moon née Na Young, is compelled to consider the decisions that led her to New York and subsequently, her husband when Hae Sung Jung, her childhood sweetheart finally makes it across the ocean to see her. Their reunion is awkward and stilted yet full of affection, the years weathered them a bit, sure but the care is evident. Even if they don’t know how to feel about seeing each other after all this time, they’re indeed, feeling, deeply.

Across the duration of a nearly 2 hour runtime we witness the emotional waxing and waning of Nora and Hae Sung attempting to ease all the confusion around their connection while toeing the lines of propriety because Nora is married. They demand little of each other aside from honesty and even that is colored by nearly finished statements, weighted glances and double speak. Two decades of history and what ifs are further punctuated by Arthur, Nora’s husband’s presence both literally and metaphorically across the film.

He does all the right things. He’s kind and understanding about Nora’s desire to see Hae Sung and experience him corporeally for the first time in their adult lives and is ever hospitable when he meets him. Despite this, he can’t help but feel inadequate compared to her first love; they share more than history, they share a world, a language and culture. Nora is known to Hae Sung in ways Arthur never will experience, it’s what breeds his anxieties about their renewed connection. He’ll always have met Nora after she became Nora, whereas Hae Sung got to experience all iterations, the girl that was Na Young and the woman that is Nora Moon.

Nora spends an entire day with Hae Sung where they attempt to enjoy each other just enough for their reunion to be worth it but less than anything that can be read as romantic intent. They ignore the longing only they (and Arthur by the end of the movie) can see because choices were made, and they feel comfortable standing by them.

The film’s climax isn’t a big bang, Hae Sung and Arthur don’t come to blows. Instead the three of them grab dinner, enjoy each other’s company in the liminal space of the two paths Nora’s life could have taken and with who. And with some liquid courage, the curtains are parted and the childhood sweethearts have a beautifully transparent conversation in Korean, the language they learned to love each other in.

Arthur, though present for this conversation, respects its privacy. He scrolls his phone as his wife speaks to what could have been the love of her life in their native tongue and pretends it doesn’t stir complicated and undeniably wounded feelings within him. Though we often see discussions about fate and soulmates, it’s entirely possible that our lives, our love lives most of all, is driven solely by personal choice. Is that not where the nail biting comes from? If one chooses to stand by their decisions, then they’re admitting there were decisions to make, that this all encompassing love didn’t spawn passively but rather through deliberate effort to know and grow with another.

In the end, Nora’s lucky, she gets to gaze between the two great loves of her life and make peace with her path. The question: who’d I be if this didn’t happen? who’d I be if it did? becomes obsolete because this moment, these connections, her marriage are the answer, there’s wisdom in that.

Challengers takes an alternative view. If Past Lives is stripped down and quietly meditative, Challengers is brash and unencumbered in its prodding. In Justin Kuritzkes world, tennis provides the backdrop for relationships that span nearly half of these characters lifetimes as well as a medium to talk when they find themselves unable, or realistically, reluctant to. Everything’s about tennis, so nothing’s about tennis and the matches we witness on screen are the closest our triad get to authentic expressions of their frustrations, hopes and dreams.

Despite our film beginning well into these character’s mess, the love story ultimately commences before either boy meets Tashi. Art and Patrick, teen tennis prodigies had spent years together as best friends, shrouding homoerotic longing for each other in anything capable of being an intermediary.

Tashi was inheriting a love story, not starting one. Tennis being a vehicle to confront their desire is made especially fascinating by her inclusion because of what the sport, and by virtue the men, grow to mean to Tashi. Art and Patrick are white boys with affluent legacies couching them in security whereas Tashi comes from a working class family, and is Black in one of the whitest sports in the world. Tennis is a game for the boys but for Tashi, it’s her lifeline— her chance at a dazzling and spectacular existence typically reserved for the Elite. For Tashi, loving tennis isn’t a happy accident but rather compulsory in order to see to the mobility and adoration she seeks. In a lot of ways, everyone in her life remains inferior to the sport; any partner of hers is in a love triangle with tennis and the only way out, is through winning.

Tashi has it all: the technicality and grace we saw in Art, accompanied with the intuitive raw power and tenacity we saw in Patrick. She’s the best of the both of them, she’s the best tennis has to offer. The immediate draw towards her is as much about her elevated game as it is her beauty. When the boys watch her play, get to experience her objectively for the last time, it’s ripe with wonder and an electricity they refuse to name but you can feel. They want Tashi, a female counterpart and perfect mix of their respective traits, meaning they also want each other.

When our actual romance begins to transpire on screen, it’s with all three of our characters, the sectioning off will come later. Tennis ultimately determines who has access to Tashi and with so many factors crowded into a room (or on double beds shoved together at a shitty hotel in Flushing), conflict is bound to happen. Unlike Past Lives, Challengers doesn’t ask us to wonder about the depth of romantic feelings between our throuple, but rather the depth of their devotion to the sport responsible for leading them to each other.

The vulnerable moments of their shared pasts is interspersed with the 2019 Challenger Final, where Art and Patrick, once best friends, now 12 years estranged, get to hash their mess out on the court while a hungry public and even hungrier Tashi watch. The question: what could have been? is entertained by all of our protagonists respectively because they all lost something shortly after finding each other. Tashi arguably most of all when a devastating freak injury (caused by Art’s meddling to be clear) ends her career before she could even go pro.

So regarding the romance, the question isn’t so much: which man is better for me? but actually, are these men a reflection of all I’d have amounted to?

Tashi, by way of her relationship with these men gets to experience both outcomes, and ponder them in equal measure though she only has control over one, the life and thus career she chose with Art. She’s forever calm and collected in public, she’d never give away her personal power or the leverage her casual aloofness affords her yet even still, the cracks in her veneer deepen as the challenger progresses.

This tournament matters far more than she’d ever admit, we become aware a little over half way through the film that a big decision will proceed this season. Either Art wins and goes on to complete his career Grand Slam and she finds contentment (hopefully) in the career she nurtured or Patrick wins and Art is devastated, using the embarrassment of the loss to rid him of trying to win the US Open, paving the way for his retirement. As Patrick tells Tashi in the alleyway,

The only reason Tashi can love Art is because he gave her what Patrick never could, total control over his career, his life’s trajectory and legacy. He’s a devotee of Tashi’s, kneeling in supplication to her heart’s desire except, it’s not enough. Art’s a good tennis player, a great one even, but he’s no Tashi. Tashi would have completed her career grand slam by now. Tashi would have been the face of all the brands. Tashi would have been something indescribable and rare. Instead, she’s the wife and coach of a man who’s only ever almost enough. If this pains Art, it mortally wounds Tashi.

It’s the core of her frustrations with Patrick, if there was a man she could have molded in her image, it would have been him but he had too much hubris and too little drive to sustain. To mourn the strain in their relationship (I hesitate to say end considering she fucks him on the low), means accepting she’s as much of a has-been or could-have-been as him. If there’s a version of Tashi that went on to become the GOAT because she was never injured, then there’s also a version of Tashi that went pro and fumbled her way through a career that could only be described as unsatisfactory.

The feelings she has for Patrick and Art are secondary, they serve as a vector for the actual love of her life, tennis. If Nora belongs only to herself, making her content with her decisions in life, then Tashi belongs to the court, to the highs and lows of tennis. And she doesn’t know who she is without tennis and gives us no indication she wants to find out.

Unlike Past Lives, our resolution doesn’t come from sincere conversation earmarked by tender feelings. Challengers takes its conflict to the place it began, the tennis court. After Patrick plays his hand (signalling to Art that he & Tashi fucked), they decide to settle the score once and for all. It’s a punishing volley that closes the gap, literally and figuratively in our throuples relationship and as Tashi tries to follow along the sidelines, her presence cocoons the men like a shawl. For once, in twelve years, they’re experiencing the relationship that is tennis together and it only took a random draw, deceit and infidelity to do so.

These love stories, split over decades and continents all punctuated by life altering events outside of our characters control, allow space to ask hard questions we’re told cease to exist when true love occurs.

Was there another option for me, for us? Is the merit of love and desire bound to its profound uniqueness? Does the sincerity of our connections hinge on their irreplicable nature? Where does the harm lie, in asking the question or admitting you have one?

Neither Song nor Kuritzkes answer this with a pretty bow, but they questioned it, which in a lot of ways is enough.

In the rom-com, it’s almost guaranteed that in order to prove fealty to your one true love, you must make a spectacle of your past connections. The lead is made to disavow all the love they’ve stumbled through prior to ending up here, as proof nothing could ever amount to this. Personally, I find love too dynamic to contain to my current partner(s), even when I think I want to experience them forever. Our lives are cumulative, who’s to say we’d be capable of finding true love if we hadn’t micro dosed it along the way?

Diana, Nora and Tashi dared to wonder and refused to apologize for it. The men who loved them fell in love with women who question and it would be a disservice to them to expect anything different. Whether a million dollars, In-Yun or a career grand slam, we wouldn’t find ourselves dreaming of what isn’t possible and the ability to visit that place, caress its edges fondly, then come back to the life we choose, might be the most romantic tale of all.

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“God is a disgruntled cuckold.”

The first time I’d say this out loud was at a brunch on a sleepy, rainy day in the PNW 10 years ago. I was contemplative in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to be for months and when I grew too fatigued to secure the floodgates, that’s what poured out. I remember eye rolls at the table, my friends convinced I would say anything for a laugh— Nia, the ceaseless showman. It wasn’t a joke but rather a sentiment my brain had been grinding toward for ages, like weathered rocks smoothed in persistently choppy waters. The former church girl life had lent me a combative gaze towards Him, the Christian God as sold to me by both the Catholic and Southern Baptist Church. I had no restful moment in my faith (if it ever existed). It was endless questioning, stiff backs in a pew paranoid that being wrong this time about this thing, would have consequences I wasn’t prepared to survive.

I’d approach the altar some mornings, fingers flexing tightly against each other as I passed off virulent pleas and bargains for prayer, tears threatening to expose me for the anxiously non-believing heretic I imagined myself to be. I grew so preoccupied with the rites of worship that I challenged them to become my God, figuring works without faith was a way to encounter a deity, whether they already existed or I’d reverse engineered their creation. If I conceded to the possibility of a higher power having put me in the rat race, the least they could do was watch me ardently try to make it work before counting losses and retreating.

In the church, they say you can find God in everything. That every breath and thought, belief and action is orchestrated by God and you have two options: succumb to His will, or resist it and be punished. It’s a great vehicle of control, one that conveniently cast light on a God as voyeuristic and demanding as the society bred to bend in supplication towards Him. When God is everywhere, we’re taught to find God in everything and usually can do so, forever. These teachings aren’t of consequence to me these days, I left the church ages ago. Finding God in all the places Christianity said it was impossible but the place I find God most, where I think it’s comedic and poetic is well, porn.

I don’t watch porn much. When sex is your business1, it can be hard to view editorialized fucking as anything less than the production. And on the rare day I can suspend my professional brain, I still have no desire. Personally, I like my voyeurism IRL and have been spoiled for far too long for its digital counterpart to feel like anything more than a paltry appetizer. But if I open my laptop and load the thing, God has met me in the same place every time— the kneel. You all know it. If you’ve ever watched cishet porn then you’re well acquainted with this phenomenon. At some point, the female performer falls to her knees, tilts her head up and assumes a gaze so familiar to me I could call on it like an old friend.

This look is one of animated yearning, a silent plea that says “I’ve surrendered.” To what? Is up for interpretation, always.

And despite my hyper vigilance that this is indeed a production, and a porno, the christian part of my brain that I’ve long starved curdles with hunger as it recognizes its kin. Her gaze invites me in, challenges me to share a moment with her in devotion. Her stance is one assumed across the world by church girls, taught to desire deeply for intimacy and closeness to God. We find our heads turned up with slack mouths whether for dick or divinity, the motivation indistinguishable on our features.

We come to sex the same way we come to God, hesitant perhaps, but always motivated by a desire and hunger you couldn’t articulate well if you tried. I saw a video go viral of a female pastor at a mega church saying “Only Jesus can satisfy.” It reads like a plea more often than an attestation. Life would be much simpler if we just stopped wanting, stopped seeking satisfaction because the good book tells us to, because it says any satisfaction past God’s, is evil. Though I don’t believe that to be true, the sentiment infected me as much as the next person and by in large produced this cycle of deferring, succumbing to, then agonizing over desires, whatever they might be: sex, food, comfort, security, a fulfilling life. Within this logic, it never felt wrong to already have, only to want if you don’t— under God’s eye, we’re all masochist I suppose.

There’s a preoccupation, in our world, with things making sense. We measure history and time through logic and formulas, binary code and math; they all have their place, but I worry we expect logic to explain the inexplicable too often though it pains us to do so. Yes, there’s a science behind socialization, connection, desire, sexual impulse and we should remain interested in it but it’s not the sum of these things, of who we are. The world was spinning eons before we attempted to notate and understand its axis, we danced amongst the cosmos before we attempted to name them. There’s comfort in that, how often things just happen without seeking our permission.

Total freedom I’ve imagined, lies in the ability to exist unfettered by the confusion or attentiveness of elements around you. For centuries since the colonial era began, we’ve been primed to believe our humanity lies in adamant restraint, ones ability to detach, suppress, remain stoic in the face of terror, cool in a boiler. If it couldn’t be reasoned away, it was beneath humanity. This was the logic of the church, and of the freakishly evil empires pursuing “valor” in its name. Everywhere I look, I see echoes of this marriage to restraint, in our dress, language, hair and physical expression.

As a descendant of victims of Chattel Slavery, the “primative” class of people, I realized my ability to reclaim the pride and veneration I was robbed of required me, all of us really, to not just reject the colonial overlords but also their restraint. It’s high time we stop allowing the groups who’ve behaved the least civilized in the name of expansion and capital to define what civility, least of all, humanity means. To reject the totality of the human experience, is to reject the soul of humanity, empire is soulless and we can only exist peacefully within it if we too commit to soullessness.

For those of us that refuse to abide by soullessness, we yearn to reclaim excitement, curiousity, desire that requires no explanation. That’s the crisis is it not? Everyone is tired of the rules (because they don’t work) but is too afraid to demand the world be better, that it embrace humanity without oppressive confines because it’s hard to imagine what we’ve never known. And though we’ve never known it, it’s important to remember that people have known it. There was a world prior to colonialism and Christianity and the constant spectre of terror trailing us no matter where we go. The issue isn’t what humans do when they’re not restrained, it’s what empires do in the name of restraint.

I never feel more human than when I embrace my desires wholeheartedly. Desire is what motivates all change. A desire to eat, to love or be loved, to fuck, to hurt what has hurt you, to be free even if its pursuance can kill you. They’ve robbed us of the beauty of desire because it creates a chasm between what we have been, what we could be and what we should be. If our satisfaction is limited to what is here and now and known and “proper” then we need never seek more or better or just, we simply exist. That feels decidely anti human.

In a world as diseased as ours, Jesus is the only thing that satisfies because he’s the only thing allowed to bring us satisfaction. No one demands we explain away faith, the fervent prayers and tongues, the endless sacrifice of the poor that we call tithing, it’s limited logic with innumerable grace for it. And contrary to what we’ve been told, we can choose to apply that same grace to all of our wants, whether its polite to express them in a pew or not.

I ache with lust so intensely it feels I can peer into the past, present and future of human connection. The face of a lover takes shape with a magnificence that can only be described as godly. Sweat tastes like ocean mist, flesh between my teeth feels like every perfectly ripe fruit I’ve been blessed with, the curve of a spine registers just as marvelously as a towering tree in a forest. The electricity is in the wanting and pursuing it, wantonly. The hours on our knees, be it in a pew or a porno remind us that you can only want if you’re alive, and if we expect the world to care about the living, we must act on our aliveness as often and brazenly as possible. It’s the most natural way to assert our personhood, what about us actually matters.

