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peacefulapocalypse · 3 years

Text

I Sexually Identify as an

Attack Helicopter

by ISABEL FALL

I sexually identify as an attack helicopter.

I lied. According to US Army Technical Manual 0, The Soldier as a System, “attack helicopter” is a

gender identity, not a biological sex. My dog tags and Form 3349 say my body is an XX-karyotope

somatic female.

But, really, I didn’t lie. My body is a component in my mission, subordinate to what I truly am. If I

say I am an attack helicopter, then my body, my sex, is too. I’ll prove it to you.

When I joined the Army I consented to tactical-role gender reassignment. It was mandatory for the

MOS I’d tested into. I was nervous. I’d never been anything but a woman before.

But I decided that I was done with womanhood, over what womanhood could do for me; I wanted to

be something furiously new.

To the people who say a woman would’ve refused to do what I do, I say—

Isn’t that the point?

I fly—

Red evening over the white Mojave, and I watch the sun set through a canopy of polycarbonate and

glass: clitoral bulge of cockpit on the helicopter’s nose. Lightning probes the burned wreck of an oil

refinery and the Santa Ana feeds a smoldering wildfire and pulls pine soot out southwest across the

Big Pacific. We are alone with each other, Axis and I, flying low.

We are traveling south to strike a high school.

Rotor wash flattens rings of desert creosote. Did you know that creosote bushes clone themselves?

The ten-thousand-year elders enforce dead zones where nothing can grow except more creosote.

Beetles and mice live among them, the way our cities had pigeons and mice. I guess the analogy

breaks down because the creosote’s lasted ten thousand years. You don’t need an attack helicopter

to tell you that our cities haven’t. The Army gave me gene therapy to make my blood toxic to

mosquitoes. Soon you will have that too, to fight malaria in the Hudson floodplain and on the banks

of the Greater Lake.

Now I cross Highway 40, southbound at two hundred knots. The Apache’s engine is electric and

silent. Decibel killers sop up the rotor noise. White-bright infrared vision shows me stripes of heat,

the tire tracks left by Pear Mesa school buses. Buried housing projects smolder under the dirt,

radiators curled until sunset. This is enemy territory. You can tell because, though this desert was

once Nevada and California, there are no American flags.

“Barb,” the Apache whispers, in a voice that Axis once identified, to my alarm, as my mother’s.

“Waypoint soon.”

“Axis.” I call out to my gunner, tucked into the nose ahead of me. I can see only gray helmet and

flight suit shoulders, but I know that body wholly, the hard knots of muscle, the ridge of pelvic

girdle, the shallow navel and flat hard chest. An attack helicopter has a crew of two. My gunner is

my marriage, my pillar, the completion of my gender.

“Axis.” The repeated call sign means, I hear you.

“Ten minutes to target.”

“Ready for target,” Axis says.

But there is again that roughness, like a fold in carbon fiber. I heard it when we reviewed our

fragment orders for the strike. I hear it again now. I cannot ignore it any more than I could ignore a

battery fire; it is a fault in a person and a system I trust with my life.

But I can choose to ignore it for now.

The target bumps up over the horizon. The low mounds of Kelso-Ventura District High burn warm

gray through a parfait coating of aerogel insulation and desert soil. We have crossed a third of the

continental US to strike a school built by Americans.

Axis cues up a missile: black eyes narrowed, telltales reflected against clear laser-washed cornea.

“Call the shot, Barb.”

“Stand by. Maneuvering.” I lift us above the desert floor, buying some room for the missile to run,

watching the probability-of-kill calculation change with each motion of the aircraft.

Before the Army my name was Seo Ji Hee. Now my call sign is Barb, which isn’t short for Barbara. I

share a rank (flight warrant officer), a gender, and a urinary system with my gunner Axis: we are

harnessed and catheterized into the narrow tandem cockpit of a Boeing AH-70 Apache Mystic.

America names its helicopters for the people it destroyed.

We are here to degrade and destroy strategic targets in the United States of America’s war against

the Pear Mesa Budget Committee. If you disagree with the war, so be it: I ask your empathy, not

your sympathy. Save your pity for the poor legislators who had to find some constitutional

framework for declaring war against a credit union.

The reasons for war don’t matter much to us. We want to fight the way a woman wants to be

gracious, the way a man wants to be firm. Our need is as vamp-fierce as the strutting queen and

dryly subtle as the dapper lesbian and comfortable as the soft resilience of the demiwoman. How

often do you analyze the reasons for your own gender? You might sigh at the necessity of morning

makeup, or hide your love for your friends behind beer and bravado. Maybe you even resent the

punishment for breaking these norms.

But how often—really—do you think about the grand strategy of gender? The mess of history and

sociology, biology and game theory that gave rise to your pants and your hair and your salary? The

casus belli?

Often, you might say. All the time. It haunts me.

Then you, more than anyone, helped make me.

When I was a woman I wanted to be good at woman. I wanted to darken my eyes and strut in heels.

I wanted to laugh from my throat when I was pleased, laugh so low that women would shiver in

contentment down the block.

And at the same time I resented it all. I wanted to be sharper, stronger, a new-made thing,

exquisite and formidable. Did I want that because I was taught to hate being a woman? Or because I

hated being taught anything at all?

