i like that naomi got me the exact quote. (everything i say has been said before by a feminist in the seventies. eighties.) also that she thinks i might cook even though i’ve never even gotten my oven turned on, nor am i even clear if i am using the right language to discuss said oven. anyway, i laughed. 

"emo-agressive elfa males are the new passive-aggressive alpha males."

mikkipedia

“emo-aggressive” is important. 

the other day one of the people with whom i share an ex was telling me how he would talk about his past substance abuse issues and i was like, oh, yeah, he totally used to use that to get girls and, also, to take over every conversation. another person, with whom i share a different ex, was like, “all the crying.” all the crying. and that time he was tweeting at people he thought i didn’t like and when i showed up at his apartment a few minutes later he immediately said, “i feel like you’ve been distant lately.” 

manipulative. emotional bullying by playing the victim. 

so here is the book: you can go back to the 50s and talk about men not sharing their emotions with anyone except for their wives, blah blah, then talk about the 60s with, like, the esalen and t-group dudes sharing, sharing, sharing, and the new left men who tried to distance themselves from those dudes all the while following c. stuart mills’s “the personal is political” and thinking black culture was more authentic because it was more feeling even as they criticized feminist groups that did CR. then you can trace the 80s and 90s and, i don’t know, donahue and alan alda and the rise of indie bands or something. then you can get to now and men patting themselves on the back for being so in touch with their emotions while actually (as always) using them in a really patriarchal and oppressive way to drown out women’s feelings or insist on taking up more space or add to women’s affective labor or as a trick to actually avoid doing things or to insist that women aren’t being vulnerable enough without any sense of the different stakes.

insidious sexism works better. plundering resources. 

find a few recent movies and novels and interview some couples therapists and at least you’ve got a nyt styles story. you’re welcome. 

"it isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, i have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that i can know, beforehand, everything i need to tell you. it means that most of the time i am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. that these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. that i feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. that we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. the possibility of life between us."

adrienne rich, women and honor: some notes on lying. (via teaandthorazine) what about this to this? not totally, just a little bit. feeling forced to speak or to speak perfectly or to speak of feelings one does not at that moment want to speak of is a nightmare or even traumatic. “frightening, but not destructive.” also: honor. 

"the fear that fate will strike again is crucial to the memory of trauma, and to the inability to talk about it…the act of telling might itself become severely traumatizing, if the price of speaking is re-living; not relief, but further retraumatization…moreover, if one talks about the trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to, the telling might itself be lived as a return of the trauma—a re-experiencing of the event itself."

dori laub, “bearing witness or the vicissitudes of listening” in testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history

"…the contract of the testimony…"

dori laub, “bearing witness or the vicissitudes of listening” in testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. it’s all about contracts. 

"…in contrast to freud’s vision of the human being as a field of significance whose actions express wider meaning than we might care to be questioned about, austin’s vision is of the human being as a field of vulnerability whose actions imply wider consequences and effects and results—if narrower meaning—than we should have to be answerable for."

stanley cavell in the introduction to shoshana felman’s the scandal of the speaking body. it’s so touching—really touching, i love this—partly because it feels like privileged men struggling to get it. 

"silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. there is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses."

michel foucault, the history of sexuality, an introduction: volume I 

this makes me think about when i said that i felt like privacy rejected me and so why be silent. this also make me think about when we were first dating and he was like, “i know you like to keep your relationships private” or, much, much later, when mikki said to me, “this must be really hard for you. the relationship has been so theatrical from the beginning and you’ve always been such a private person.” one of the reasons i was always so private, i think, is because that’s what allowed me to actually be vulnerable.

i became less private, perhaps, during all of those terrible couples therapy sessions—not my idea—in which silence is considered an affront to the entire process. i remember one time, in particular, when i felt like the therapist and my boyfriend were colluding to try to get me to speak on a subject, even though i clearly didn’t want to, even though it was hardly the worst of our problems, but perhaps a convenient one for him, a way for him to make it look like i was acting out on issues that were all in my head, or maybe it was our worst problem, related to the fact that i thought he was all talk about the relationship but wouldn’t do anything, least of all protect me or my feelings. anyway, they both appeared rational, your dry heat feels like power, while i was clearly on the verge of some traumatic reaction—i felt terrible, i felt like no one cared that i felt terrible, not to mention overpowered—and i had already said i didn’t want to talk about it. and so i didn’t. i fucking refused to talk about it and remained silent as a form of speech and self-protection and i’m glad i did. vulnerability is a privilege. anyway, when i was ready i did talk about it, right here, on my tumblr. 

at first i was afraid to listen to but it’s so right for today’s conversation with my therapist about capitalism and tonight’s theorizing about same.  

"although the male, being ashamed of what he is and almost of everything he does, insists on privacy and secrecy in all aspects of his life, he has no real regard for privacy."

valerie solanas, SCUM 

"as a woman living among the signifying practices of men, i am familiar with the politics of the process by which the woman’s pain went unspoken and was made intelligible as what it was not."

jo-anna isaak, “our mother tongue: the post-partum document“