If you can learn denial, you can learn desire. I believe we all should yearn to know it more. And hey, if you’re that concerned with the sanctity of your soul, there’s always a hail mary to spare.

It’s important to me that you know this piece was in progress prior to the passing of Pope Francis. Some may find the title crass, blasphemous even and to that I say, I think he’d have liked it, have you ever met a priest?

Genres are suggestions, not immutable and Nana seemed to embrace that ethos with the creative liberties he took not just with his writing, but the very format of the text.

There’s omniscient 3rd person narration typical of fiction novels throughout with frequent footnotes that are frankly, oversized. They bloated the page and provided a level of detail that exceeds exposition (which I’m not a big fan of as is), and borders non fiction educational materials. It was giving McGraw Hill.

I suppose one could argue the intent was to imply Chain Gangs mythology is fact in another dimension by presenting it to the audience as a textbook accompaniment of sorts, if that is the case I’d say it was ill advised; one of the biggest hurdles I had following the story came from the footnotes disrupting the connection I attempted to build to our characters. If I look a little deeper, I’d just as easily believe it was to ensure that readers understood how little mythology existed considering he’s taking a sharp stab at the current violent, vengeful carceral state and Prison Industrial Complex. It all felt rooted in some anxious paternalism, like there was genuine concern the audiences couldn’t keep up or orient themselves to the world without more guiding hands than I’d expect or welcome.

In the midst of an anti-intellectualism crisis, I find myself increasingly more concerned with the expectations authors have of their audiences coloring how they choose to present stories to us. The shortened attention spans and thirst for quippy one liners primed for TikTok virality have publicized the well known publishing secret that you don’t need your readers to get analytical, you just need them to get… the book, of course.

In a world of “it’s not that deep” and “the curtains are just blue”, I’m left weary of books that don’t insist their readers work their brain much and, don’t even give them an opportunity to. In the case of Chain Gang, it felt like every story progression insisted that the audience couldn’t take enough away from the dialogue and worldbuilding that wasn’t explicitly stated or further clarified in the footnotes. Sometimes less is more and despite the route taken, Nana does “less” well.

Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the oversized exposition nearly every chapter is how capable Adjei-Brenyah proved he could set the scene proficiently in few words. I enjoyed his writing most in the ring, the combat and subsequent deaths read like a dream because he said just enough, every time.

One of my favorite examples takes place in Staxx’ first on page fight against Barry “Rave Bear” Harris after she’s amputated his leg and he realizes how much he’s been got.

“Bears face was in the dirt, but his arms were still swinging, still holding his bats, up, down, up, down, as though he were trying to swim on solid earth.” […]

“Shit,” Barry said.

This was a man who wanted to live, who found yielding to others inconceivable. He’d always go down with a fight because maybe, just maybe, sheer will can spare him except that’s untrue this time. The lesson in humility costs him his life.

The following page we read a biography and prison origin story about Barry that felt redundant and this issue spawns again and again. In an attempt to humanize these characters, Nana seems to write away the desire to see them, I don’t get to want to know more because damn near everything has been said.

These character’s world revolves around the CAPE2, the program that created this televised gladatorial system, and the most insightful exchanges we see revolve around its central conflict: will I survive? Do I deserve to? There’s intimacy within the dread and fears all these characters have to navigate, even when they appear not to be affected. How they kill, live and die tells us more about them than Nana perhaps gave himself credit for.

I thought it was a debut, the signs of a green author unsure of his footing yet, it’s his second published work.

The single worst thing about Chain Gang All-Stars is how compelling the characters could have been, had he given them space to breathe. The heart of our story lies in the relationship between Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxx” Stacker, two Black women imprisoned on murder charges, standing on the edge of high freedom (low freedom is death) and well past the point of infamy. They’re stars in their own right and getting to watch them reconcile with that reality admist a stunning amount of violence, apathy and paranoia was where most of my interests lie. These women met each other at the lip of death hour after hour and while avoiding such fates, offered each other a soft space to land. This relationship had a lot of heart to it because the weight of mortality rests atop them like a mosquito net, every second together counted because the seconds were counted.

It was interesting to see love explored with characters occupying contrasting narratives about their stories, purpose and potential.

In this way the pair act as a foil to each other. Thurwar is deeply self loathing and like most of the characters we interact with in CAPE, she’s painfully aware of what led to her imprisonment and finds it difficult to imagine the cruelty and barbarity she’s surviving outpaces the permenance of killing her lover. She spends the majority of the novel emotionally flaggelating herself between bouts of anxiety related to her line’s fate. Staxx on the other hand not only accepts what she’s done, she thinks the succeeding events made her better. She sees her circumstances for what they are and the liveliness she exudes come from a sense of content related to her growth. Everyday she throws her all into loving, into being better, into spreading her love far and wide enough to collapse the system that birth this version of her.

In Staxx’ POV, I thought frequently of the brief words of Melanie “Melancholia” Bishop, Thurwars first match and kill within CAPE. Melancholia told Thurwar to love, to make them love her in return and to tuck the most central parts of her someplace safe, and she did, it was in Hamara.

It was their contrast that let me in on the novel’s outcome. By the first private moment Thurwar and Staxx have between their respective matches, I knew they’d be tasked with killing each other eventually. When the time came for their fight, we realize that this is perhaps the first murderous act that required no forgiveness because real love was present. They’d actually seen each other and that was indeed the highest victory since ultimately, everyone gets “freed” by blade or victory.

Typically, tales about imprisoned people are preoccupied with redemption, the “villain’s” journey to being a “law abiding citizen”. An attempt at softening the vitriol and indifference exhibited toward folks locked up, it’s the author’s way of saying “See, they are people and they can change!”. Chain Gang has little interest in pursuing this narrative and instead steers unflinchingly into the less soothing truth that it doesn’t matter if people can be redeemed if they’re not treated like human beings currently. On pg. 4, it’s established that Thurwar uses her full government name as opposed to a stage name to remind people of her personhood, even when she thinks she doesn’t deserve such consideration.

We experience characters who work within CAPE’s appartatus or just enjoy the spoils of it and they all share one quality: voyeurism. It’s not enough to know these death matches are occuring, they have to watch them, buy tickets to see them in person, goad participants into interracting with them where they can. There are eyes on the CAPE at all times, most of which are elective. These gladiators are bonefide comic book characters for the majority of the people interacting with them which made their solitary moments feel like a reward. We’re introduced to Staxx as she’s coming out for her fight with Bear and she says one of the most vulnerable things disclosed about her in a rather pedestrian manner.

This is the plainest language we get out of Hamara, who for the majority of the novel masters doublespeak, she tows the line between saying everything, in the middle of what looks like nothing. Staxx comes alive in the BattleGround because she can’t kill if she didn’t feel alive, if she didn’t want to live. It’s this very understanding that later punctuates the mercy she shows Thurwar that leads to her (low) freedom. Staxx is at her best (or believes she is), in the BattleGround and it’s where she feels seen— to walk out would be to kill a part of her that allowed her to fight for salvation.

Love is her primary motivation and that’s evident until the very end, even if her beloved and deadly scythe weren’t aptly named LoveGuile. Every act, not matter how deadly, has love threaded through it.

And I suppose that’s what we’re to gather from most of the folks we interact with throughout this story. That in a needlessly cruel world begging to dispose of people, sometimes the only choice you’re allowed is whether or not to love. Agency restored in this liminal space where you get to decide how you feel and what it means even if the oppressive systems and their enablers don’t care about your feelings, or life.

In a better world, stories such as these would actually be fiction. In ours, it’s but an addendum to horrors currently being survived. Though I didn’t appreciate the lengthy footnotes and intellectual alleyoop, I understand why it exists—to see people. The people who are sequestered by the state to necrotize and hurt and suffer in the name of punishment, in the name of “justice”. Every minute Nana spent writing his novel, thousands of people were in chains, at the mercy of wardens, CO’s, cops, et. al and similarly, every second I spent reading his book and writing a review, they were still there and more of them are to come.

It sounds impossible but despite what the story entailed and how it ended, it never lost its humanity and the hope it occupies. A little light glimmered in the distance between every uncomfortable laugh in the audiences and weighted silence that made us believe they were actually getting how horrific this shit is. That light said “no one deserves this, seriously, no one.” and I nodded in agreement the entire way.

Chain Gang All-Stars is worth a read and more importantly, it’s worth further consideration. It charges us with the task of examining where we too are being voyeurs to harm, ask us to reject the whims of the oppressive systems that manufacture the circumstances for our known and unknown world. This isn’t the read you can have jovial conversations at the dinner party about necessarily, but it would do you well to lean into a friend, into someone you love and recommend they experience the tale for themselves.

Also you’re not losing it. If this appeared, disappeared and reappeared in your inbox that’s because I hit a button too quickly!

Time is a prison.

As more of it passes and in turn ages me, I feel assured of it. To be clear, the actual existence of time isn’t up for debate. It’s happening, this isn’t the new flat earth scheme. The purpose and means at which we track the passage of time is where the holding cell lies. Time is political, from the calendar we use (Gregorian named after the Pope who instituted the switch) to the length of the standard work day/week (shaped largely by militant labor organizing) or the existence of daylight savings time (and those who wish to abolish it), how we’re allowed to reconcile with time matters. We tend not to concern ourselves with it’s workings in the macro, our overlords don’t allow us such luxuries so instead, we expose our anxieties about time in the minutiae. The humdrum of our daily lives and who occupies that space with us.

When we partner and/or commune, time becomes infinitely more important than it had been previously. We yearn for more of it with our crushes, we hit snooze with gumption for that precious “five more minutes” in bed with our companion(s), opine with friends over the agonizing question of whether we’ll still love each other a decade from now. Time is a force we yield to the confines of whether we want to or not.

Accepting this challenges the way we cling to days, weeks, months and years that ultimately, pass independent of our need to notate it. Considering it this way makes the standard mm/dd/yy format emotionally obsolete for me. We exist within time because it’s always happening meaning there have to be better ways to punctuate what about it matters to us.

When relationships end we fixate on time with little difficulty, in fact, its the fulcrum of most post-breakup analysis and bereavement.

“I gave her 3 years of my life!”

“Can’t believe I’m getting divorced at forty, he got some of my best years.”

“Best friends since elementary school, now they’re like strangers.”

Capitalism is a greedy bitch. The more leisure time was encroached upon by the establishment, the more we began to hold the remaining time (and who it’s exchanged with), in a strangle. It’s the perfect outcome for capitalism. You make the people work more and more until they believe all time is money and thus introduce productivity and optimization metrics into their leisure time, further enforcing the demands of the system fucking them to begin with. Evil. Genius.

In turn, every year carries a toll like dogearing a book, it can only be smoothed over in hindsight when you can plainly see the damage done.

When asked how long we’d been together, I became more esoteric as I realized I didn’t think about the years often but rather, the times. I watched six years pass next to my ex and depending on the day it only took a fortnight or stuttered along like dog years; sometimes, I was unsure of how much time had passed because I only stored bits and pieces of it. These events and feelings that transpired in an attention seeking way, the easiest to remember. My responses grew more colorful over time.

“He’s gone from a novice to expert in chastity.”

“Innumerable amounts of kisses against walls because I’m too impatient to wait.”

“Tens of pounds of home cooked meals and desserts.”

It’s an acrid yet romantic way to describe 6 1⁄2 years. The edge of my twenties, the earliest of his thirties and countless hours reveling in that very fact. We had the kind of thing that shouldn’t have worked from the beginning, making every day together feel like an accomplishment in itself. One day you’re bouncing along the tightrope and the next, yearning for it as you grasp at air in a catastrophic descent. I couldn’t possible tell you what those years were independently, they existed in hoards scattered across the smudged map of Us.

Years One & Two were the Early Recovery1 days.

Years Three & Four were the Cautiously Optimistic2 days.

Years Five & Six were the Continuous Eulogizing3 days.

Phases, eras if you will that colored birthdays and anniversaries and health problems and the agitation of a shit day that got a little bit better because you like em funny with a constant supply of so bad, it’s good jokes.

For months I’ve longed to write about this, in true artiste (barf) fashion, I expected this ache, one that swells at night between cold sheets only to disappear at dawn’s turn, to motivate poetry out of me. A viral mini-docuseries exploring the science of heartbreak and its solutions. Hell, a trembling mixtape of me covering love songs would suffice. In my younger days, I could recall, dissect and interpret a breakup with the quickness of a computer. The gross and awkwardly large feelings would compel me to action with no extra provocation required. Be it the songs or poems or short stories, my reservoir of emotion demanded release in a way I could channel and shape. I hadn’t known my ability to do so wasn’t bottomless. So much for the perfect heartbreak essay.

My silence about the breakup and by proxy, relationship was solely informed by my inability to say much of anything. I couldn’t describe things I hadn’t felt before and much to my surprise, this breakup was more emotionally vast than most others for so many reasons that I couldn’t list.

For a long time all I could say was simply “I almost married him, we were almost married.”

I wanted to say more, I needed to say more but it became evident that I had limited control over whether that would happen. Once I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror while saying it, eyes too big, carrying the maternal inheritance that is my pout. My animated side profile reminded me of the funhouse mirrors that bounce and contort with movement and it perfectly encapsulated what I was going through.

The rococo language I used to deploy escaped me because for the first time, my feelings were more complicated than the words I had for them. It took me acknowledging this complexity to find words for it, however paltry compared to my usual musings.

“I still love him, probably always will a little.”

“So glad we didn’t live together, it would have made this a nightmare.”

“He was painfully shy about PDA which always tickled me considering how fucking kinky we were.”

“A technophobe in NetSec, I mean our relationship was one of the only reasons he had a smartphone. I refused to text without memes.”

“I loved cooking for us because I could make anything I wanted, he wasn’t a picky eater.”

“I carved a hole inside of me and built us a lush world to exist in together and now I don’t know how to destroy it.”

“I hated arguing with him because he’s nowhere near as mean as me when he’s angry like I was a cunt, he deserved it though!”

“A communist who could fix the wifi, build me things and was a phenomenal group sex partner, when is that coming around again?”

“This was supposed to be my first divorce, I’d be such a hot divorcee. *smacks teeth* Shame.”

I’ve realized over the last seven months that this breakup would serve as a reference for more than itself. Leaving my fiance didn’t change me but rather occurred sometime around other changes I hadn’t yet catalogued consciously. My reconciliation with major life events looks quieter because shouting into the ether isn’t very restorative for me anymore. Making my life look as messy as I felt wasn’t appealing because the mess I realized, was a beacon begging people to see what about it was messy so they’d tell me how to fix it. Fleabag’s confessional was more relatable than I could appreciate younger.

To intellectualize it for a second, one of the reasons I can move through loss this way is because I have no aspirations toward children and marrying for me is more of a pragmatic endeavor (and cheeky indulgence cause I genuinely believe I was born to divorce) than a romantic one. Long ago, I realized that self actualization as an adult revolves entirely around what (capitalism) and who (still capitalism plus cisheteropatriarchy) you own. An adulthood purposefully void of children and spouses who’d demand we live together (I don’t abide by single home cohabitation), is hard to build in a world intent on punishing us for it.

The plight of single adults is well documented, mostly because we complain about how unsustainable singlehood is long term, by design. Across the web you’ll find many a blog4 or forum offering a soapbox to discuss all the ways our lives get fucked because we’re the only taxable laborers the government can count on in our homes. The most troublesome ways singlism appears refuse to go away unless you’re the right kind of partnered (married) and/or have children.

The sociopolitical lack of tolerance for people who imagine a life void of the nuclear family, is in part one of the reasons people cling onto relationships5, it’s expensive when the government hates you. And if you’ve been single for any number of time then you know our mixed circles with married couples and parents, remind us how vacant they view our lives without “the things” so to speak. Breakups are further complicated by the fact that sometimes, it’s a reminder that your friend seem to only see you, like really see you, when you’re partnered. As if this person offers a character reference for the quarterly friendship review.

