Andy Warhol Almost Dies

“talking to him was like talking to a chair” 

I was rereading this today and thought how nice that he compares SCUM Manifesto to the Temple of Dendur in terms of cultural artifacts.

mikkipedia:

And also that if someone had published Lolita as L.O.L.I.T.A, Lessons Of a Lecherous Incestuous Trust-betraying child Abuser AND RAPIST or something and Nabokov shot the person responsible, people would be sticking up for him pretty hardcore.

“as it happens…she was angry because he had lost the manuscript of a play she had written…” um, kinda. this blog post is so short, how did any editor let so much nonsense language and even less rigorous ideas go? the tone is everything you’ve ever needed to know about the patriarchy. who is worse, andy warhol or this ultra-bored, but really ultra-boring, writer? seriously valerie forever. at least she fucking did something besides pedantically and prissily faux-equivocate—“mainly remembered,” “fifteen years or so” (look it up, reporter, precision is your job. how many years was it?)—and wore lipstick while doing it. 

hysteriarama:

TRIGGER WARNING WHATEVER I FEEL GROSS PLZ DON’T TELL MY MOM I’M NOT READY TO HAVE THAT CONVERSATION UGH UGH THIS FEELS LIKE COMING OUT

to contextualize oversharing as a tactic:

- caution, the ways we speak in hushed tones

- being a “shitty person”, carefully measuring our words out to not transgress upon anyone’s hard-won autonomy and safety

- except that that can be silencing, quiet isn’t necessarily safer

- and sometimes we can deal with difficulty, sometimes you just need to say everything that’s bothering you in a space for you won’t be abandoned for it

- not always

- but sometimes

- if we politicize support and care but only in certain contexts then we miss something

- if we support survivors but we don’t support people who just feel bad then we don’t give them space to assert their feeling-bad as something that may be pre-politicized

- for example sometimes it takes us a long time to name rape as rape and violation as violation. the first hint is the feeling bad but when we say the feeling bad we’re being crazy, we’re being hysterical

- in many communities, feeling-bad and oversharing it is only valued and received gently when it’s understood as political

- I’m thinking of all the people I know who would call a rape joke out as fucked but wouldn’t listen to someone vent/participate in a climate of non-venting as normal and healthy and how they are contributing to silence

- because we aren’t finished figuring out how to live together, how to practice intimacy, how to relate, how to resist etc, together

- and feeling awful is relevant

- feeling awful is relevant

- feeling awful is relevant

- I don’t know what it means but it is relevant

How am I to integrate these experiences:

When I was eighteen and had just been assaulted by a friend who I knew and trusted I didn’t call it assault. I was without an adequate language for the mess of grief and betrayal I felt. I did not have the words to call it rape. That came later. At the time I only felt wrecked. (You know this story, why am I telling it to you, you know it)

important. it’s true that it is fucked that certain people think certain things should only be talked about in certain ways in certain spaces. (that is, in the ways and spaces that make them feel comfortable. that is, in therapy, but not an hour after therapy. or ten hours after therapy. therapy or other designated spaces as containers for feelings so they don’t inconvenience other times and spaces and people who only want to be bothered for an hour, once a week, or for however long the meeting lasts.) and the thing about not being abandoned; there are so many ways of abandoning someone. i would also like to support telling a story, or the story, again and again. 

farahjoon:

I made this last night because I didn’t want to study for midterms. I wanna make it my default on fuckbook because of reasons, but then I’m like ‘fuck it, no one cares, whatever.’ my apathy knows no bounds. still, this is really, really fucking important, and just so fucking relevant to our lives.  

omg. 

"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. 

"beneath the faux-breezy boredom of tanenhaus’ tone is a kind of sexist rage that is simmering like that fatal attraction bunny."

i was re-reading myself, as one does, and thinking that, after that ann liv young post, this 90swoman post is maybe my favorite thing i’ve ever written on how bored The Heteropatriarchy is with us and how we are forever accused of being boring, or out of step with time.

also, doesn’t tanenhaus’s dry heat feel like power? what we’ve had to give up to get here. i take it personally. chris kraus’s comments about the therapeutic or psychoanalytic or confessional ‘I’” bug me not only because they seem affectively in tune with someone like tanenhaus, but because they resonate with accusations of feminist art and politics being stuck in the 60s, as though we actually worked out any of those issues, or anyone actually knows that much more about women’s lives now, beyond what we know about women and sex, which is the one thing no one is that scared to talk about, and that gets publicized partly because guys want to read about that, too. 

of course, part of what is so boring for women is that we aren’t supposed to talk about it, any of it, or if we do, it’s supposed to be in a certain way, which i don’t think has so much to do with being therapeutic as with being palatable and, yes, easily narrativized.

i think i’m getting hung up on a word. heaven. 

also: see one of my favorite pieces of art. 

emotional weaponry

“mother wants what’s best for her kids; daddy only wants what’s best for daddy, that is peace and quiet, pandering to his delusion of dignity (`respect’), a good reflection on himself (status) and the opportunity to control and manipulate, or, if he’s an `enlightened’ father, to `give guidance’. his daughter, in addition, he wants sexually — he gives her hand in marriage; the other part is for him. daddy, unlike mother, can never give in to his kids, as he must, at all costs, preserve his delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always-rightness and strength. never getting one’s way leads to lack of self-confidence in one’s ability to cope with the world and to a passive acceptance of the status quo. mother loves her kids, although she sometimes gets angry, but anger blows over quickly and even while it exists, doesn’t preclude love and basic acceptance. emotionally diseased daddy doesn’t love his kids; he approves of them — if they’re `good’, that is, if they’re nice, `respectful’, obedient, subservient to his will, quiet and not given to unseemly displays of temper that would be most upsetting to daddy’s easily disturbed male nervous system — in other words, if they’re passive vegetables. If they’re not `good’, he doesn’t get angry — not if he’s a modern, `civilized’ father (the old-fashioned ranting, raving brute is preferable, as he is so ridiculous he can be easily despised) — but rather expresses disapproval, a state that, unlike anger, endures and precludes a basic acceptance, leaving the kid with the feeling of worthlessness and a lifelong obsession with being approved of; the result is fear of independent thought, as this leads to unconventional, disapproved of opinions and way of life.”

—valerie solanas, SCUM. a man once told me that he “didn’t approve” of my crying in the months after the miscarriage. mmmmmhmmmm.  

"(maleness is the right to shut up, to not apologize, to preserve the illusion of bodily integrity)"

negationparty, the only forms of writing i am capable of are manipulative fake disclosure and pointless mapping/coding/commanding of some fictional Other