Now I am jointed inside. Now I am geared and shafted, I am a being of opposing torques. The noise

I make is canceled by decibel killers so I am no louder than a woman laughing through two walls.

When I was a woman I wanted to have friends who would gasp at the precision and surprise of my

gifts. Now I show friendship by tracking the motions of your head, looking at what you look at, the

way one helicopter’s sensors can be slaved to the motions of another.

When I was a woman I wanted my skin to be as smooth and dark as the sintered stone countertop

in our kitchen.

Now my skin is boron-carbide and Kevlar. Now I have a wrist callus where I press my hydration

sensor into my skin too hard and too often. Now I have bit-down nails from the claustrophobia of the

bus ride to the flight line. I paint them desert colors, compulsively.

When I was a woman I was always aware of surveillance. The threat of the eyes on me, the chance

that I would cross over some threshold of detection and become a target.

Now I do the exact same thing. But I am counting radars and lidars and pit viper thermal sensors,

waiting for a missile.

I am gas turbines. I am the way I never sit on the same side of the table as a stranger. I am most

comfortable in moonless dark, in low places between hills. I am always thirsty and always tense. I

tense my core and pace my breath even when coiled up in a briefing chair. As if my tail rotor must

cancel the spin of the main blades and the turbines must whirl and the plates flex against the pitch

links or I will go down spinning to my death.

An airplane wants in its very body to stay flying. A helicopter is propelled by its interior

near-disaster.

I speak the attack command to my gunner. “Normalize the target.”

Nothing happens.

“Axis. Comm check.”

“Barb, Axis. I hear you.” No explanation for the fault. There is nothing wrong with the weapon attack

parameters. Nothing wrong with any system at all, except the one without any telltales, my spouse,

my gunner.

“Normalize the target,” I repeat.

“Axis. Rifle one.”

The weapon falls off our wing, ignites, homes in on the hard invisible point of the laser designator.

Missiles are faster than you think, more like a bullet than a bird. If you’ve ever seen a bird.

The weapon penetrates the concrete shelter of Kelso-Ventura High School and fills the empty halls

with thermobaric aerosol. Then: ignition. The detonation hollows out the school like a hooked finger

scooping out an egg. There are not more than a few janitors in there. A few teachers working late.

They are bycatch.

What do I feel in that moment? Relief. Not sexual, not like eating or pissing, not like coming in from

the heat to the cool dry climate shelter. It’s a sense of passing . Walking down the street in the right

clothes, with the right partner, to the right job. That feeling. Have you felt it?

But there is also an itch of worry—why did Axis hesitate? How did Axis hesitate?

Kelso-Ventura High School collapses into its own basement. “Target normalized,” Axis reports,

without emotion, and my heart beats slow and worried.

I want you to understand that the way I feel about Axis is hard and impersonal and lovely. It is

exactly the way you would feel if a beautiful, silent turbine whirled beside you day and night,

protecting you, driving you on, coursing with current, fiercely bladed, devoted. God, it’s love. It’s

love I can’t explain. It’s cold and good.

“Barb,” I say, which means I understand . “Exiting north, zero three zero, cupids two.”

I adjust the collective—feel the swash plate push up against the pitch links, the links tilt the angle of

the rotors so they ease their bite on the air—and the Apache, my body, sinks toward the hot desert

floor. Warm updraft caresses the hull, sensual contrast with the Santa Ana wind. I shiver in delight.

Suddenly: warning receivers hiss in my ear, poke me in the sacral vertebrae, put a dark

thunderstorm note into my air. “Shit,” Axis hisses. “Air search radar active, bearing 192, angles

twenty, distance . . . eighty klicks. It’s a fast-mover. He must’ve heard the blast.”

A fighter. A combat jet. Pear Mesa’s mercenary defenders have an air force, and they are out on the

hunt. “A Werewolf.”

“Must be. Gown?”

“Gown up.” I cue the plasma-sheath stealth system that protects us from radar and laser hits. The

Apache glows with lines of arc-weld light, UFO light. Our rotor wash blasts the plasma into a bright

wedding train behind us. To the enemy’s sensors, that trail of plasma is as thick and soft as

insulating foam. To our eyes it’s cold aurora fire.

“Let’s get the fuck out.” I touch the cyclic and we sideslip through Mojave dust, watching the school

fall into itself. There is no reason to do this except that somehow I know Axis wants to see. Finally I

pull the nose around, aim us northeast, shedding light like a comet buzzing the desert on its way

into the sun.

“Werewolf at seventy klicks,” Axis reports. “Coming our way. Time to intercept . . . six minutes.”

The Werewolf Apostles are mercenaries, survivors from the militaries of climate-seared states. They

sell their training and their hardware to earn their refugee peoples a few degrees more distance from

the equator.

The heat of the broken world has chased them here to chase us.

Before my assignment neurosurgery, they made me sit through (I could bear to sit, back then) the

mandatory course on Applied Constructive Gender Theory. Slouched in a fungus-nibbled plastic chair

as transparencies slid across the cracked screen of a De-networked Briefing Element overhead

projector: how I learned the technology of gender.

Long before we had writing or farms or post-digital strike helicopters, we had each other. We lived

together and changed each other, and so we needed to say “this is who I am, this is what I do.”