There’s a real piece in there about the insidiousness of relationship maintenance and formation in a world obsessed with the nuclear family and friends who can’t seem to see or care to repel its shortcomings. That’s not this piece. All I’ll offer is, support I tend to get from my married or parent friends post breakup is reliably the most present they’ll be until there’s someone else I can bring around. The rally in part serves them, the victors of love getting to bestow “wisdom” on the lowly gal who refuses to settle down before bringing home your tale as a cautionary bit of gossip to share with their spouse because when they married, it meant you were forced to forfeit real privacy.

Being the last one standing single means saying goodbye to depth in a large sum of your friendships and saying hello to a depressing amount of solo activities. The post split lonely tends to linger because there’s only you and the four walls shared history weighs down to watch you wallow. At some point, you just resign yourself to feeling it all alone, so I did.

I listened to the greatest breakup albums. I masturbated more. I started and stopped knitting again. I read and wrote and hated and loved it all. I missed him, god I missed him with a depth of feeling that felt like self-betrayal considering I delivered the death blow to our future together. I slept both too much and too little… often. I created despite, in spite maybe. The time passed and still, I moved with it.

It’s over. Our paths have diverged in ways that make sense even on days the lonely tries to convince me it was all a mistake. And as more time passes, I find myself grateful I spent the years that were rolling by anyway with someone who made it’s passing more rich. I’ve never been the kind to regret a relationship because it feels like rejecting all the things that make me want to track time at all. The memories and experiences and unforgettable nights and more importantly, the Nia who relished in them, moved through them with an indulgent spirit, doesn’t deserve my regret.

The version of me that catalogued all of this wasn’t misguided or foolish. She was alive, so devastatingly and beautifully alive trying to make sense of a life we can’t foresee perhaps so we live it as we were meant to.

However we choose to (or not to) track time, the tale goes as follows: we meet, I hate him (typical), we become friends, we date and love each other, we get engaged, a week after getting fired meaning a week and four days after my birthday, I let him go. A sentence worth 6 1⁄2 years, and however more I choose to say about it won’t change that. I finally think that’s a good thing.

He’d never be comfortable with me “feeding his biometrics” to the internet or whatever6 so this pic is the best I could do. He approved it lol.

I felt nearly overwhelmed with love this day and I’m better for it.

Some of my favorite films premiered under the Hays Codes1. I think about that more these days, in the midst of sociopolitical and self censure in the culture, I don’t fear but moreso know we’re living in analogous times. For years I’ve been the town crier, using every bit of bass in my voice to alert people that a moral sex panic was coming and that it’d be bad… really fucking bad. I’ve discussed the factors that produced this behavior a few times now: poverty, religiosity, whorephobia, a culture endeared to surveillance, younger generations raised by the internet who’ve yet to separate visibility from volume, the list goes on.

Whatever the reasons we choose to ascribe, there’s an attack on privacy and sexuality and public expressions of personhood. The efforts to enforce uniformity and pious behavior ranges across the spectrum from passive aggressive comments and public shaming to threats or acts of violence taken not to correct the behavior of the offender, but rather to show spectators they can (and oftentimes will) be next. In the colonial world, rejection of the cultural hegemony is more that an issue of likability, it’s an issue of freedom. We’re not taught to sit in the weight of that in society, it’s part of the reason we got here. Strategic messaging that relies on deep-seated biases in a world that never truly reconciled with its colonial, religiously occupied forefathers who hated sex because they hated themselves.

We see their playbook clearly today, Puritans of all varieties with scathing takes on society, one that in their aligned view is too permissive of the weird and perverse and hard to conform. For years I’ve been calling this the decency/deviancy binary.

The Decent: White (or light), thin, able-bodied, cishet, pious, child producing and capitalism loving

you can imagine what comprises of

The Deviant: Black (or brown), fat or “poorly shaped”, disabled (or unable to hide needs), areligious or the wrong kind of religious, seemingly sexually preoccupied and capitalism averse

There’s obviously movement between these two, this binary like most of them is incomplete and doesn’t speak to the totality of our existence and that’s the point. When we’re forced into the margins with this or that reasoning, a level of self denial is inherently built into the mechanism. The reason the Empire loves binaries is because it thrives on sacrifice, be it the way you can refer to partners at work or the kind of clothes you can wear to a restaurant. In the Empire, binaries serve as daily reminders that you always owe a sum and payment has to come at a cost to your personhood. It’s depressing as shit if we’re being honest.

Alas, we mustn’t despair, we grieve on the road. There are ways to combat a moral sex panic and its accompanying sex obsessed but repulsed culture. This guide has the steps I and many others should take to reclaim our personhood and combat harmful ideals for a society ill equipped to handle freedom.

Rejecting Modesty

When we look the same, it’s easier to trick us into believing we also think the same— in a moral sex panic, the people take up the mantle of regulating “anti-social” behavior, all the overlords do is build the framework. So, if you’ve been looking around, you see how the trends (and thus social priorities) have shifted to covet modesty (read: purity) again. The clean girl & corporate siren babes in their monochrome athleisure sets, slick backed hair and linen perfumes were a clear indicator of modest, almost utilitarian dress coming back into fashion. Modesty is being touted as purposeful and classy, the sensible way, which is exactly why you should reject it.

This isn’t to say you have to abandon your personal style for the sake of low necklines and backless dresses, but this is to say you shouldn’t introduce more modesty to your fashion diet because it eases the social pressure or the eyes on you. The issue of modesty is that it’s rarely sufficient, for the puritan, there’s always more you could be doing to be less noticeable which is the ultimate aim. Making you less identifiable means you're quickly subsumed into the dominant culture and its aspirations, they make you lose yourself before they disappear you altogether. Standing out challenges this, it forces people to sit in the discomfort of folks choosing to live as they were. Though change is inevitable, not all change is well intended.

Don’t let them dictate your dress, this isn’t a middle school hallway where you’re pulled to the side for pants too tight or shoulders too exposed. We’re grown fucking adults and the way that appears in our style is something we have to choose to embrace, even in the face of adversity.

Laugh at the Absurd

For the unforeseeable future, you need to laugh. a lot. Puritanism finds its legs when there’s something to be upset about, remember, they’re sex obsessed yet repulsed. It’s all they can think about or see and hear in the world around them and that promotes strong feelings of disgust and shame that instead of unpacking, they use to police the world. Whether religious or secular all Puritans share a cause: ridding the world of their personal temptations. Most contact you have with a Puritan will illuminate this quickly, the whole “every accusation is a confession” thing.

One of the many reasons they’ll make wild accusations and find sex everywhere is to prove their own preoccupation is the baseline, it’s an invitation to admit you find sex in as much as they do. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Whether it’s an animated series or updated logo for a brand, some joke stated in a podcast or the plot of a recent bestseller, you’re under no obligation to affirm this worldview.

They always say certain media couldn’t be made today because it would “get cancelled for not being woke”, we know that’s not true. In reality, some of our most beloved media couldn’t be reproduced today because puritans have hyper sexualized it. I think about something like the PowerPuff Girls, literal test tube babies with a recurring enemy such as Him. A flamboyant, feminine presenting demon who calls himself The King of Darkness; today the streets would blow their top over Him.

So much of their power comes from the unsuspecting engaging in their logic in attempts to disprove it. That’s not how this shit works though. The second you step into the ring so to speak with them, they’ve already won. You’re engaging with their convoluted baseline which inherently legitimizes it as a real and valid concern, which it isn’t! The best course of action is to ignore it, make them explain, justify and stew in the nonsense by themselves. Attention is currency in culture wars, which is what this is, to be clear.

If you like me have a Grade A RBF, slow blinks and a side eye are enough, but if you really want to bring it home simply say “I don’t think well adjusted people worry about these sorta things.”, toss a laugh on the end for some extra punch. If they don’t cower away from the convo (which in my experience, they usually do), they’ll get bored at the lack of engagement and keep it pushing, mumbling the good word under their breaths.

The biggest threat to expression and freedom is an equalized audience. It’s the reason debate content is more harmful than good, platforming violent, extremist or weirdo logic signals that it’s worth considering to the folks witnessing the conversation. You gotta suck the oxygen out to subdue the flames, the oxygen in question is attention. Essentially, tap into your mean girl (non gender specific) energy, laugh in their face, flip the hair and sashay away.

Retire Self Censure

This may very well be the hardest task and its applicable to all systems seeking to dispossess you. When you hear people say “you need to kill the cop in your head”, they’re referring to preemptive policing, it’s deeply connected to the history of people complying in advance. We live in a very punitive society, one that for the commoner, consequences can be plenty; and that society relies on us doing the bulk of the work to regulate our actions and words and beliefs as much as our appearance.

However unfortunate it is, we’re prone to reproduce the circumstances most innate to us and those circumstances are full of policing. The rise in call out content and digital vigilantism (what the kids call cancel culture), is proof of this fact.

The fear of being caught committing a social faux pas is higher than ever because our digital lives have more merit than they ever have. The wrong statement or retweet or TikTok could be the difference between a normal night and being doxxed. The effects of this perversion of accountability is a bit like a boomerang, we often will do the work first to avoid having to do so in public. That’s not inherently bad, discernment is good. Knowing some things really are inside thoughts, are good. The concern is knowing what’s worth censoring and that’s much more prone to suggestion from the zeitgeist than other things.

I can think of no greater example than language used online to avoid perceived censorship. To be clear, censorship exists and is reliant on the values of the entity allowing public communication, but it’s less than people would imagine. They may manipulate an algorithm or suppress videos about incensing topics but they only have to do it sometimes, the succeeding adjustments from the population are entirely self promoted and voluntary.

Take TikTok for instance. An app where people in an attempt to avoid platform suppression, have taken to using code words to discuss sensitive topics. Suicide is unalive themselves. A gun is a pew pew. Rape is grape or SA (short for sexual assault). Pedophilia is PDF File. The list goes on if you could believe it, and the most damning thing about it is how readily people introduced it into their personal lexicon off the internet. This is the ambition of pro surveillance and censorship culture, they can step out of the room because you’ve continued the work all on your own.

The most effective way to combat censorship is to STOP COMPLYING. Our brains love patterns and are bias to continue them where it can get away with it to preserve brain power for other things. It’s time to manually input what language you use and where. Discernment is key, no ones saying you call your boss a cunt in the next department meeting (even though they may deserve it). All you have to do is choose, actively as often as you can to just speak plainly, to leak the power out of these alternatives; algorithmic bias is real but it’s also frequently changing. It’s all about efficiency meaning once a task is complete, they move on to the next thing and personally, I think the language of sex isn’t being tracked as much as it was. Once you’re in the middle of the panic, oversight gets more hands-off because as I’ve stated multiple times in this piece, we. are. the. police.

The only way to subvert that is to stop policing language they’ve deemed too crude or vulgar. If there’s anything you should know about puritans, it’s that they’ll always find new words to harp over, more skin to lament about, extra trends to lambast. You can’t win with them so you might as well stop speaking their language.

Marry the Taboo

This may be the most important step, and also, the most daunting. It’s not enough to regulate what is mainstream and keep further barriers to visibility if one doesn’t adhere to the dominant culture, it’s about stomping out any opposition not already cowering in fear. It’s why we’ve seen so many attacks on things such as Drag Brunches and read alongs, the smear campaigns serve as a warning: the perverted and degenerate should be invisible. If we’re thinking about this more critically, we’d recognize the goal isn’t to annihilate all “anti-social” life but rather keep it small and contained to the shadows so there’s less risk moral crusaders own activities will come into question. The more people do a thing, the easier it is to be caught doing a thing.

I think frequently about Madison Cawthorn, the conservative former representative of North Carolina’s 11th district who went on a podcast and stated this

“The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington … being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70 – [you] look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics. … Then all of a sudden you get invited – ‘We’re going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.’ … What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. … Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it’s like, this is wild.”2

These accusations are ultimately what led to the end of his political career on the Hill.

Whether or not it’s credible, I couldn’t say for sure as a civilian. As a sex worker who’s worked across the country from NYC to SEA with friends (and clients) in high places… I’d say it wasn’t a lie. They’re hypocrites, but they're strategic ones. The plan is simple and highly effective:

1. Exploit manufactured austerity and poverty

2. Offer up a scapegoat

3. Decry about the lack of moral aptitude of said group

4. Alienate the population from public life

5. Engage with and/or abuse said population in private

The formula is the same for everything that falls under the control of the ruling class. It’s very much a “right for me, not for thee” scenario with violent ends.

It surprises people how much of the social contract relies on shame and embarrassment. Humans are pro-social creatures, we’re hardwired to seek and maintain communities and that attribute is hungrily exploited by our moralistic overlords. Few people are okay being the undesirable in every room, some of us don’t have a choice (hi fellow disabled, queers and whores!) but most do and you should choose the weird, every single time.

Half the work of policing the taboo is making it seem otherworldly and sinister so people don’t even bother getting curious about what they’ve been told to condemn. Demystifying the taboo can only come from embracing the taboo. Whether it’s attending a Drag Brunch and posting it on your socials or taking an introductory shibari class and raving about it to your community, seek out what’s under fire and do so gleefully.

The dark night is scary because it’s hard to identify the unknown so pull that bitch into the light! They can’t fear monger what’s seen and easily knowable. And it’s important for people adjacent to the target of the panic to continue to engage with people, and make it seem as normal as it is.

All Roads Lead to Sluts

Pejorative's are used liberally. For some years now, the terms “slut”, “whore”, “queer” “hoe” etc. have been dulled in their violence. Their etymology is the same as most insults, a means of signifying when the wrong kind of person is around. As people began ironically using these terms, they lost a bit of currency. The power of such insults have never been felt uniformly, historically, those of us who these terms were originated to denigrate didn’t see a decrease in vitriol but rather found ourselves stuck in a crowd of half steppers. People who could take these terms and blanket themselves with it like a cape.

Makeout with the same sex tipsy at a party? Queer

Have too many hookups sophomore year of college? Slut

Openly discuss your love for anal? Whore

The Scarlet Letter meant to cast you into permanent social exile and shame, except the streets started to gamify it. There’s a larger conversation about how voyeuristic civilians and cishets are about cultures (and their accompanied struggles) they themselves aren’t apart of, but that’s for another day. All that needs to be stated now is that this isn’t the time to slink back from language that was gleefully co-opted, this is the time to put the foot to the gas.

The Puritans have won this round and thus, have sharpened the blade that is incendiary language. These pejoratives will no longer be for play/play, when people spew these words, you have to reasonably assume they mean it. In which case the best course of action is to just eat it. Different from racial epithets, accusations of sexual deviancy rely on continued participation of the accused. The longer you defend yourself agains the stain of “slut”, “whore”, “hoe”, “hussy”, the more you affirm there’s a group or people within a group that the language is appropriate to use on.

The more distance you attempt to create between the meaning of these words and yourself, the more you alienate the people who could never argue their way out of such a title. If like me you’re a literal whore, then there’s no bargaining to get away from the disdain and I don’t think that should be intention.

To be a good conspirator with folks trying to survive a time intent on class, race and social cleansing, you have to be willing to take some shit on the chin for the communities most impacted. Instead of arguing with the person who just called you a hoe, say “Okay.” and go about your business. You’re not required to engage with the why’s or what’s, they’re inconsequential and we’ve already established that in order to snuff out the social capital of hatred, you have to stop speaking its language.

If rejecting modesty, laughing at the absurd, patronizing the taboo and refusing self-censure makes you a slut, then be the slut! You’ve likely been calling yourself one playfully for years, might as well live up to the title.

In Sum

We’re in for a long road ahead. I’ve stated publicly given the current sociopolitical climate that it’s not giving 1930’s as some have suggested, but rather, the 1890’s. The Gilded Age where the world felt like it was on the precipice of something, and that something included a shit ton of strife.

I think back to those old films I love. Notorious (46’) where Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman found a way to produce passion in longing pecks due to 3 second kiss limit rules under the Hay’s Codes.

I recall Virni Lisi busting out of a cake wearing only a whipped cream bikini in How to Murder Your Wife (65’)

Or Some Like It Hot! (59’) when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dressed in drag and were flirted with by men on camera.

In the face of suppression, surveillance and censorship, we, those of us who care, tend to find a way to rebel. To cause an uproar and laugh at outrage. To assert our presence, whether it’s celebrated or not.

Sex is so deeply rooted in my life. It’s been my companion in ways I find difficult to put to words, in full transparency I genuinely think I was born for sex; my relationship to it, the capital it’s produced for me over the years, the education I provide using it as a vehicle for conversation and my fervent belief that sex could shepherd in the revolution. Sex host the best and worst parts of me. I’m afforded full personhood when that’s understood and respected.

In times of great upheaval, sex is among the first things attacked. The need to control the masses starts in the bedroom oftentimes but the goal is never to end there, there’s always someone or something up next on the chopping block. If we let the puritans cleanse society of sex, then we’re consenting to the loss of culture and diversity and actual human life.

No one cares already when a whore goes missing, what do you think will happen when it’s decided anyone can be disappeared as long as you “prove” they’re a whore as well? It’s bigger than social media deplatforming and doxxing campaigns, it’s bigger than banning Drag Brunches and creating further barriers to gender affirming care. It’s bigger than attempts to abolish porn and thus those of us who make our income producing it.

It’s about trying to rewrite the terms for a dignified life and we can’t let that slide. At the same time discretion and privacy leaked from the culture, paranoia and shame rose in it. This is the panopticon and sex is the watchtower’s first target, rejecting that could very well be the keys to free ourselves we’ve been looking for.

In the spirit of fucking for the revolution, I’m resharing a pleasure resolution page I made years ago, you can print it out and fill it in or just use it for reference for some creation of your own. On it are some ideas to get you started and as always,

Stay thoughty. Stay Thotty.

Until next time.

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The door slammed shut behind me with finality.

In this room, the one frequently changing shape across continental and international borders, were serious people. Some had aging totes and quippy pins displayed on jackets, others had ball caps and worn books tucked into the back pocket of jeans— they all were immediately suspicious of me. I likened it to a shark tank, where its occupants swam rigorously, just waiting for a shot to draw blood. Their voices competing for authority, hands gesturing wildly with a glee that felt inappropriate for the subject matter being discussed. They were searching for something, signifiers. A way to disseminate roles and aims; find out who’s an ally or foe, if such a thing exists, and in these rooms, the preferred way to answer that question is to ask,

“So what are you, like a Marxist-Leninist? Or, Mao? You give a Maoist vibe. Maybe Anarcho-Communist? You seem like you get excited by destruction.”

This interrogation offered with a smile was not innocuous. Even when I couldn’t understand what the measure was or why it mattered so much, I knew it existed, knew I was auditioning for something.

When I began answering these questions, I couldn’t even adequately define these affiliations. It was like speaking a different language. Amongst these people, politics felt larger than life. Some obscure entity that only the brightest minds could interact with in earnest; a lifetime spent coordinating survival in the ghetto didn’t inspire much confidence here.

My introduction to a moving politic, what I’ve since come to know as a praxis, was fighting to survive. The benevolence of fellow poors carried me into adulthood and those actions rarely came with a thesis explaining why they felt endeared to helping others. It was largely left undefined, those efforts seemed to be of little consequence without an accompanying label here.

“I’d say I’m a…”

Bullshitter.

Long before I felt comfortable with my answers, I learned to assert them well. I sat in a basement in Portland once having to prove my fealty to the cause with text I found too dense and ill equipped for contemporary times. The performance of it all felt like drag; the same way having to appear worldly enough to exchange money but classy enough not to beg for it did when I interacted with clients. An aloofness to one’s worldview and how they navigated it, was its own currency. The act I could only drop with the undesirables who faked it alongside me. The whores, the addicts, the homeless, the bereft— those of us in communities these spaces turned into a thought exercise one Thursday a month.

Theory wasn’t something I picked up out of a natural curiosity but rather, I felt compelled to. Admittance to these spaces, the ones that posture concern for the revolution wasn’t the only task, there’s continued performance. One less about attendance and more about active, widely seen cerebral participation valorizing these texts and their authors. It wasn’t enough to assert a belief in the same things, the origins mattered— what sage ole wise one gifted you with this clarity.

For me, it was none of them.

I’m longwinded, have been every day since I acquired the skills required to talk you down or make your eyes blur from sentences that never cease to exist. At the dinner table, consenting to a story from me means going on an adventure, one that could take hours (it seems) to get to. A childhood friend’s mother called me motormouth when she thought I wasn’t around; I heard her, I just didn’t have the sense to find it insulting. You’d think this quality would bode well in intellectually curious spaces, it would. I just wasn’t in them.

These basements and coffee shops and booked meeting rooms weren’t about curiosity or a fervor for change. It was the gladiator pit. The prime location to flex or fail at posturing well enough. I’d find a corner or wall and just watch. There’d usually be an agenda, topics we expected to discuss and somewhere around 1/4 through our allotted time, the real show would start. There’d be a “call in” or a current event that incensed someone and the commentary on that was never singular, everyone had to get a word in. Oftentimes by the end, I found it difficult to track what even caused the conversation to begin with, it rarely seemed to matter. Despite being married to words my entire life, I grew tired of them quickly in this space.

The more dire the circumstances of my life became, the heavier my tongue appeared. Words meant to appease would curdle in my throat and come out sour and dispassionate. What I believed to be true wasn’t faltering but rather my willingness to contort these views into conversations about materialism and Trotskyism was. The terms felt vulgar compared to the language of well… life. The one I was surviving long before I forced my way through Das Kapital. The existence it felt like we were avoiding confronting, by talking about it all. the. fucking. time.

I was tired of acting like I believed everyone in these leftist spaces had a personal investment in world building that required more of them than commentary. And as I distanced myself from the Matadors waving colored flags to distract from the fact that we indeed could and should be doing things right now, I remembered these spaces didn’t gift me my politic. I was born with it.

I was raised in a home, however unstable, that contended with Black radical thought every Sunday, where my mother picked a book from her shelf and made us read; an hour minimum with a report expected by the end of the month. I’d read Sula, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Negroes With Guns and Beloved before graduating middle school. The awareness of my positionality within oppressive systems came from quickly whispered words as police stopped my siblings and I on the way to the store or coming from the field where my brother played soccer with friends. Tense questions, hands rested comfortably on state issued firearms, the intimate knowledge of a pat down for daring to exist with this skin, in this poverty, in this country. A slimy comment from men that had to know how young I was crossing the street, fingers gripping my mother’s favorite switchblade, the one her father gifted her when she was a little older than I’d been.

My childhood was marred with strife and the stains of institutional violence interspersed with kindness and the generosity of those around me being bled out as well. I spent Sunday mornings in the second pew of my grandmothers church, weighing the fear of a jealous, righteous God against the care shown by the ushers escorting me to the bathroom. The caramels and strawberry candy offered to me with a smile by women who only knew me as Ella’s granddaughter, the affiliation enough to care for me as their own. There are people I’ll likely never see free again, cast hundreds of miles away from their home with prison sentences inconceivable to most unacquainted with the finality of a carceral state; I relish in the texture of the pen indents on the letters we’re able to offer each other instead.

Everyday we’re confronted with a world that requires we announce ourselves (hello surveillance state) and our intentions. I refuse to allow my politic to be victim to this any longer. My most specific affiliations don’t matter, the words I find too tight and confined for all I wish to come to past never belonged to me, and I’m exhausted of trying to make them fit. I have no intrinsic issue with leftist spaces, despite how this piece began, they’re not especially unique in their problems. Rather I’ve decided to live the solution to them as opposed to proclaim the solution. The Matadors only matter to those entertained by them, or those forced to conspire with them.

I’ve learned from moving through the world that no amount of good doing will prevent me, us really, from being walking contradictions. Casting an identity around terms meant to synthesize conversations (we should be curious about how Capitalism informs our need for such identifiers as well) won’t prevent this outcome. I always felt like a bad [insert -ist label] because the theory foundational to it had animated into its own beast, a regulatory force that felt easy to accidentally forsake, causing me to veer away from the people and toward, the theoretical. I’d be wrong to postulate this as truth for us all, and in a world married to identity markers meant to disenfranchise, I can engage with why it’s appealing to have a choice in identifying as something for once. I just fear we’ve strayed too far.

Regardless of where you fall on a vast spectrum of thought, we can all agree that even its most milquetoast presentations sit on the fringes of society, currently. In the US, thinking your ability to go hungry in the richest country in the world is abhorrent is radical, hating homelessness more than you hate the homeless is radical, finding the existence of medical debt ghoulish is radical. You’re playing with a rigged deck already and learning how to run a successful game isn’t going to come from books, it’ll come from doing, with as many people as possible.

Since 2010 when I as a youth began working in Abortion Care and Sex Education, the phrase: meet people where they’re at, has been impressed into my brain. After some time you come to realize the people are at their desperation, their hunger, their inability to keep the heat on all winter. Politics are the supplies available to pack a bullet wound because we’ve already been shot—to be clear. Us commoners get to choose how much pressure to apply because ultimately, it is us with our hands bloody, trying desperately to keep each other alive. That space doesn’t stop to ask questions about which theorist got it more right.

These days, I’m strategic with how I consolidate my worldview into words. I made peace with who I, who a lot of disenfranchised people are, which is at our core, self preservationist. The altruism of my motives can’t be separated from my own desperation, the festering beast that’s angry and selfish and just wants to make it however I can. If I have to name my politic in one sentence for the rest of my life I’ve settled for this:

I’m an enthusiastic conspirator in helping people survive the Empire that requires their death and labor to persist.

All my motivations and actions and risks taken can be distilled to that fact. My politic isn’t righteous, these are just the methods I feel will most likely achieve the outcome I’m seeking. I reckon it’s more relatable too. Intrinsically, I know the Empire (all the isms) need us more than we need them. They know it too, it’s why they’ve weakened us at every turn. It’s why they make us crawl through glass to lick the back of the spoon, too worn out to feel anything but gratitude for making it there. The ritualistic cruelty, the mind games and witch-hunts are all there to obfuscate their vulnerability. An irrefutable fact that theory didn’t awaken you to: there’s power in numbers and the same numbers maintaining your struggle could liberate you from it. I’d spent so long agonizing over my inherent lack, the fact that hard as I try, I couldn’t endear myself to theory. It feels silly in hindsight considering how much I’ve done out in the world for people, with people, since allowing myself not to read it.

I always say: education may not be free, but curiosity is.

And my curiosity has promoted me to great lengths in pursuit of answers. I know the answers to my deepest questions cannot be answered within this world as it appears now, it’s too sick to do so. The spirit propelling me forward is one excited to assuage these inquiries so I can move on to better ones, more lighthearted and playful ones. I get my hands dirty and shake shoulders and yell at my fellow man to stay up so I can finally see what’s on the other side of these sentences.

One day, I plan to sit down and review my scrawls asking Can I build a life not preoccupied with survival? Do I get to center joy there? Will it mean I can stop feeling guilty for not doing more now to see that life? How long did it take for all the fuckery leading here to feel worth it? Is death in the better world more peaceful? Did my loved ones make it there?

The queries are remarkably human and likely, unable to be answered by just one of us. That’s why this work requires collaboration I imagine, because though I can ask the questions in solitude, their accompanying answers can’t be actualized outside of community. Historically, in my life at least, party lines and affiliations were not the most reliable measure for finding my co-conspirators. There’s wisdom in that, if we probe a little bit.

I’m estranged from my brothers. There’s too much history, not enough care for each other’s wounds and an awkwardness inherent to knowing something is wrong, but feeling tired of overextending myself to fix it. Despite that, we occupy each other’s memories and thus, souls tangentially. Occasionally, I’ll be hit by a wave of nostalgia that feels so pointed I’m convinced one of them sent it to me.

On a particularly weepy day, I sat for hours remembering afternoons spent looking out the window of our living room. The 21st floor offering a beautiful view of all of our haunts, our communities. A little while later, I received a text on my work phone. There was no message attached, just three pictures of the view from the window that had been haunting me. I later found out through my mother that my oldest brother had gone back to our old project, he knocked on the door and asked the family currently living there who didn’t know us from a hole in the wall if he could see that view one more time and take some pictures. They didn’t speak much English but he said they let him in, offered him a meal while he was there. He told my mother he thought I’d appreciate the photos, that good people live in the walls we fought and laughed and cried in.

He was right.

To be clear, no one expected me to, it’s just a thought I’ve had since the weekend after Thanksgiving when all corners of the internet turned to their audiences in order to lobby for a product or service or person. Like most of us whose livelihood in part relies on internet visibility and engagement, it certainly tempted me.

Try as I might, I can’t outrun consumerism. I’d say I’m more mindful than most, the last five years I've really surprised myself with the restraint shown when deciding on purchases. I attribute some of this not just to my evolving politic, but also my slow hobbies™️. I’ve discussed them briefly in the past but seeking out activities that try my patience hasn’t just made me a more patient, gentler person, but also less likely to make rash purchases and decisions. The first day I cooked a meal with items I’d harvested from my garden, I cried. I hadn’t realized how intense it would be to experience the fruits of my labor— to walk outside and one day see green and strong roots and juicy fruit and veggies that rewarded me for my patience and love. Or the first time I looked up and realized I’d knitted a scarf, an admittedly shitty one, but a scarf nonetheless. The first sips of my home-brewed wine, mead or beer always comforts me and I can confidently say slowing down has rewired my brain for the better.

So in that spirit, I don’t have gift ideas necessarily, but I do have life enrichment recommendations if you’re interested in those.

Let’s begin!

What do you read?

I’m asked frequently about my recommendations for books regarding various histories and movements that have shaped culture. That fills me with warmth; the question is intimate to me, I think there’s something very vulnerable, almost crass about people trusting you with their brain— for them to think you’re contribution to conversation is proof you have good fucking taste, and they want that as well.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that’s an honor that’s incomparable to most things I’ve done in my life so thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I have a hard time compiling things because taste can be so subjective so instead I’ve just placed exciting items from my TBR that run the gamut. Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of these and your thoughts!

The theme of 2025 for me is: Peopling.

If this year has taught me anything, it’s that we’re not in a loneliness epidemic but rather a crisis of connection, meaning the accessibility of people isn’t the problem, but rather the social contract degenerating. The internet has altered the world in ways we likely still don’t understand in totality but perhaps the worst for a pro-social species is an obsfucation of what it means to commune. As someone who’s done community organizing and mutual aid for decades almost, I’ve seen this apathy for the fellow person grow as we’re encouraged to enrich our online lives and communities.

The internet was supposed to be an accoutrement to our lives in meatspace, not a replacement and I think we’re finally seeing the consequences of that. As a society, we’ve forgotten how to people and my contributions to the world require a lot of peopling so that’s a skill I feel we should all sharpen up on, if we’re to survive fascist times. I’ve said it dozens of times but it bears repeating. No one’s coming to save us, the only people who can, are the people. We’d do well to remember that, so I’ve attached a little poster I put together about the 3 facets of communing and ways to promote them all.

Looking to 2025

The world feels restless right now. It usually does this time of year but in light of the last, honestly 18 months or so, it feels weighted. There’s a need for something to happen though folks have been hesitant (and/or afraid) of naming it. It would be a stretch to call myself a culture critic, but I have my finger on the pulse more often than not. People are simple in ways I find easy to clock and that translates to how the world at large functions.

I’m sure I’ll expand on some of these items as the year progresses but as it stands, this is what I see for 2025.