So, in the same way that we attached sounds to meanings to make language, we began to attach

clusters of behavior to signal social roles. Those clusters were rich, and quick-changing, and so just

like language, we needed networks devoted to processing them. We needed a place in the brain to

construct and to analyze gender.

Generations of queer activists fought to make gender a self-determined choice, and to undo the

creeping determinism that said the way it is now is the way it always was and always must be.

Generations of scientists mapped the neural wiring that motivated and encoded the gender choice.

And the moment their work reached a usable stage—the moment society was ready to accept plastic

gender, and scientists were ready to manipulate it—the military found a new resource. Armed with

functional connectome mapping and neural plastics, the military can make gender tactical.

If gender has always been a construct, then why not construct new ones?

My gender networks have been reassigned to make me a better AH-70 Apache Mystic pilot. This is

better than conventional skill learning. I can show you why.

Look at a diagram of an attack helicopter’s airframe and components. Tell me how much of it you

grasp at once.

Now look at a person near you, their clothes, their hair, their makeup and expression, the way they

meet or avoid your eyes. Tell me which was richer with information about danger and capability. Tell

me which was easier to access and interpret.

The gender networks are old and well-connected. They work .

I remember being a woman. I remember it the way you remember that old, beloved hobby you left

behind. Woman felt like my prom dress, polyester satin smoothed between little hand and little hip.

Woman felt like a little tic of the lips when I was interrupted, or like teasing out the mood my

boyfriend wouldn’t explain. Like remembering his mom’s birthday for him, or giving him a list of

things to buy at the store, when he wanted to be better about groceries.

I was always aware of being small: aware that people could hurt me. I spent a lot of time thinking

about things that had happened right before something awful. I would look around me and ask

myself, are the same things happening now? Women live in cross-reference. It is harder work than

we know.

Now I think about being small as an advantage for nape-of-earth maneuvers and pop-up guided

missile attacks.

Now I yield to speed walkers in the hall like I need to avoid fouling my rotors.

Now walking beneath high-tension power lines makes me feel the way that a cis man would feel if he

strutted down the street in a miniskirt and heels.

I’m comfortable in open spaces but only if there’s terrain to break it up. I hate conversations I

haven’t started; I interrupt shamelessly so that I can make my point and leave.

People treat me like I’m dangerous, like I could hurt them if I wanted to. They want me protected

and watched over. They bring me water and ask how I’m doing.

People want me on their team. They want what I can do.

A fighter is hunting us, and I am afraid that my gunner has gender dysphoria.

Twenty thousand feet above us (still we use feet for altitude) the bathroom-tiled transceivers cupped

behind the nose cone of a Werewolf Apostle J-20S fighter broadcast fingers of radar light. Each beam

cast at a separate frequency, a fringed caress instead of a pointed prod. But we are jumpy, we are

hypervigilant—we feel that creeper touch.

I get the cold-rush skin-prickle feel of a stranger following you in the dark. Has he seen you? Is he

just going the same way? If he attacks, what will you do, could you get help, could you scream? Put

your keys between your fingers, like it will help. Glass branches of possibility grow from my skin,

waiting to be snapped off by the truth.

“Give me a warning before he’s in IRST range,” I order Axis. “We’re going north.”

“Axis.” The Werewolf’s infrared sensor will pick up the heat of us, our engine and plasma shield,

burning against the twilight desert. The same system that hides us from his radar makes us hot and

visible to his IRST.

I throttle up, running faster, and the Apache whispers alarm. “Gown overspeed.” We’re moving too

fast for the plasma stealth system, and the wind’s tearing it from our skin. We are not modest. I

want to duck behind a ridge to cover myself, but I push through the discomfort, feeling out the

tradeoff between stealth and distance. Like the morning check in the mirror, trading the confidence

of a good look against the threat of reaction.

When the women of Soviet Russia went to war against the Nazis, when they volunteered by the

thousands to serve as snipers and pilots and tank drivers and infantry and partisans, they fought

hard and they fought well. They ate frozen horse dung and hauled men twice their weight out of

burning tanks. They shot at their own mothers to kill the Nazis behind her.

But they did not lose their gender; they gave up the inhibition against killing but would not give up

flowers in their hair, polish for their shoes, a yearning for the young lieutenant, a kiss on his dead

lips.

And if that is not enough to convince you that gender grows deep enough to thrive in war: when the

war ended the Soviet women were punished. They went unmarried and unrespected. They were

excluded from the victory parades. They had violated their gender to fight for the state and the state

judged that violation worth punishment more than their heroism was worth reward.

Gender is stronger than war. It remains when all else flees.

When I was a woman I wanted to machine myself.

I loved nails cut like laser arcs and painted violent-bright in bathrooms that smelled like laboratories.

I wanted to grow thick legs with fat and muscle that made shapes under the skin like Nazca lines. I

loved my birth control, loved that I could turn my period off, loved the home beauty-feedback kits

that told you what to eat and dose to adjust your scent, your skin, your moods. I admired, wasn��t

sure if I wanted to be or wanted to fuck, the women in the build-your-own-shit videos I watched on

our local image of the old Internet. Women who made cyberattack kits and jewelry and

sterile-printed IUDs, made their own huge wedge heels and fitted bras and skin-thin chameleon

dresses. Women who talked about their implants the same way they talked about computers,

phones, tools: technologies of access, technologies of self-expression.