Rejecting Resolutions

Perhaps the worst thing about entering a new year is the mounting pressure to make (almost always impossible) goals for ourselves. Personally, I gave up on resolutions about 5 years ago when I realized they promoted me to do nothing aside from punish myself when I didn't adhere to the timeline I set. At this point in my life, I’ve found it easier to enrich what I’m already interested in than spawn masochistic habits or routines from scratch. My personal ethos really hinges on me having a very seeking personality, I’m just someone constantly looking for things or people or experiences. And the way I deal with “resolutions” now is the best way to honor that.

This is part of the plan for 2025.

A Parting Word

2024 has been a very trying year for me, personally. It’s been harder not to catastrophize than usual and I’ve been giving myself grace for the slip-ups. I’ve attempted to sit down and write a piece recapping the year both sociopolitically and personally but have fallen short. Time has never felt more fluid. I mean it sent me on a spiral this week realizing Bridgerton Season 3 came out this Spring/Summer— I genuinely thought that took place well over a year ago!

I’ve spent the better part of my life deathly afraid of being left behind, of staggering my way through the world in a way too prosaic to care about. I have no dreams of being a star, to be clear, but I’ve longed for personal champions. People who see me in totality and support my wins, however they may come and comfort my losses to the best of their abilities. This community has provided a lot of that this year. I’ve been mulling over the history of my online presence frequently with the pending TikTok ban and had a “holy shit, you’ve been on the internet for almost 20 years and this is the first time you feel in it” moment.

I don’t find it embarrassing to say I have hopes and dreams for myself, some of which revolve around public life. Being a writer is all I’ve ever wanted; since I was a child I was assured through some divine force that my words would be my legacy, and finally feeling like I have an audience for them— means unspeakable things to me.

As we transcend into the New Year and all it’s fuck shit, I just hope you know how much your support matters to me. This week, That Deep hit 1,000 subscribers. The number feels inconceivable in a lot of ways but is so impactful for me. If the internet went away tomorrow, your relationship with me and my words would be unforgettable and one of my greatest achievements in this world, truly.

I don’t discuss this ever, but I’m in an ATR (African Traditional Religion). One of our core beliefs is in animism, the idea that all beings have a soul, interconnected by nature and divinity. It’s something I wholeheartedly believe yet sometimes struggle to reconcile with my own soul, there are days I feel void of one— it’s this publication, and TikTok community and beautifully complicated relationships in my life that remind me I do.

May the rest of 2024 greet you with ease. We’ll commune in the new year.

Așe

The footnotes of the piece can be checked for further clarity but ahead of your reading just know the capitalization of the “D” in Death is an intentional choice and hopefully the logic is made apparent by the end of the essay. Grief is something I’m intimately acquainted with and find great comfort in, it was cathartic finding a way to synthesize why as well as make an argument for more of it in this piece. It’s one I sincerely hope you enjoy.

“Who did the body?”

is the first question they’ll ask after (or if they’re particularly uncouth), during my funeral. Such a thought wouldn’t be special. It’s present at every funeral and repass I’ve ever attended. Though it seems unique to Blackness, it will not be unique to my life. This question’s been asked ad nauseam and still, the answer rarely satisfies. The circumstances of death may not be predictable but the proceeding rites will be. A hug, somehow flaccid yet overwhelmingly stiff. Measured condolences that spill from lips that only mean it some of the time, and finally, the cursory glance into the casket, no more than 5 seconds required to assess the state of my death. Inevitably, things will be wrong: my face will be too pigmented or caked up, the hair incongruent with my usual styles and the clothes too put together for me to ever wear in earnest alive.

In a mess of wood and satin, sickly sweet fragrances and a mist of antiseptic, the body will be displayed with the grace of a holiday roast, made for critical consumption. My choice to be cremated is an inspired one.

The funeral has always intrigued me—this performance of recognizing an immutable facet of life, one’s eventual death, felt needlessly complicated and often times, foreboding; an aneurysm or stroke or rogue bus mowing me down capping off my final days was never inconceivable. For every moment I’m grateful for being alive, I’m reminded this could be my last thought. I find myself pondering whether it’s this knowledge that makes me grateful in the first place. The answer to that question remains unknown.

The human relationship to death is further complicated by our incessant need to control our outcomes, of the billions of living species on planet Earth, we’ve been historically discontent with letting that existence occur unfettered. Understanding that mars my own relationship with the process. The few times I’ve thought I was about to die, I felt a crippling fear wash over me, not about my pending death but rather, what would be done to my body, how the capacity to cope by my loved ones will ultimately decide how faithful they are to my wishes. Control, functioning like a straitjacket on both ends; death will come for me, whether I had plans to go or not and when I do, the remnants of my existence will be left solely to the living. There’s something painful about it, desperately seeking dominion over the only thing we cannot.

We1 have bastardized the natural order, looking for any loopholes available to circumvent the finality of loss. I’ve observed the lengths folks will go to delay the permanence of death; though it can’t be cheated literally, we will die trying.

There’s entire industries around it.

On its face, it seems like another consequences of Capitalism and the contemporary world’s (namely the Global North) obsession with consumption, the marriage between who you are and what you own. That would be a fair interpretation but as I age and greet death continuously in various ways, I’ve adopted a more sympathetic glance at the activity. Through extending the “life” of our dead, we allow ourselves to be more intimately involved in the process at large. Capital D “Death”2 is outside of our purview in many ways, though death can (and often is) manufactured, it doesn’t require a hand to occur. It’s inevitable and that inevitability in cultures sitting atop years of hubris that say if you can’t make it happen, it’s because you didn’t want it enough, have really set us up for these oddities.

Under the colonial shadow cast upon society, it’s unfathomable to think we would end up any other way. We’ve been handed a script that says what is natural, is inherently conquerable. The root of such sentiments are the reason we even have atrocities to learn then unlearn then repeat then reject in the first place. Flags are flown in outer space as we turn toward space exploration (read: colonization) because the globe isn’t big enough for our species ambitions and subsequently, our greatest fears.

We yearn to immortalize our dead and in turn, pry open their caskets and force their ascension from the grave. In attempts to delay what is natural and honestly, beautiful, we become artificial. It’s a pathetic and wholly understandable response. And as technology continues to anamorphize, the implications of our neuroses grow. It’s not enough to listen to your loved one pressed in a vinyl, no, they need to be suspended in the Milky Way. To a place they could never really die, and if they do, it’ll be well out of your view so they might as well be living.

If you’re being especially selfish, you could use AI to manufacture their memory book, accompanied by their biography, photos and quotes. It’ll burn through obscene amount of water and extend a woefully unethical technology’s capabilities but at least you were able to synthesize grandma’s life in an hour or less. Forgoing archiving the deceased yourself (a loving, important act of grief), for the convenience of a machine.

Ironically, technology though meant to increase our proximity to the dead, alienates us from Death. What do we call it, when we use the alien to cope with the human?

The greater tragedy perhaps is the tools we’ve built are as impermanent as we are. The records scratch and weather and someday, cannot be played. The file of your digital memory book will corrupt, your external hard drive will be rendered obsolete and thus, useless to you. The tree erected with your ashes will not persist forever but rather, age as we do, and return to the earth once more.

By refusing to confront the sum of Death’s nature, we replicate it. You’ll die one day, and objects meant to preserve you will succumb as well—we’ve architected our death in perpetuity.

“How do you want to die?”

Since childhood, I’ve been confronting these questions; my naturally stoic grieving process made me a desirable pew mate as the organ played and eyes drifted between the body, to the pastor, to the bereaved, back to the body. The choreography was instinctive, stunning in a haunting way. It’s proof of how equalizing Death is, how no man or belief system has found a way to cheat it, and if they have, it’s been kept under wraps. A sob reverbs under the pastor’s tempered tone and we all fight not to follow the sound of anguish, rather allowing it to travel across the room at its own speed, cocooning those who need it, wisping past the rest.

It’s that unmistakable keen native to mourning, a sound that tells you someone has died, if you were doubtful. The language that needs no translation. A certain agony unique to reconciling with mortality takes home in us all, at least once or twice. Words turned over and over again as we spend our mortal life coping with other’s deaths.

We even attempt to find its analogous counterparts in our language.

Le Petit Mort, the little death. How the French chose to assert the orgasm sits curiously in this space. The Little Death, much like the big one, favors us all; can indiscriminately alter the course of everything. Orgasms. Death. Steal us of our senses with no expectation of gratitude for it. A nosedive into the inevitable with mystery shrouding what will greet us after.

I’d imagine the French decided upon this because they too felt awfully mortal in the throes of pleasure. Wistfully hoped the orgasm was a mirror of something more daunting than itself. Orgasms are great, the combination of desire and awe and the sweet pains of being corporeal hold intrinsic relief and who wouldn’t want death to feel like that? Airy and bright with little bites of electricity in between. Sometimes an orgasm will rip through me so violently that I’m able to recall we really are just blocks of atoms rubbing furiously together— simple creatures taking delight in that liminal space.

I suppose there’s comfort built within the comparison as well. If we’ve kissed Le Petit Mort, then maybe Le Grande Mort can’t be so bad.

For a long time on this planet, we democratized these contradictions and expected that all could hold them appropriately. We insisted on our right to grieve endlessly and stayed close to the processes and rites required to honor our dead as well as confront them. The most immediate loved ones would be supported by the community, the wise and willing would prepare the body for transmutation, whether that be via pyre or water or soil. We’d lock arms and make earnest wishes aloud as we requested safe travels for souls. We sang and danced and cried, oh we cried, together, always together. The behavior was compulsory, because it was an assertion of humanity.

Today, we’re bombarded with death. It’s broadcast widely through our devices (the radio, the news, social media etc.) yet we’ve never been so far removed from it. The older I get, the more people I meet, it’s becoming less commonplace for folks to have ever interacted with the dead in earnest. Thousands of years of us knowing Death intimately, only for a physical relationship with the dead to become a minoritized experience. Outside of my community, I don’t meet many people who’ve seen dead bodies in real life, much less touched them, hugged tightening and cold skin for the last time. We’re a dying breed (pun, unintended).

Technology, automation, their marriage has not only produced more death, but tucked it away. Subverted long held precedent to sanitize our relationship to aging, to our inevitable passing. Instead of congratulating our elders for approaching the end of a long journey, we admonish them for discussing it; it was decided at some point that interacting with Death in its totality was more gauche then creating as much distance from it as you can.

Every facet of life is penetrated by anxiety about the natural failing us, prompting the gleeful rejection of its complements. This abandonment produced the circumstances required not just for mass death, but for the apathy attached to it.

This week I read Who Can You Kill? by Lolo, it’s a meditation on necropolitics3 essentially, the recent streak of vigilantism (be it the white domestic terror or class variety) front and center in its message. The question of who’s worthy of life or meant for dishonorable death only occurs in societies that require Death be dishonored at all. And I’d argue all death adopts a degree of dishonorability the second it becomes the purview or work of a selective few. When we all touched Death, its sanctity was easier to maintain—since its outsourcing, its become the playground of the cruel and unjust as opposed to the commonfolk, as it was intended to be. As we’d done for most of human history.

We produce the dead, then ignore death, only to be troubled by the lapse in memory this mechanism causes. We immortalize our dead in the language, in the music, in the tech, in fucking space because memory has been made deficient. The hugs and phone conversations and weirdly illuminating arguments meant nothing if there ceased to be tangible proof of our shared existence. We’re suffering from a memory loss prescribed by the very tools we use to treat it. The relief of knowing something, not someone (an important distinction, I assure you) is cataloguing our legacies, make us careless about their preservation within us. The perfect circumstances for this mortality atrophy that extends the impact of grief due to its refusal to engage with its origins.

Grief is power because it’s crafted by love’s memory. It reminds me of Sethe in Beloved, suspended in a mourning that served to remind her she’d lost something precious, that grief ultimately, is a gift.

“Something that is loved is never lost.”

Our capacity to love and thus honor each other, is cauterized when we attempt to circumvent why loving matters. If grief is an extension of love, then love is a precursor to death—proof that what makes life precious, worth loving even, is its impermanence, and all we are capable of doing before Death consumes us. The reason it’s easy to make death the business of the inhuman (whether it be a drone strike, an automatic denial via software or algorithm trained to view certain bodies as valuable exclusively in death) is because we’ve abandoned humanity, we’ve abandoned loving.

And this dereliction is costly, not just on the planet but on our souls. Life cannot be lived or experienced to its fullest extent in a world intent on disseminating it from the light that makes the path visible. If we’re to concede that we’re above Death and its gravity, then we’re stating we’re above life, in all its glory and awkwardness and wonder. Turning our back to the funeral pyre doesn’t stop the flames but rather ensure if they spread too far and wide, we’ll be unaware and consumed in its blaze. I want us to become reacquainted with Death so that we can decrease its frequency. So the funerals we go to are not the descendants of poverty and austerity and terror but rather the natural (read: unmanufactured) and sensible end to a robust story and life.

Despite our best efforts, the preservation of people, memory itself, didn’t come with cogent instructions. Much like crawling and crying and blinking we simply do the thing now and find out what it was later—vocabulary isn’t what affords us our humanity, being human does, and what it means to be human is a inquiry that seems to only be answered at the end of our lives.

When my grandfather died, my mother refused to leave his bedside. Though it’s been decades since, she has a perfect recall of that day, of the process she watched hospital staff take after he took his last breath before wheeling his body to the morgue. Whenever we discuss it, she marvels on how sensible it all is, how crystalizing it was to see that he didn’t need those things anymore. She was one of two family members who touched him postmortem. The finality of his death made unavoidable by that very action.

Before his funeral, my uncle shaved Pappy (my grandfather), one last time. He said it was his way of giving back to his father, taking a skill he’d learned from him and using it to help him appear as he’d have liked. It’s the most pronounced example of the power of working with Death, with grief, not against it. A give and take that wasn’t passed on with the intent on this outcome but made sweeter because of it. The love of his third son was apparent on the day of his funeral, it could not be escaped and that may be the best outcome we could ever hope for, and the only one worth aspiring to.

This episode was so fun to record, I got to talk to my friend and comrade and fellow creator, Dana (@TaeHungz on TikTok) about all things liberation astrology and what our knowledge of it can do to prepare us for taking steps toward freedom now and in the future.

Apologies for the volume, even with edits, we get rowdy an awful lot— it’s the New Yorker in us, we couldn’t help it.

If you enjoy the episode make sure to let us know on our socials (@ShakingSheets & @TaeHungz in most places) and subscribe to Dana’s Substack 4th World Oasis!

4th world oasis

✧ water and alchemy for a free world ✧

By dana ☆

A new essay is on the way as well so look out for that soon and as always,

Stay thoughty. Stay thotty.

Since the last edition of Heaux’s Know, we’ve had a bit of growth. So, welcome! to all new subscribers and a warm how’ve you been? to returning subscribers. The news runs the gamut this time including updates of ongoing criminal & civil cases, post-election ballot measures that passed and stories that cover the morose as well as the hopeful. With that being said, the news.

Sex & Reproductive Justice

• The University of Wisconsin reinstated SexWIse, the university's peer run comprehensive sex education program after a battle with administration and The Madison Federalist who found the program’s discussion of porn ( in efforts to promote media literacy) and LGBTQIA+ identities as “promotion of porn consumption & LGBTQIA+ topics”. The student run program quickly contested this decision and organized for the reinstatement of their program, citing its importance for educating young college students and encouraging a larger culture of consent. The Herald covered it here

• Though he’s since withdrawn from the pursuit to be confirmed as the Attorney General under Trump (he wouldn’t have enough support via vote to be confirmed), Matt Gaetz is still under scrutiny as a House Ethics Committee investigation alleging he paid a minor for sexual services (sex trafficking by its clearest definitions) remained top of mind in the American consciousness. Though Gaetz resignation from Congress for the remainder of this season prevents the Committee from disciplining the man, complicated questions arise as he won reelection with no precedent indicating he couldn’t be reconfirmed in January. The Rolling Stones has the timeline & they’re asking the important questions.

• In San Antonio, TX, the Reproductive Justice Fund, an effort spawned in 2022, received a $500,000 increase courtesy of the SA city council. These funds will be distributed to non profits focused on increasing contraceptive access, offering sex education in schools, prenatal care and more. KTSA reported on it here.

• Four women are suing the state of Idaho after they were denied access to abortion care for fatal fetal abnormalities. Idaho has some of the most restrictive abortions bans in the country, including the termination of a pregnancy at any stage, with few exemptions, being a felony offense punishable by two to five years in prison. As well as a vigilante law that allows private citizens to sue health care providers rendering abortion care after 6 weeks. There are no exemptions for fatal fetal abnormalities under current Idaho law. The Center for Reproductive Rights fought a similar case in Texas last spring and lost, however, they remain hopeful that their case will lead to victory, and hopefully some justice for these women. NBC News has the story.

• In Ohio, a county judge struck down the state’s 6-week ban on abortion, citing the reproductive rights amendment Ohioan’s voted for last year in Issue 1. Though this is a victory for abortion care providers and advocates, the fight remains. Ant-Abortion organizations have already called for appeals to the ruling, Justice Jenkins has a month to consider. The Associated Press has the story here.

• This past election, 10 states had Abortion on the ballot, and 7 of them voted in favor of codifying it in their respective state constitutions. Nebraska and South Dakota voted overwhelmingly against codifying Abortion rights and Floridians were unable to meet the 60% yes threshold required to codify these freedoms, falling short with 57% in favor. Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Arizona, Montana and Nevada all passed with overwhelming support by voters. Turnout has all the details here.

• Margaret Sanger, valorized birth control activist, founder of Planned Parenthood (and notorious racist eugenicist) may have the glory, but Mary Ware Dennett also helped shape US History, despite her story and time as a sex education & birth control activist existing in relative obscurity. Stephanie Gorton, author of the The Icon and the Idealist is here to rectify the record and tell these women’s interwoven story in its totality. She wrote up a piece and shared the first two chapters of her book over at Teen Vogue, it’s certainly worth a read.

• Missouri Republicans wish to defy the will of Missourians by challenging Amendment 3, the measure that established the fundamental right to reproductive freedom in the states constitution that passed with a clear majority in this last election. Missouri houses one of the strictest abortion bans to be enacted post-Dobbs, with abortion prohibited at all stages with no exemptions. Multiple organizations including Planned Parenthood, have already filed lawsuits against the state’s abortion bans, citing Amendment 3 as an assertion of the right to have reproductive freedoms and thus, abortion access. The story is continuing to develop and Turnout has been following it diligently, here.

Domestic Stories

• The last few months have been clear illustrations of what’s to come in the evolving climate crisis. With Hurricane’s Helene & Milton reminding people how absolutely devastating extreme weather conditions are and how difficult it is to survive and rebuild after them. Mother Jones contemplates that reality with Brandi Hand, who survived Hurricane Katrina which irreparably changed NOLA, only to have her life impacted again when Hurricane Helene hurtled toward her home in North Carolina, the place her and her husband resettled after losing everything to Hurricane Katrina. Brandi is but one person in a list of survivors of the climate crisis who are confronted with the reality that few places are actually safe from extreme weather. I highly suggest you give this a read, Jackie Flynn Mogensen wrote a very humanizing tale here.

• Movement Media Alliance, a collective of social justice oriented media makers, launched Communities Beyond Elections, a project highlighting the people who comprise of the country, not the politicians allegedly representing their interest. Da’Shaun Harrison, the Editor-At-Large of Scalawag Magazine wrote a moving piece about this project and it deserves more attention, as does Communities Beyond Elections. Have a read here.

• Former President and President-Elect, Donald Trump has announced via Truth Social his day one plan to impose a 25% tariff on goods coming into the US via Mexico & Canada with an additional 10% tariff on goods from China, where we receive almost half of our imports from. Corporations in the US have already begun releasing statements and asserting the cost of goods will rise in response to such political action. NewsWeek wrote a guide to items consumers may want to purchase ahead of these tariffs due to anticipated price increases.

• The Menendez Brothers, who found renewed interest in their parricide case after a recent Ryan Murphy adaption gained popularity, are still fighting to come home. Their resentencing hearing, previously scheduled for early December, has been pushed back a month into January, ensuring the siblings will bring in the New Year incarcerated still. The new district attorney, Nathan Hochman once sworn in on December 2, vows to objectively review their case and make a fair assessment of their resentencing. The Daily Beast has the story here.

• Alex Jones, right wing commentator and prior owner of InfoWars is fighting a battle in court over satire magazine, The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars in a bankruptcy auction. Jones claims that fraud and collusion took place in order for the media outlet to purchase the website. The emergency motion to disqualify The Onion’s bid on InfoWars, has been pushed back by Justice Christopher Lopez who stated he plans to hear the motion simultaneously with the trustee’s request to approve the sale of InfoWars to The Onion. Politico has the write up.

• Ryan Kobayashi, the father of Hannah Kobayashi, a missing Hawaiian woman has died, with the official cause of death ruled a suicide by LA county’s coroner’s office. Mr. Kobayashi was found in a parking lot with multiple blunt force trauma injuries. While attempting to mourn the loss of Ryan, the family is still working diligently for answers to Hannah’s disappearance. Hannah has not contacted loved ones or been seen since November 10, two days after missing her connecting flight to NY, where she planned to visit her aunt living Upstate. ABC7 mocked up the timeline of her disappearance. The Guardian has the details on Ryan Kobayashi’s death, and Li, his surviving fiancee has started a GoFundMe.

• Susan Lorincz, a white woman who killed Black neighbor, Ajike “AJ” Owens by fatally shooting her as she knocked on her apartment door, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She was found guilty of Manslaughter by a jury in August when her Stand Your Ground law defense fell through with little evidence that she was in imminent danger, justifying her use of fatal force. Pamela Dias, AJ’s mother, made a public statement after Lorincz’s sentencing. CNN has the details here.

• A Connecticut couple was booked in Minnesota for allegedly stealing $1 Million in goods and items from Lululemon stores across the country. As relayed by the Associated Press, “According to the criminal complaints, a Lululemon investigator had been tracking the pair even before police first confronted them on Nov. 14 at a store in suburban Roseville. The investigator told police the couple were responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses across the country, the complaints said. They would steal items and make fraudulent returns, it said.” The full story is here.

• Damian Williams, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor is resigning ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Williams is the first Black person to occupy this title and was nominated by President Biden. Williams has led successful, public cases targeting Billionaires such Max Bankman-Fried and Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang for financial fraud and corruption. Edward Kim, his current deputy will occupy his seat after December 13th, when he resigns. Reuters wrote about it here.

• According to the Harris' team, Kamala Harris is weighing her political options after Inauguration Day. According to insiders, Harris’ good will with the Democratic Party increased during her presidential run and thus, see her political future nearing its prime, not its end. With frequently louder talks of Democrats such as current California State Governor, Gavin Newsom considering a 2028 presidential run, talks of Harris wanting to succeed into the Governorship have increased as well. Ultimately, it’s too early to tell, but Politico is sharing what they know, here.

• Transgender rights have been a political hotbed for years, and that aggressive fight is only getting larger in scale. South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace in preparation for Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride’s entrance to Congress as the first openly Trans person, introduced a resolution with aims to ban Transgender people from using single-sex bathroom facilities that don’t correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Since introducing this resolution, Mace has proposed even more extreme legislation that would institute a bathroom ban for Transgender folk on all federal properties. McBride has already released a statement stating she plans to comply if this resolution is to pass and Mace’s bill poses a larger threat for Trans folk within the US during a time of damning legislative violence. ABC News has everything about the bill, and the state of Transgender rights across the nation here.

International Headlines

• In Romania, Călin Georgescu, a far right nationalist with Pro-Russian sentiments, is steaming ahead in the Presidential election, securing first place in the polls of the Presidential run-off. The success of his campaign is being largely attributed to social media, with viral TikTok videos and podcast appearances galvanizing voter bases for him. This election is further proof of the shift in political ideology across the West, favoring right wing nationalist and militant sentiments, exploiting economic hardships and the threats of war for political gain. The next round of these elections takes place in December where Georgescu and his far-right allies seek to snag seats in parliament as well as the Presidency. The Guardian has the story here.

• A full on brawl took place in Serbian Parliament, as a deadly rail station roof’s collapse sparked conversations about who’s at fault. The ruling party as well as their opposition appeared with banners, accusing each other of negligence resulting in the fatal accident and fists began to fly when members attempted to snatch the opposing political party’s banner. This roof collapse has been met with protest and outcry against the Serbian government which constituents say is ineffective and authoritarian. The Associated Press has the details here.

• A tourist yacht sank in the Red Sea on Monday. Though there were rough waters warnings made, the vessel went out to sea and capsized. According to Egyptian officials, 28 people have been rescued with 16 passengers remaining missing as of the time of reporting. Foreign nationals from all across the US, EU & China were aboard the ship and 12 have yet to be recovered as well as 4 Egyptian crew members. Multiple dignitaries have been approached for information and comment with varied results. The story is here.

• Four Lebanese sources claim a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel is set to be announced by President Biden and French President Macron soon. Since September, Israel has launched a brutal assault against Southern Lebanon, killing at least 31 people in the last 24 hours. This assault takes place amid continued genocide of the people of Gaza with journalist on the ground calling the circumstances “completely apocalyptic” in Northern Gaza. Israel’s attacks have killed and/or injured hundreds of thousands of people within the Gaza Strip as well as neighboring areas in Lebanon. Al Jazeera has the live updates here.

• In Sudan, the “biggest humanitarian emergency” on the globe continues to devastate civilians, with experts estimating 2.5 Million people will die of starvation by year’s end. The lack of global humanitarian response has made circumstance more dire, as soup kitchens are forced to close for lack of funding and the brutal civil war forces over 10 Million people to be displaced within the country. According to the UN and Human Rights Watch experts, the city of Darfur is experiencing a genocide caused by the fighting of RSF forces and the Sudanese Army. Last week, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution cosponsored by the UK & Sierra Leone which sought to enforce compliance with a commitment both the RSF & Sudanese government made to respect International Law and ensure the protection of civilians. The World Food Program is on the ground in Sudan, feeding civilians, I’d urge you to donate if you can— the world is literally watching the people of Sudan starve to death and any assistance we can provide, we should. HRW has a wealth of information about the ongoing conflict and crisis here.

• Illegal Gold Mining continues to drive deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo amid ongoing climate crisis. Okapi Wildlife Reserve, also known as “Africa’s Unicorn”, is endangered and its continued devastation will have lasting effects on biodiversity and the climate, with OWR being in the top 40% of terrestrial protected areas most resilient to climate change. Over 18 mining sites are active with an estimated 25,000 miners consistently mining the area. This is amidst civil war, where the Eastern DRC continues to be devastated by Rwanda backed rebel militias such as the Tutsi M23. The country of Angola has been steering mediations between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, with a peace agreement seemingly making good aims toward implementation. The International Rescue Committee has been on the ground in the DRC since 1996, they’re currently launching a response as Monkeypox has been declared a public heath emergency by WHO and Africa CDC. All of these efforts require funding, and if you have some spare dollars hanging around, consider putting it towards humanitarian efforts such as these.

• Censorship is a global hot topic, as illustrated by Australia’s latest bold move to ban social media for citizens under 16 years of age. The bill was introduced on November 21st with large support from the current center-left Albanese Government. Youth activist and their allies have been staunch opponents of this bill, presenting the potential unconstitutional nature of such an action and reminders for parliament that children are not apolitical, with activist such as Greta Thunberg, Leo Puglisi, and others as examples. Both Google and Meta as well as TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, have released statements urging the Australian government to reconsider. Currently, Australia is conducting a trial on age verification using biometric facial age estimation, age verification and inference technology meant to consider the efficacy in moderating minor’s access to online pornography. Tech companies and activist are calling for a halt to this bill until the trial is completed in 2026. Key players in the online censorship debate noted how fast Australia is attempting to pass this recent legislation amidst pushback. This is the story.

And that was the news. If any source grabbed your interest, I urge you to share it and please patronize the independent media publishers I attempt to platform. We’re in a time of deep censorship with legacy media doing the work of the establishment gleefully and thus, we must uplift independent journalists and publications seeking the story without fear of it antagonizing their funders.

Thanks for sticking with me, and as always: Stay Thoughty and Stay Thotty.

- Nia Òla

“I was sitting at the aquarium at the dolphin show with my daughter and all I could think about is how we were sitting ducks with our backs to the door.” Is a comment left on a TikTok video I made nearly two years ago discussing the bones of what is now this massive essay. If you’re one of the many people who encouraged me to write it, thank you. This may be the proudest I’ve ever felt sharing a piece— I hope you enjoy it.

Three exits.

My first thought in every room is to quickly identify them; the cataloguing doesn’t take me much time. Soon after, a rudimentary plan sparks, nothing precise really, it’s all rounded numbers. How many people are in this space? What size would the scared mob be? How many feet to my nearest exit points? Ideally, less than 20 and how soon after the first shot fires will I move? Almost immediately. These plans come easy to me now but when I try to recall when it started, I always draw a blank. Maybe it’s protection, my brain shielding how long I’ve considered guarding my mortality from this specific threat, or pity from my nervous system, already overwhelmed with the daily task of easing endless questions like am I real? Is this all life is? decided to spare itself (inversely me), from mulling over more questions that don’t have pretty answers. It almost doesn’t matter when this hyper vigilance started as long as it pays off, makes it easier to potentially survive too often of a threat.

As of today, November 13th, there have been 458 mass shootings in 20241 in the US and by year’s end, we’re projected to see a number over 600. That’s an average of almost two mass shootings a day.

In a world of uncertainty, the probability of experiencing a mass shooting feels more assured than having basic needs met, which is, grim to say the least.

The threat of death via gun violence isn’t exclusive to the United States, upwards of 71% of global homicides occur with the use of firearms2, but mass shootings, defined by Gun Violence Archive as3 “…a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.”, is a phenomenon which is almost uniquely American. It’s a permanent fixture to discourse about the nation, and what makes us standout from other high earning countries in the Empire. Though much of its violence is exported to the global south, a sizable amount is diffused into the civilian class as well— an as above, so below ordeal.

And it’s felt deeply, when surveyed4, about 79% of the adult population in the US experience stress due to the possibility of a mass shooting and almost a third (33%) stated this fear prevents them from going to certain places or events. Unfortunately, such habit changes attempting to assuage these fears are not available to all members of the US population. The majority of US teens5, close to 60%, have mass shooting anxiety specific to school, and in light of the numbers, they have every reason to feel this way. As of November 11th6, there have been 76 school shootings this year, its prevalence has more than doubled in a decade. When everyone feels hopeless about the same problem it’s bound to be addressed… right? The answer is complicated, and like most things under late stage Capitalism, the “solutions” cropping up are not only politically motivated, but profit breaking.

In the last decade or so, in response to mass shooting concerns, a new industry has appeared: The Active Shooter Defense Enterprise. The industry’s largest supporters are the usual suspects, current & former law enforcement, surveillance tech (which is… most tech to be frank), and Big Gun™️. In a press statement after Biden’s address on gun control, the NRA7 (National Rifle Association), stated

“The National Rifle Association of America supports substantive policies and real solutions that will make a difference […]The NRA has long supported securing our schools so that our teachers and children will be safe.”

The safety measures supported, conveniently, don’t address gun accessibility, but rather equipment and technology that can be utilized in the event of a mass shooting, all of which cost a pretty penny and pennies are being spent. According to research done by Omdia8, American schools are anticipated to spend 3.5 billion dollars annually on “armed shooter defense security”. These measures range anywhere from renovating schools with bulletproof material, installing AI supported body scanners and crisis alert systems or specialized door stops meant to keep people out or in, depending on the style.