Something about their merciless self-possession and self-modification stirred me. The first time I

ever meant to masturbate I imagined one of those women coming into my house, picking the lock,

telling me exactly what to do, how to be like her. I told my first boyfriend about this, I showed him

pictures, and he said, girl, you bi as hell, which was true, but also wrong. Because I did not want

those dresses, those heels, those bodies in the way I wanted my boyfriend. I wanted to possess that

power. I wanted to have it and be it.

The Apache is my body now, and like most bodies it is sensual. Fabric armor that stiffens beneath

my probing fingers. Stub wings clustered with ordnance. Rotors so light and strong they do not even

droop: as artificial-looking, to an older pilot, as breast implants. And I brush at the black ring of a

sensor housing, like the tip of a nail lifting a stray lash from the white of your eye.

I don’t shave, which all the fast jet pilots do, down to the last curly scrotal hair. Nobody expects a

helicopter to be sleek. I have hairy armpits and thick black bush all the way to my ass crack. The

things that are taboo and arousing to me are the things taboo to helicopters. I like to be picked up,

moved, pressed, bent and folded, held down, made to shudder, made to abandon control.

Do these last details bother you? Does the topography of my pubic hair feel intrusive and

unnecessary? I like that. I like to intrude, inflict damage, withdraw. A year after you read this maybe

those paragraphs will be the only thing you remember: and you will know why the rules of gender

are worth recruitment.

But we cannot linger on the point of attack.

“He’s coming north. Time to intercept three minutes.”

“Shit. How long until he gets us on thermal?”

“Ninety seconds with the gown on.” Danger has swept away Axis’ hesitation.

“Shit.”

“He’s not quite on zero aspect—yeah, he’s coming up a few degrees off our heading. He’s not sure

exactly where we are. He’s hunting.”

“He’ll be sure soon enough. Can we kill him?”

“With sidewinders?” Axis pauses articulately: the target is twenty thousand feet above us, and he

has a laser that can blind our missiles. “We’d have more luck bailing out and hiking.”

“All right. I’m gonna fly us out of this.”

“Sure.”

“Just check the gun.”

“Ten times already, Barb.”

When climate and economy and pathology all went finally and totally critical along the Gulf Coast,

the federal government fled Cabo fever and VARD-2 to huddle behind New York’s flood barriers.

We left eleven hundred and six local disaster governments behind. One of them was the Pear Mesa

Budget Committee. The rest of them were doomed.

Pear Mesa was different because it had bought up and hardened its own hardware and power. So

Pear Mesa’s neural nets kept running, retrained from credit union portfolio management to the

emergency triage of hundreds of thousands of starving sick refugees.

Pear Mesa’s computers taught themselves to govern the forsaken southern seaboard. Now they

coordinate water distribution, re-express crop genomes, ration electricity for survival AC, manage all

the life support humans need to exist in our warmed-over hell.

But, like all advanced neural nets, these systems are black boxes. We have no idea how they work,

what they think. Why do Pear Mesa’s AIs order the planting of pear trees? Because pears were their

corporate icon, and the AIs associate pear trees with areas under their control. Why does no one

make the AIs stop? Because no one knows what else is tangled up with the “plant pear trees”

impulse. The AIs may have learned, through some rewarded fallacy or perverse founder effect, that

pear trees cause humans to have babies. They may believe that their only function is to build

support systems around pear trees.

When America declared war on Pear Mesa, their AIs identified a useful diagnostic criterion for hostile

territory: the posting of fifty-star American flags. Without ever knowing what a flag meant, without

any concept of nations or symbols, they ordered the destruction of the stars and stripes in Pear Mesa

territory.

That was convenient for propaganda. But the real reason for the war, sold to a hesitant Congress by

technocrats and strategic ecologists, was the ideology of scale atrocity . Pear Mesa’s AIs could not be

modified by humans, thus could not be joined with America’s own governing algorithms: thus must

be forced to yield all their control, or else remain forever separate.

And that separation was intolerable. By refusing the United States administration, our superior

resources and planning capability, Pear Mesa’s AIs condemned citizens who might otherwise be

saved to die—a genocide by neglect. Wasn’t that the unforgivable crime of fossil capitalism? The

creation of systems whose failure modes led to mass death?

Didn’t we have a moral imperative to intercede?

Pear Mesa cannot surrender, because the neural nets have a basic imperative to remain online. Pear

Mesa’s citizens cannot question the machines’ decisions. Everything the machines do is connected in

ways no human can comprehend. Disobey one order and you might as well disobey them all.

But none of this is why I kill.

I kill for the same reason men don’t wear short skirts, the same reason I used to pluck my brows,

the reason enby people are supposed to be (unfair and stupid, yes, but still) androgynous with short

hair. Are those good reasons to do something? If you say no, honestly no—can you tell me you

break these rules without fear or cost?

But killing isn’t a gender role, you might tell me. Killing isn’t a decision about how to present your

own autonomous self to the world. It is coercive and punitive. Killing is therefore not an act of

gender.

I wish that were true. Can you tell me honestly that killing is a genderless act? The method? The

motive? The victim?

When you imagine the innocent dead, who do you see?