Despite the promises these companies make to concerned school administrators and parents, the technology is already proving to be inconsistent and faulty. The Charlotte Observer9 wrote an expose on Centegix, one of the companies offering AI video surveillance and a crisis alert system that won a bid with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district; multiple times since its installation when the alert system was meant to deploy, it failed— even still, when the alarms are deemed “false” (even if by company error), the school is charged a sizable fee. Despite this, CMS continues to employ Centegix.

In Cobb County, GA, a similar scenario occurred10 where “AlertPoint”, a $5 million crisis management service’s server fried and sent alerts to one of the largest school districts in the country, prompting lockdowns and terror for students. Despite its evidenced inefficacy, these systems and services are still being lobbied for by special interest groups11 (such as SIA) and community members seeking answers to these violent ails—Congress approved an additional $300 million for school safety measures such as these just this year.

With the capacity to curtail mass shootings (both in/outside of schools) seeming low, insidious players have made moves that seem isolated but when presented all together, broadly serve a related agenda. The late James Brown crooned “This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world” for decades on the global stage… and the investment in maintaining that reality can be creative— we’re seeing just how so with the rise of the TradWife.

Bread, Babies and Bibles

When the story of Hannah Neeleman, community appointed “Queen of the Tradwives” of Ballerina Farms broke, the conversations that ensued were inescapable. The Times of London12 was able to snag a rare peek behind the curtain by visiting Ballerina Farms HQ, a sprawling 328-acre homestead nestled in Kamas, Utah where Hannah, her husband Daniel, and their 8 children live. On this property, the children are raised, homeschooled and taught subsistence skills meant to steer them into adulthood healthy, resourceful and most importantly, aligned with the right views. The reporting on the Ballerina Farms matriarch by The Times took what previously felt intimate, thus innocuous to her audience and placed it on a pressure plate, deglamorizing the “homeliness” of it all in favor of a more concerned view.

Hannah, 34, found her strategically apolitical lifestyle content under scrutiny as people, namely women, asked just how much this “dream” cost her, and whether its broadcast served any particular agenda. I’d say, yes.

Tradwives are defined as13 “ a woman who believes in and practices traditional gender roles and marriages. Some may choose to take a homemaking role within their marriage, and others leave their careers to focus on meeting their family's needs in the home.”

The popularity of the term seems to have origins in 2018 and is broadly, a western phenomenon. It seeks to draw from past eras such as the 50’s when the homemaker was valorized and broadly poses appeal for women (usually white, usually young) who’ve found themselves fatigued by what they consider feminism’s demands and the expectations of women under Capitalism in modern times.

The appeal of the Tradwife lifestyle in part, is the assumed reclamation of time and labor— instead of being confined to a desk for 40 years, why not raise a handful of children until adulthood and enjoy an earlier “retirement” than your peers? Instead of crying about the decaying job market you’re forced to compete in, why not let your man bring home the bacon and you cook it? It seems good and well divorced from its historical context, but as I discussed in There Was Only Turf, the women who serve as inspiration for this movement felt foxholed into it with little escape— we see alimony’s expansion in the US during the 19th century and beyond14 because women couldn’t hold property and often found themselves separated from spouses with little financial reliability. With a few decades of distance, the preceding circumstances and consequences of the lifestyle have fallen out of the general consciousness, which serve its biggest champions, white nationalism.

The face of the TradWife movement is formulaic: thin, white (or light) and pious, however unassuming that quality is presented. The biggest names attached to this lifestyle (and thus, politic) speak to its intention and racial exclusivity.

This was the topic of curiosity for Seyward Darby15, author of, Sisters In Hate: American Women and White Extremism. She found, having spent months with various women with power and influence within the white nationalist and alt-right movement, that recruiting women was paramount for the movements expansion and survival, and that this effort must be led by other women. The promotion of being a tradwife at a time of rising white christian nationalism isn’t an accident but rather a design; there’s a reason engaging with tradwife content online has the algorithm quickly offering anti-science, anti-miscegenation, anti-secular material. They’re closely related. Darby observes,

“Tradwives and white nationalists share core objectives (more babies), myths (America’s moral decline), and iconography (happy heterosexual families). Such close proximity, particularly on social media makes the exchange of ideas a straightforward prospect.” pg. 156

Almost every woman she spent time with during this book’s development were led to the alt-right with tradwife content online. These were women who’d oftentimes previously considered themselves liberal and/or permissive yet felt too helpless to craft a dignified life. Lana, one of the strongest faces for women of the alt-right, observed this connection and uses it to cajole more women to the movement by presenting it as a place they could regain agency.

“… Lana amassed a constellation of white-nationalist women. The particulars of their stories varied, but the broad strokes were consistent: They had all felt lost, besieged, empty, probing, insecure, frustrated, or unmoored. White nationalism has transmuted their greivances or anger into a lofty purpose. When she invited them on Radio 3Fourteen, Lana gave the women a stage and validation. The effect, it seemed, was intoxicating and emboldening.” pg. 218

Online Tradwife content creators occupy a similar space. Their editorialized lives are presented as a respite from “girlbossing” with simple beliefs that often promote their audiences’ curiosity and those questions usually have answers within an existing religious and/or social structure. The biggest faces of the Tradwives of TikTok are all Mormon, a notoriously anti-Black and misogynistic denomination of Christianity16 who encourage their members to draw in initiates with a practice referred to as “Friendshipping”17.

The practice of “friendshipping” is straight forward, simply interact with and befriend people with little to no connection to the church and allow your life to be testimony to its benefits. They discourage plain evangelizing and instead offer tips18: keep them informed, bake a treat, seek common interests— sound familiar? The best recruitment tool is to refuse it is recruitment and in the age of militant curation and aesthetic development, it’s the easiest it’s ever been. Every one is seeking an “era” to occupy and glamorous, beautiful, simple living homemaker is appealing, in large, due to its feminine faces. Simply put by Darby,

“Like many digital influencers, tradwives present themselves as both aspirational and relatable. The message is simple enough: You know you want to be like us, and you can if you try.” pg. 154

The promotion of a lifestyle and ideology conveniently incompatible with racial equity, feminism, and queerness to name a few, offers these women a crusade, a worthy cause to put their energy toward while maintaining their position in the home. Children are the fulcrum of this work.

My Kids, My Choice

Parental rights are a hot button issue for conservatives and the majority of these efforts are led by women. Groups such as Moms For Liberty (M4L), Citizens Defending Freedom and Focus on the Family extend great efforts toward curtailing progressive policy and weakening existing civil rights, all in the name of, “parental rights”. A perusal of any of their sites and mission statements offers you insight into their current enemies, including but not limited to: Sex Ed, SEL (social emotional learning), CRT (Critical Race Theory), Gender Ideology, expanding homeschool protections, school choice and Restorative Justice.

Homeschooling in particular has seen a boom in the years since this form of “advocacy” grew to popularity. In my home state of New York for instance, homeschool enrollment has increased by 178%, with charter enrollment increasing by 125%, public school (the alleged hotbed for the radicalizing of children) however, has seen a 13% decrease in enrollment in the past 10 years.

With the increase in homeschooling and decrease in childcare services19 (which range in price from $5,327 to $17,171 annually20), parents find themselves burdened with the demands of ensuring there’s steady childcare and education for their children, this responsibility is a gendered one more often than not. The “Parental Work Disruption Index” developed by KPMG21 found that an estimated 1.2-1.5 million workers either shorten working hours or miss work entirely each month due to low childcare access, 90% of those workers are women.

One study22 found that the rising cost of childcare resulted in an estimated 13% decline in the employment of mothers with children under 5. With women being forced home due to lack of childcare, homeschooling becomes more appealing and homemaking regains its honor. It’s a sacrifice, yes, but one you’d make a thousand times over because that’s what a good mother would do, right? There’s a reason the “parental rights advocacy” groups are run and organized by conservatives: families structured heteronormatively with discontent SAHM’s are primed to join a “righteous” cause— what’s more righteous than protecting children? And if in the process she finds herself empowered by these efforts… it’s icing on the cake.

The foundation of parental rights (within this framework) really invites parents to look at their children as inherently proprietary, a perma-owned class only liberated (usually) with entrance into adulthood. This belief has a long legacy. In Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, Toby Rollo writes,

“The young represent the originary exploited class. As far back as the historical record goes in the West, the bodies and labor of children were viewed as belonging to adults. Children were the first form of property, and mass child labor was central to every agricultural and industrial revolution—to the production of surplus resources along with the amassing and centralization of wealth.” pg. 161

Parents are frightened, all too aware of the dangers having their children out of their presence for too long pose and these special interest groups monopolize on that fear compounded by often ill-addressed latent bias. Like most extremist causes, the “problems” are presented as all-encompassing and malicious, a direct attack on families livelihood and inversely, the solutions require violent excision of the “issues”, be it, media or people themselves.

These efforts have largely been successful as well. As of today23, 1,128 titles have been targeted with over 400 attempts to censor library materials and services in 2024 alone. These groups, often in collaboration with conservative lawmakers, intend to collapse infrastructure that doesn’t align with white christian nationalist views using children as the trojan horse.

Just as before, children are a useful tool whether for literal labor or to serve as a compassionate population policy can be pushed using. In pursuit of near total control of what children are exposed to (further removing them from mostly theoretical agency), parents can wage war against anything and anyone considered counterculture, namely: the LGBTQIA+ community and sex workers.

All Roads Lead to Sex

Since its earliest days, sex has shaped the internet. This history is the primary point of study in How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole. In the text, we come to understand rather quickly that the internet can’t be divorced from sex, as its modernization was almost always occurring due to the need to innovate how erotic labor was performed. Whether through product and software development, payment processing or cultural output, sex is inextricable from the internet’s legacy and function. As the internet expanded and centralized, attacks on sex’s presence on it grew.

The information highway is an easy target for censorship, in part due to its accessibility. According to Statista24, there are 5.52 billion internet users, 5.22 billion of them possessing social media, that’s 63%25 of the global population. Over26 90% of the adolescent population in the US has a smartphone and the majority use social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat to commune and share. Social media, like much of the Internet, is a mixed age space, and with the loss of active third spaces coined by Ray Oldenburg27 to mean “your third place is where you can relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances…”, oftentimes the only place teens can exchange with peers for free.

If we concede to the internet being an inherently mixed space, then the space finds itself required to accommodate the youngest of users, even in supposed “age-restricted” spaces. This logic is used to increase the breath of the surveillance state and push anti-sex action such as criminalizing all forms of sex work (on/offline) and abolishing internet porn. For many pro-censorship advocates, sexual material and sexuality is interchangeable. It stems from the same foundation: that what is overtly sexual (or believed to be) should die out, and if that’s impossible, it should persist silently out of view.

We can see this belief permeated throughout lobbying efforts fronted by religious, conservative institutions such as Exodus Cry, Fight The New Drug and NCOSE (National Center of Sexual Exploitation), who rebranded from Morality in Media to appear less religiously motivated. These groups use the traumas survived by children, trafficking and sexual violence survivors to push a radical agenda. One that says sex is a threat to the safety of children and thus, the internet and should be staunchly regulated. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to push for amendment of Section 23028 legislation extrapolated from the Communications Decency Act of 96’, some of the most draconian legislation brought forth in US history. Section 230, a measly 26 words, currently determine the future of constitutional rights to free speech and the livelihood of sex workers. It reads,

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

To be clear, it doesn’t absolve companies of criminal liability in the event of illegal or harmful content being uploaded (a feature amended by SESTA/FOSTA), but rather asserts that the person ultimately responsible for the content is the person who uploaded it, not the hosting site. This bit of legislation supports all free speech on the internet. It’s what allows for sites such as Yelp, Reddit, X (formerly Twitter) etc. to exist and foster user generated communication. Without the protection of Section 230, these sites would greatly limit or bar user generated content because it’s not worth the potential of legal culpability. It’s this very legislation that’s a target of groups like NCOSE29 who say they want it “radically reformed” but frequently platform players calling for its repeal.

The crusade to abolish sex work is a shared goal amongst conservatives and radical feminists alike, leading to collaboration between the two across the decades30. The refusal to engage with the realities of sex/work as a question of labor rather than morality means the only people they need to consult on abolition and criminalization, are each other. The through line is clear and awfully paternalistic, the people engaged in the “harm” aren’t considered reliable narrators on what exactly is harmful, and subsequently, how to mitigate that harm. This logic is applied similarly to deny Queer & Trans people the right to a dignified public existence.

Language is shifted strategically in order to argue that one’s very existence (be it as a sex worker, trans individual, etc.) is inherently indecent and thus nefarious. When lobbying these causes and sourcing more public support, this is taken into account. For instance, in 2014 anti-prostitution group Demand Abolition had internal documents leaked31 to the press that stated

“…framing the Campaign’s key target as sexual slavery might garner more support and less resistance, while framing the Campaign as combating prostitution may be less likely to mobilize similar levels of support.”

When attempting to curtail marginalized people with few rights and protections already, the optics matter. In such instances, people need an easily identified villain for the hero to save. The well meaning civilian is less inclined to question abolishing “sexual slavery” vs “prostitution” because slavery is universally acknowledged as bad, people feel comfortable hating it. Saving someone who’s enslaved is morally sound, always, yet the whore comes with more interrogation because of their occupations moral ambiguity. For the civilian class, it’s as much about what sex/work (and thus the whore) represents symbolically as the material realities the whore is working to survive. If the language associated with the prostitute has clear criminal connotations though, then those complex questions are flattened, in deference to law & order— this tactic is widely successful and continues to expand.

It’s why we see it deployed in conversations discussing queer and transgender folk, attaching “groomers”32, a universally agreed upon term for predator onto them, to push violent policy and suppress solidarity from other groups. It’s hard to join the opposition when they’ve been framed as lewd, dirty and to some extent, primitive. This matters greatly because it offers the contrast people are seeking when making “moral” decisions, a way to say “this is what we’re protecting you from” and across the aisle, they’ve positioned children who by default are vulnerable. Even if you have hangups about the methodology, you’ll concede to the presence of a threat, and that’s all they need to move forward with annihilationist policies.

It’s the legs of current Vice President, Kamala Harris’ seminal legislation Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, also known as SESTA/FOSTA which served as her senatorial debut of sorts, and made clear she cared not for the safety of sex workers, who’d been publicly loud about its dangers if passed. Prior to then, President Donald Trump signing it into law, Backpage was raided and shuttered, despite cooperating with federal investigations and independently addressing trafficking concerns.

After the bill’s passing in 2018, numerous sites disappeared (such as Backpage & Craigslist Personals section) or upended as many sex workers off their platforms as they could, even if services weren’t being advertised. SESTA/FOSTA had just shredded through Section 230’s protection and provided a caveat: you’re not liable for user generated content, unless there’s suspected exploitation on your platform then you are liable. It’s like if you let a friend borrow your car, didn't know they committed a hit and run in it, and still, you were arrested for vehicular homicide. With that possibility, how likely are you to loan the car again? Even if the platform has no knowledge of trafficking and/or sexual exploitation occurring on their site, they’re held liable, spooking the majority of the internet into shunning sex workers entirely.

The community impact was nearly immediate, with thousand’s livelihood erased literally overnight. In a study done since, SESTA/FOSTA33 has been shown to increase upwards of 74% of sex worker’s economic instability and led to increased client violence for 34%. Not only did the takedown erase the modes of advertisement, but targeted many sites used in the community for safety measures such as vetting and got many booted from payment processors34 such as VISA & Mastercard. Well established “bad johns” list were scrubbed, and without the safety the internet afforded sex workers to be discerning with clientele, many had to resort back to street based work and quickie negotiations, increasing the risk of criminality and violence.