“Barb,” Axis calls, softly. Your own voice always sounds wrong on recordings—too nasal. Axis’ voice

sounds wrong when it’s not coming straight into my skull through helmet mic.

“Barb.”

“How are we doing?”

“Exiting one hundred and fifty knots north. Still in his radar but he hasn’t locked us up.”

“How are you doing?”

I cringe in discomfort. The question is an indirect way for Axis to admit something’s wrong, and that

indirection is obscene. Like hiding a corroded tail rotor bearing from your maintenance guys.

“I’m good,” I say, with fake ease. “I’m in flow. Can’t you feel it?” I dip the nose to match a drop-off

below, provoking a whine from the terrain detector. I am teasing, striking a pose. “We’re gonna be

okay.”

“I feel it, Barb.” But Axis is tense, worried about our pursuer, and other things. Doesn’t laugh.

“How about you?”

“Nominal.”

Again the indirection, again the denial, and so I blurt it out. “Are you dysphoric?”

“What?” Axis says, calmly.

“You’ve been hesitating. Acting funny. Is your—” There is no way to ask someone if their militarized

gender conditioning is malfunctioning. “Are you good?”

“I . . . ” Hesitation. It makes me cringe again, in secondhand shame. Never hesitate. “I don’t know.”

“Do you need to go on report?”

Severe gender dysphoria can be a flight risk. If Axis hesitates over something that needs to be done

instantly, the mission could fail decisively. We could both die.

“I don’t want that,” Axis says.

“I don’t want that either,” I say, desperately. I want nothing less than that. “But, Axis, if—”

The warning receiver climbs to a steady crow call.

“He knows we’re here,” I say, to Axis’ tight inhalation. “He can’t get a lock through the gown but

he’s aware of our presence. Fuck. Blinder, blinder, he’s got his laser on us—”

The fighter’s lidar pod is trying to catch the glint of a reflection off us. “Shit,” Axis says. “We’re

gonna get shot.”

“The gown should defeat it. He’s not close enough for thermal yet.”

“He’s gonna launch anyway. He’s gonna shoot and then get a lock to steer it in.”

“I don’t know—missiles aren’t cheap these days—”

The ESM mast on the Apache’s rotor hub, mounted like a lamp on a post, contains a cluster of

electro-optical sensors that constantly scan the sky: the Distributed Aperture Sensor. When the DAS

detects the flash of a missile launch, it plays a warning tone and uses my vest to poke me in the

small of my back.

My vest pokes me in the small of my back.

“Barb. Missile launch south. Barb. Fox 3 inbound. Inbound. Inbound.”

“He fired,” Axis calls. “Barb?”

“Barb,” I acknowledge.

I fuck—

Oh, you want to know: many of you, at least. It’s all right. An attack helicopter isn’t a private way of

being. Your needs and capabilities must be maintained for the mission.

I don’t think becoming an attack helicopter changed who I wanted to fuck. I like butch assertive

people. I like talent and prestige, the status that comes of doing things well. I was never taught the

lie that I was wired for monogamy, but I was still careful with men, I was still wary, and I could

never tell him why: that I was afraid not because of him, but because of all the men who’d seemed

good like him, at first, and then turned into something else.

No one stalks an attack helicopter. No slack-eyed well-dressed drunk punches you for ignoring the

little rape he slurs at your neckline. No one even breaks your heart: with my dopamine system tied

up by the reassignment surgery, fully assigned to mission behavior, I can’t fall in love with anything

except my own purpose.

Are you aware of your body? Do you feel your spine when you stand, your hips when you walk, the

tightness and the mass in your core? When you look at yourself, whose eyes do you use? Your own?

I am always in myself. I never see myself through my partner’s eyes. I have weapons to use, of

course, ways of moving, moans and cries. But I measure those weapons by their effect, not by their

similarity to some idea of how I should be.

Flying is the loop of machinery and pilot, the sense of your motion on the controls translated into

torque and lift, the airframe’s reaction shaping your next motion until the loop closes and machine

and pilot are one. Awareness collapses to the moment. You are always doing the right thing exactly

as it needs to be done. Sex is the same: the search for everything in an instant.

Of course I fuck Axis. A few decades ago this would’ve been a crime. What a waste of perfectly

useful behavior. What a waste of that lean muscled form and those perfect killing hands that know

me millimeter-by-millimeter system-by-system so there is no mystique between us. No “secret

places” or “feminine mysteries,” only the tortuously exact technical exercise of nerves and pressure.

Oxytocin released, to flow between us, by the press of knuckles in my cunt.

When I come beneath Axis I cry out, I press my body close, I want that utter loss of control that I

feel nowhere else. Heartbeat in arched throat: nipple beneath straining tongue. And my mind is

hyper-activated, free-associating, and as Axis works in me I see the work we do together. I see puffs

of thirty-millimeter autocannon detonating on night-cold desert floor.

Violence doesn’t get me off. But getting off makes me revel in who I am: and I am violent, made for

violence, alive in the fight.

Does that surprise you? Does it bother you to mingle cold technical discipline with hot flesh and

sweat?

Let me ask you: why has the worst insult you can give a combat pilot always been weak dick?

Have you ever been exultant? Have you ever known that you are a triumph? Have you ever felt that

it was your whole life’s purpose to do something, and all that you needed to succeed was to be

entirely yourself?

To be yourself well is the wholest and best feeling that anything has ever felt.

It is what I feel when I am about to live or die.

The Werewolf’s missile arches down on us, motor burned out, falling like an arrow. He is trying a

Shoot On Prospect attack: he cannot find us exactly, so he fires a missile that will finish the search,

lock onto our heat or burn through our stealth with its onboard radar, or acquire us optically like a

staring human eye. Or at least make us react. Like the catcaller’s barked “Hey!” to evoke the flinch

or the huddle, the proof that he has power.

We are ringed in the vortex of a dilemma. If we switch off the stealth gown, the Werewolf fighter will

lock its radar onto us and guide the missile to the kill. If we keep the stealth system on, the missile’s

heat-seeker will home in on the blazing plasma.

I know what to do. Not in the way you learn how to fly a helicopter, but the way you know how to

hold your elbows when you gesture.

A helicopter is more than a hovering fan, see? The blades of the rotor tilt and swivel. When you turn

the aircraft left, the rotors deepen their bite into the air on one side of their spin, to make off-center

lift. You cannot force a helicopter or it will throw you to the earth. You must be gentle.

I caress the cyclic.

The Apache’s nose comes up smooth and fast. The Mojave horizon disappears under the chin. Axis’

gasp from the front seat passes through the microphone and into the bones of my face. The pitch

indicator climbs up toward sixty degrees, ass down, chin up. Our airspeed plummets from a hundred

and fifty knots to sixty.

We hang there for an instant like a dancer in an oversway. The missile is coming straight down at

us. We are not even running anymore.

And I lower the collective, flattening the blades of the rotor, so that they cannot cut the air at an

angle and we lose all lift.

We fall.

I toe the rudder. The tail rotor yields a little of its purpose, which is to counter the torque of the

main rotor: and that liberated torque spins the Apache clockwise, opposite the rotor’s turn, until we

are nose down sixty degrees, facing back the way we came, looking into the Mojave desert as it rises

up to take us.

I have pirouetted us in place. Plasma fire blows in wraith pennants as the stealth system tries to

keep us modest.

“Can you get it?” I ask.

“Axis.”

I raise the collective again and the rotors bite back into the air. We do not rise, but our fall slows

down. Cyclic stick answers to the barest twitch of wrist, and I remember, once, how that slim wrist

made me think of fragility, frailty, fear: I am remembering even as I pitch the helicopter back and

we climb again, nose up, tail down, scudding backward into the sky while aimed at our chasing killer.

Axis is on top now, above me in the front seat, and in front of Axis is the chin gun, pointed sixty

degrees up into heaven.

“Barb,” the helicopter whispers, like my mother in my ear. “Missile ten seconds. Music? Glare?”

No. No jamming. The Werewolf missile will home in on jamming like a wolf with a taste for pepper.

Our laser might dazzle the seeker, drive it off course—but if the missile turns then Axis cannot take

the shot.

It is not a choice. I trust Axis.

Axis steers the nose turret onto the target and I imagine strong fingers on my own chin, turning me

for a kiss, looking up into the red scorched sky—Axis chooses the weapon (30MM GUIDED PROX AP)

and aims and fires with all the idle don’t-have-to-try confidence of the first girl dribbling a soccer ball

who I ever for a moment loved—

The chin autocannon barks out ten rounds a second. It is effective out to one point five kilometers.

The missile is moving more than a hundred meters per second.

Axis has one second almost exactly, ten shots of thirty-millimeter smart grenade, to save us.

A mote of gray shadow rushes at us and intersects the line of cannon fire from the gun. It becomes

a spray of light. The Apache tings and rattles. The desert below us, behind us, stipples with tiny

plumes of dust that pick up in the wind and settle out like sift from a hand.

“Got it,” Axis says.

“I love you.”

“Axis.”

Many of you are veterans in the act of gender. You weigh the gaze and disposition of strangers in a

subway car and select where to stand, how often to look up, how to accept or reject conversation.

Like a frequency-hopping radar, you modulate your attention for the people in your context: do not

look too much, lest you seem interested, or alarming. You regulate your yawns, your appetite, your

toilet. You do it constantly and without failure.

You are aces.

What other way could be better? What other neural pathways are so available to constant

reprogramming, yet so deeply connected to judgment, behavior, reflex?

Some people say that there is no gender, that it is a postmodern construct, that in fact there are

only man and woman and a few marginal confusions. To those people I ask: if your body-fact is

enough to establish your gender, you would willingly wear bright dresses and cry at movies, wouldn’t

you? You would hold hands and compliment each other on your beauty, wouldn’t you? Because your

cock would be enough to make you a man.

Have you ever guarded anything so vigilantly as you protect yourself against the shame of

gender-wrong?

The same force that keeps you from gender-wrong is the force that keeps me from fucking up.

The missile is dead. The Werewolf Apostle is still up there.

“He’s turning off.” Axis has taken over defensive awareness while I fly. “Radar off. Laser off. He’s

letting us go.”

“Afraid of our fighters?” The mercenaries cannot replace a lost J-20S. And he probably has a

wingman, still hiding, who would die too if they stray into a trap.

“Yes,” Axis says.