The legislation hasn’t shown to be effective for curtailing sex trafficking or exploitation of children online, but is a gold mine for censorship and further surveillance by the police state. Numerous bills are currently attempting to use its legacy to make it even easier to suppress and remove traces of sex, sexuality and free sexual expression from the internet. Currently, KOSA (The Kids Online Safety Act) and EARN IT (The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies) Act attempt to further degrade Section 230 by applying its protections discriminatingly via an unelected commission35 tasked with writing best practices, all of which conveniently bar speech and content of LGBTQIA+, sex work and reproductive health (namely abortion) origins. It would be a disastrous blow to remaining free speech legislation and attempt to eradicate sex or the sexed entirely. Public support of these bills are largely in part due to language, and the use of children (and the potential for their exploitation) as a compassionate front.

Who would say no to making the internet more safe for kids? Monsters, maybe.

Being proactive about the harm the internet poses toward children doesn't require sweeping legislation that demand you upload government ID or develop digital passports that law enforcement will happily buy the data of for a couple grand36, but rather promotion of internet literacy and more proactive conversations about online safety facilitated by trusted adults and parents37. The right to free speech includes anonymity38 and during a rise in fascism globally, we need to be safeguarding it as much as possible, our survival quite literally depends on it.

For users, the internet is no longer the loosely regulated Wild West, but for the capitalist? The sky’s the limit and the presence of children pose a unique opportunity to fly high.

CocoMelon or CocoMillions?

Children aren’t going anywhere, as www suggests, the internet is a giant interconnected web and children, or rather their profitability is the tie currently holding it together.

In 1983, companies spent a little over $100 million marketing to children. That price tag has increased exponentially, with companies spending nearly $17 billion advertising to them today. As smart tech became more accessible and children had more unsupervised screen time39, marketers took it as an opportunity to extend their reach. With the expansion of card payment processing, various options for kids & teens spending accounts and families being able to accommodate more purchases, advertisers monopolized on children’s independent spending power and their influence on family spending. According to expert, Sharon Beder,

“Children 12 and under spend more than $11 billion of their own money and influence family spending decisions worth another $165 billion on food, household items like furniture, electrical appliances and computers, vacations, the family car, and other spending.”

That’s a combined $176 billion children hold the coin purse of, not an easy number to ignore. And if you’re a greedy capitalist looking to expand your wealth, you care little for the moral implications of such advertisement. These measures include targeted advertisement to children from data farmed out of their online activity. Research has shown targeted ads are embedded in over half of the products used by children40. Though morally dubious, this isn’t illegal.

COPPA (The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 98’) is the only legislation that attempts to reconcile with information that can be collected from child web use, putting protections in place for sites catered to kids exclusively, a sector of online life seeming to go away in front of our eyes. COPPA however, has a problematic cousin, COPPA 2.041 currently attempting to expand in a way that threatens internet privacy and extend state censorship by combining its bones with COPA (The Child Online Protection Act), legislation that was already repealed for violating the First Amendment.

For the advertiser, having children on screens is a fat payday and for parents, it’s a tool to help manage the domestic load. We see frequent talk of iPad kids addressing that very phenomenon. For generations void of safe, accessible public space, what used to be a simple “Go outside, play and be back before the streetlights come on.” is now, “You can get on the game for a while.” The accessibility of “the game” which is supplementing peer led play outdoors and the people on the other end of it, make allowing children to navigate the web in the digital age a more strained endeavor.

In 2024, it’s nearly impossible to live an unplugged life and with digital natives such as Gen Z & Gen Alpha being raised on the internet arguably, making it “child friendly” remains a priority for parents and a ballooning bank for advertisers who through the sanitizing of the internet, can further court their preferred consumers, children.

Connecting The Dots

We live in odd, frequently unsafe times. Global leaders are embracing fascism by the dozens, the climate disaster is rearing its head in a grand manner, and the average citizen is trying to squeeze dimes out of nickels. A trip to the grocery store, bank or mall could result in annihilation by the hands of a blood thirsty assailant with an assault rifle and everyday the government reminds us that our sovereignty as people is mostly theoretical. With power floating above us at all times, the common response isn’t to look up, but rather look down.

The general populous can feel the bullies, but have a hard time seeing them, producing circumstances that ask we seek power not against these cannibalizing systems such as: White Supremacy, Colonization, Capitalism and Cisheteropatriachy but rather each other. This is the cause of a lot of preventable, lateral and south facing (punching down) violence experienced.

The looming threat of mass shootings hangs over everyone but especially plagues parents. Sometimes when I’m in a crowded public space, I think of how hard it is to run holding a child, and lament about the helplessness caregivers experience when attempting to enrich children out in the world knowing their efforts to protect them are only as good as the speed at which they run and the inattention of the shooter. The threat of terror and the loss of robust third spaces invites us to seek escape in the internet, where many actors (in good & bad faith) have intimate access to you with the capacity to reshape your world view towards many beliefs, hatred and extremism especially.

I don’t consider it coincidental that the majority of mass shooters are young, white men42 who complained of disempowerment and often found themselves further radicalized online. These men are receiving messaging meant to accompany that of young women’s— for them, an opportunity to prove their valor in pursuit of racial purity and protection of the (almost always) white family while the women and girls are courted towards “returning back to their feminine roots”, coddling dreams of low plains and milking cows with their beautiful, isolated (read: safe) white children tucked away from the threats of society. She remains passive enough to ensure the male dominated structure is maintained while exercising her own desire for power in “feminized” spaces such as education, childcare and healthcare.

These crusades invite (and often require) violence towards the most marginalized existing in subcultures the dominant culture finds difficult to produce empathy for. Sex workers & the LGBTQIA+ communities are common enemies for this reason, with the wellbeing and safety of children being used as a vehicle to legislate them out of existence. The same children made easy prey for advertisers and marketers who rely on children’s overconsumption of the internet, and the growing push for it to be even more “child friendly”, to mine them for data and covertly sell goods to them.

It’s one giant ponzi scheme, taking violence the Empire refuses to address and encouraging it be reproduced laterally. We’re staring up at what appears to be the sky, but really is the wide neck of a funnel, forcing us into more strenuous circumstances until we’re exhausted into submission or too focused on hating each other to stare our actual enemy in the eye. Instead of stacking all of our stools to reach the top and eliminate our collective abusers, we throw them at each other yelling pejoratives.

The key to tackling these issues adequately, is to first acknowledge that they’re not just connected, but entirely dependent on each other to persist. It’s like building a house; the rebar, concrete, sheetrock, wood, insulation and pipes alone are useless, but together provide shelter. In order to see freedom, we need to demolish the house that is the Empire, one wall at a time, until eventually, it all just collapses in on itself and we observe from a distance, prepared to rebuild again.

This piece was Goliath sized: dozens of hours of research, over 40 sources, agonizing rewrites, 12 pain management patches for my back. It was a true labor of love. I’m so damned proud of it and urge you to share it. I contemplated paywalling this and realized it would be a great disservice because I truly feel this is an important conversation and should be as accessible as possible. Just know your time and attention is appreciated and never taken for granted.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the first real peek behind the wall that is Me. This essay is free to read, it includes a picture I took last October in Jamaica as well. It’s the closest I could get to showing people what my eyesight (with glasses) looks like. For my paid subscribers, there’s also a bit of audio from the session that inspired this piece. Just keep scrolling at the end to give it a listen.

Every night, between the hours of 10 pm and 2 am I take in the sky, searching. For the majority of the year, what I’m looking for is there, bright and round, nearly opalescent shining down on me—of all the things I wish to see at the end, the moon is my most fervent ask. The end for many is death, a suspended heart beat, lagging brain activity and a body that says enough. The eyes shutter closed and whatever you saw is the last image you’ll ever see. My end, however, is more imminent because my brain is eating itself alive taking my vision with it. One day I’ll be blind then dead and there will be nothing to greet me on the other side.

It would be easier if this came as a shock to me, like that last-appointment-of-the-day, “Can we make this quick? I’m on overnights and my shift starts soon.” January evening was entirely out of left field. I reckon I’d have recovered quicker had I not known intuitively what she suspected and was demanding I go to the emergency room right the fuck now to find out. Years of sitting in undiagnosed, misdiagnosed wrong culminating in a few scans and the first of many lumbar punctures to confirm that, yeah girl, your brain is sick, thinks it’s cancerous— it’s not but because it believes it, it’s destroying you.

The brain’s always been my favorite organ; there’s just something about it that called to me, this wrinkled mass tucked behind a plate of armor (the skull) that quietly keeps things going. Even now, we know so little about the brain and typically, we find things out only when she’s unhappy. That’s part of the appeal for me, she’s a mercurial bitch and we’re her puppets. The fierce cerebral mistress with one fatal flaw. Unlike your peripheral nervous system, with the CNS lacking necessary equipment1 (like Schwann Cells for instance) to insulate and regenerate neurons, what’s lost can rarely be found again. Meaning every bit of damage my cranial nerves experience are irreversible, my optic nerves know that best. The most optimistic neuro-opthamologist I had thinks I’ll have vision until my 40s, maybe my 50s. My favorite tells me not to worry until it’s actually gone, if only.

I’ve been watching the world narrow for years and I don’t know how to feel about it.

“Even then, you looked… weary.” My mother says to me. We’re looking at one of the few pictures of me as a child. I’m sat cross legged, body facing away from the camera but my head turned toward it, the lens captured a cute child with an unsettled soul. In this one, I’m only 2 years old.

“I told you, I’ve always known myself.” The picture went back in the photo album. Today, it’s framed on my desk.

I suppose a young Nia though unable to name it, was already feeling the ache she’d grow into. A storm of uncertainty, of “can’t make any promises”, of prayers being answered after she’d already given up hope— a doctorate in The Not Knowing™️ and hating it. I rarely had the “why’s” but often had the “what’s” which is an especially useless talent as a child, the time in your life you’re robbed of almost all agency to do shit about what you know. As a kid, I’d tell my family I would be blind one day, they didn’t believe me but maybe my brain mistook prophecy for permission. Maybe, the aphantasia was a gift so I’d be prepared for the perpetual darkness coming.

We don’t know much about Aphantasia, mostly because it wasn’t noted until the 19th century and has only really been studied since the late 70’s. Shit— the name Aphantasia wasn't coined until 2015. Researchers surmise its origins may have something to do with the pathway between the prefrontal cortex and the visual cortex2, aside from that, we’re in the dark (pun intended). It's a strange thing to live with. So much of the richness of our interior worlds rely on memory and imagination with visualization being a huge part of both but in its absence I find a more honest meditation on life. For me, having no capacity to visualize in my mind’s eye made me militant about what I remembered. I could never draw a memory but I could weave the tale of that memory in such a way that you don’t need to see anything to feel it. I’ve journaled, religiously for decades to preserve the integrity of what I would later recall. I actually found some peace in the fact that if I can’t picture anything, that means I’m less liable to alter it.

What happened is what was, little room to add in embellishments. My imagination, while present is always rooted around a central truth. I reckon it’s why I don’t care for fantasy media much, it’s hard to enjoy something I could never conjure independently. That probably makes me a hater and it definitely makes me a pragmatist.

Without daydreaming (or dreaming at all really), I find myself confronting reality even when I don’t want to. Every time I’ve ever scrunched my face, eyes slammed shut desperate to conjure something, anything, I’m reminded that it’ll always be like this one day. I’m locked outside the tower with nowhere to hide meaning I have to adapt or perish, that adaptation is recording. Hours of audio sat in folders titled “Musings”, “Drunk shit”, “High shit” “Heaux shit” etc. I listen almost as much as I talk, get acquainted with my ears in a way my eyes won’t allow me. I continue to write knowing eventually, I won’t be able to see it. Sometimes I close my eyes and run a finger against the indents my pen made as I scribbled, curious if I could decipher the words; i’m usually unsuccessful.

I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure my memories would be preserved, if not through sight then sound but what does that mean for today? Am I ever really experiencing time or life if my desperation demands I archive it first? There are few times where I just allow myself to be present. While I live my life, eating, crying, fucking and having fun, there’s a crane poised above me ready to siphon all the bits out to place in the data bank. It’s the opposite of depersonalization; I’m not even a spectator but rather an engineer. I feel like a biographer, someone hyperaware of every moment who refuses to get lost in the novelty of it. Instead of living life, I’m documenting it.

The source of this feverish behavior isn’t lost on me. If life is sand moving in the hourglass, my writings and recordings are what allows me to inspect it, flipping it over and over until it feels like I have power over the clock. The ritual of notation much like turning my face to the moon nightly, is some of the only control I have . I couldn’t tell you what day will be the day I’m blind or having another TIA3 or hemiplegic attack4 but no matter that day, the night before I’ll have sought out the moon. I’ll have seen her as much as she sees me.

The naked human eye is categorically okay compared to other animals, nothing to write home about. So when we glance up at the sky, we’re seeing a tiny sliver of what’s actually in front of us. I couldn’t name all of the stars and celestial objects and asteroids passing us that we can’t parse out. It’s an equalizing thought for me, knowing that none of us really see shit in that context. The same way a star or moon glancing down never experiences us in our totality. If we were tasked to draw each other from memory, the images would be incomplete. We’re lacking in the same way and that brings me comfort.

Still, there’s a part of me that believes this would all be easier if my memory was failing as well. I’ve always been pretty all or nothing so total darkness without the texture of memory to complicate it calls to me. To just collapse into black all at once, with no mental rolodex grounding me is appealing. I can recognize how melodramatic this desire is, my life won’t literally stop when I’m blind but it’ll irreparably change. I can adapt, endure even but constructing a version of me okay with loss, likely followed by more loss seems impossible. There’s a concession packed in such acceptance that makes me uncomfortable— it feels like all those years I spent convincing myself that I indeed was not born to suffer were for naught.

Despite pondering on these thoughts daily, I’ve gained little insight— at this point, I don’t think there’s an answer to the questions I find myself asking. There’s no use wondering whether I’ll be able to do life blind because blind life is coming and I’ll have to do it. I’ll endure and probably be grateful for all the years I spent mulling over and preparing for the quest. My memory is phenomenal, always has been yet I’m convinced when it matters most, it’ll betray me. And could you blame me? How could I fully trust a body that’s already declared itself my enemy and waged war against me because of it?

A life of uncertainty in a body that can’t decide how much it hates me is all I have and since that’s the case, I ask for one favor. Let me take the moon with me. I do already sometimes, I can stand in its light on its brightest evenings, close my eyes and the dim glow I’m greeted with may as well be an image. My lids diffuse its brilliance into milky gray swirls and that’s more than I could ever produce independently.

My relationship to the moon is how I imagine some people feel about God. We all choose to love something that we can only hope loves us back. The act is rendered pure that way. My life, marred with ritual and compulsion found a way to make space for something more tender. The sky transmutes what usually feels like a vicious demand into a humble plea: allow me to visualize something, anything when it all goes black. Even without the moon’s intervention, my chances aren’t bad. The blind can dream5, and produce images in their mind, especially if the blindness occurred after age 5 according to research. I remain optimistic that despite being unable to visualize things now, maybe then it’ll be different. Perhaps the moon will brand itself onto me, making it all possible.

There’s some comedy in the fact that if I’m able to produce an image in my mind’s eye, it’'ll be unclear. Even with glasses, the world is a blur to me. It’s like someone took a camera lens and filthied it. When I look out, it’s all spiked edges and soft lines. There’s no refinement to the image and thus my moon will appear to me that way: imperfect, almost complete, lucid enough. That’s why I prefer to capture the world with film cameras, it reflects what I see better, something fuzzy and potentially nondescript but beautiful nonetheless.

A few times, I’ve thought I was going to die. The pain was too much, my body too weak and my resolve low; you can imagine I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes. Instead I was greeted with a sheet of black. It calmed me, a little voice in my head said “breathe, you know this place.” and it was right.

Nia Òla

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