“Keep the gown on.” In case he’s trying to bluff us into shutting down our stealth. “We’ll stick to the

terrain until he’s over the horizon.”

“Can you fly us out?”

The Apache is fighting me. Fragments of the destroyed missile have pitted the rotors, damaged the

hub assembly, and jammed the control surfaces. I begin to crush the shrapnel with the Apache’s

hydraulics, pounding the metal free with careful control inputs. But the necessary motions also move

the aircraft. Half a second’s error will crash us into the desert. I have to calculate how to un-jam the

shrapnel while accounting for the effects of that shrapnel on my flight authority and keeping the

aircraft stable despite my constant control inputs while moving at a hundred and thirty knots across

the desert.

“Barb,” I say. “Not a problem.”

And for an hour I fly without thought, without any feeling except the smooth stone joy of doing

something that takes everything.

The night desert is black to the naked eye, soft gray to thermal. My attention flips between my left

eye, focused on the instruments, and my right eye, looking outside. I am a black box like the Pear

Mesa AIs. Information arrives—a throb of feedback in the cyclic, a shift of Axis’ weight, a dune crest

ahead—and my hands and feet move to hold us steady. If I focused on what I was doing it would all

fall apart. So I don’t.

“Are you happy?” Axis asks.

Good to talk now. Keep my conscious mind from interfering with the gearbox of reflexes below.

“Yeah,” I say, and I blow out a breath into my mask, “yeah, I am,” a lightness in my ribs, “yeah, I

feel good.”

“Why do you think we just blew up a school?”

Why did I text my best friend the appearance and license number of all my cab drivers, just in case?

Because those were the things that had to be done.

Listen: I exist in this context. To make war is part of my gender. I get what I need from the flight

line, from the ozone tang of charging stations and the shimmer of distant bodies warping in the

tarmac heat, from the twenty minutes of anxiety after we land when I cannot convince myself that I

am home, and safe, and that I am no longer keeping us alive with the constant adjustments of my

hands and feet.

“Deplete their skilled labor supply, I guess. Attack the demographic skill curve.”

“Kind of a long-term objective. Kind of makes you think it’s not gonna be over by election season.”

“We don’t get to know why the AIs pick the targets.” Maybe destroying this school was an accident.

A quirk of some otherwise successful network, coupled to the load-bearing elements of a vast

strategy.

“Hey,” I say, after a beat of silence. “You did good back there.”

“You thought I wouldn’t.”

“Barb.” A more honest yes than “yes,” because it is my name, and it acknowledges that I am the

one with the doubt.

“I didn’t know if I would either,” Axis says, which feels exactly like I don’t know if I love you

anymore . I lose control for a moment and the Apache rattles in bad air and the tail slews until I stop

thinking and bring everything back under control in a burst of rage.

“You’re done?” I whisper, into the helmet. I have never even thought about this before. I am cold,

sweat soaked, and shivering with adrenaline comedown, drawn out like a tendon in high heels, a

just-off-the-dance-floor feeling, post-voracious, satisfied. Why would we choose anything else? Why

would we give this up? When it feels so good to do it? When I love it so much?

“I just . . . have questions.” The tactical channel processes the sound of Axis swallowing into a dull

point of sound, like dropped plastic.

“We don’t need to wonder, Axis. We’re gendered for the mission—”

“We can’t do this forever,” Axis says, startling me. I raise the collective and hop us up a hundred

feet, so I do not plow us into the desert. “We’re not going to be like this forever. The world won’t be

like this forever. I can’t think of myself as . . . always this.”

Yes, we will be this way forever. We survived this mission as we survive everywhere on this hot and

hostile earth. By bending all of what we are to the task. And if we use less than all of ourselves to

survive, we die.

“Are you going to put me on report?” Axis whispers.

On report as a flight risk? As a faulty component in a mission-critical system? “You just intercepted

an air-to-air missile with the autocannon, Axis. Would I ever get rid of you?”

“Because I’m useful,” Axis says, softly. “Because I can still do what I’m supposed to do. That’s what

you love. But if I couldn’t . . . I’m distracting you. I’ll let you fly.”

I spare one glance for the gray helmet in the cockpit below mine. Politeness is a gendered protocol.

Who speaks and who listens. Who denies need and who claims it. As a woman, I would’ve pressed

Axis. As a woman, I would’ve unpacked the unease and the disquiet.

As an attack helicopter, whose problems are communicated in brief, clear datums, I should ignore

Axis.

But who was ever only one thing?

“If you want to be someone else,” I say, “someone who doesn’t do what we do, then . . . I don’t

want to be the thing that stops you.”

“Bird’s gotta land sometime,” Axis says. “Doesn’t it?”

In the Applied Constructive Gender briefing, they told us that there have always been liminal

genders, places that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. Who are we in those

moments when we break our own rules? The straight man who sleeps with men? The woman who

can’t decide if what she feels is intense admiration, or sexual attraction? Where do we go, who do we

become?

Did you know that instability is one of the most vital traits of a combat aircraft? Civilian planes are

built stable, hard to turn, inclined to run straight ahead on an even level. But a military aircraft is

built so it wants to tumble out of control, and it is held steady only by constant automatic feedback.

The way I am holding this Apache steady now.

Something that is unstable is ready to move, eager to change, it wants to turn, to dive, to tear away

from stillness and fly .

Dynamism requires instability. Instability requires the possibility of change.

“Voice recorder’s off, right?” Axis asks.

“Always.”

“I love doing this. I love doing it with you. I just don’t know if it’s . . . if it’s right.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Barb?”

“Thank you for thinking about whether it’s right. Someone needs to.”

Maybe what Axis feels is a necessary new queerness. One which pries the tool of gender back from

the hands of the state and the economy and the war. I like that idea. I cannot think of myself as a

failure, as something wrong, a perversion of a liberty that past generations fought to gain.

But Axis can. And maybe you can too. That skepticism is not what I need . . . but it is necessary

anyway.

I have tried to show you what I am. I have tried to do it without judgment. That I leave to you.

“Are we gonna make it?” Axis asks, quietly.

The airframe shudders in crosswind. I let the vibrations develop, settle into a rhythm, and then I

make my body play the opposite rhythm to cancel it out.

“I don’t know,” I say, which is an answer to both of Axis’ questions, both of the ways our lives are in

danger now. “Depends how well I fly, doesn’t it?”

“It’s all you, Barb,” Axis says, with absolute trust. “Take us home.”

A search radar brushes across us, scatters off the gown, turns away to look in likelier places. The

Apache’s engine growls, eating battery, turning charge into motion. The airframe shudders again,

harder, wind rising as cooling sky fights blazing ground. We are racing a hundred and fifty feet

above the Larger Mojave where we fight a war over some new kind of survival and the planet we

maimed grows that desert kilometer by kilometer. Our aircraft is wounded in its body and in its

crew. We are propelled by disaster. We are moving swiftly.

#I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by ISABEL FALL #I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter #ISABEL FALL #gender identity

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tuyetanliu · 3 years

Photo

S P I L L E D W A T E R / D E E P O C E A N S

(a camp nano work in progress.)

a short story/novella duology focused on a triad princess, a triad heir, and their intertwined lives due to their respective roles in their families.

s p i l l e d w a t e r

parted lips, exposed wrists, lidded eyes, and pretty lies; these are the things men like.

a soft silk pillow cushioned carina’s knees from the hardwood floors of their traditional house. mother lounged on an intricate golden chair fitted with crimson-velvet covers and throw pillows; the midnight sky tumbled down her back in thick, soft curls and she ran graceful, thin fingers through the strands, checking for dry ends. her red-painted nails glistened beneath the evening light.

carina bo yok hong is the eldest child of the hong clan. in her father’s eyes, her talent for strategic violence will never eclipse her womanhood. the dragon head title she covets will fall to her incompetent secondborn brother instead while she becomes a wife to a man chosen by her father. but if she cannot choose her future, carina will undermine any attempts to stifle her potential.

d e e p o c e a n s

“is she blooded?”

he met her heavy gaze. “no one will say.”

out of fear or loyalty? her unasked questions hung in the air like the impenetrable humid summers in the south. wing hong’s eyes glided over the snow-dusted water gardens outside the windows where the fog sat low against the clear pond; a layer of white frost erased all nuances of color—a rebirth in waiting.

“no one will say,” he repeated.

antonio wing hong yeung is the heir to the yeung family. a tiger born once in every three generations, or so everyone says, and he’s in need of a wife before his succession as the dragon head. he doesn’t care for beauty or charms; he wants a vicious, cunning girl that will slit the throat of his enemies if needed. and carina bo yok hong seems to be the girl that suits his needs.

#sunsetdistrict&starfallisland #lxcuna #archistratego #merulia #writing #writeblr #spilled water & deep oceans #mine

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yongjaeten · 4 years

Text

Temptations {Na Jaemin}

Pairing: Na Jaemin x Reader

Genre: Smut

Warnings: Cursing, unprotected sex, first time

Word Count: 1,058

"You're so beautiful," he whispered in your ear as his hand crawled down your bare abdomen. "You don't know how beautiful you are to me. You're the most beautiful thing in the world to me and I can't stop looking at you."

He brought his lips down on yours and softly kissed them. His hand lifted the thin elastic waistband of your panty and he rested his hand on top of your womanhood. The contact made you furrow your eyebrows in pleasure and you placed a hand to his face, pulling him in for a deeper kiss. He separated your folds with his index and middle fingers and began coating them with your juices, swirling them around. He broke the kiss and looked into your eyes.

"You're so wet already Y/N," he said with a smirk on his face. "How long have you been thinking about me doing that to you?"

You blushed and turned your face away from his. "Jaemin..."

He held your chin and swerved it back to look at him. "Yes baby?" He asked and flashed you his drop dead gorgeous smile.

You opened your mouth to finish your statement, but he inserted two of his fingers inside you. You gasped out loud and your face contorted from the intense feeling. He took in your expression and chuckled after you. You bit down on your lower lip, trying your best not to moan out loud, and he smirked. He knew perfectly well how to make you scream his name just the way he liked it.

"You take me so well Y/N," he whispered in your ear and began to thrust his fingers at a harsh pace in and out of your soaking cunt. "Wait until you feel my cock for the first time. You'll be begging me for seconds and thirds."

He placed his lips against your neck and painted it with his finest artwork of blues and purples. "Jaemin," you softly moaned his name. Your hand crawled up to the back of his head and your fingers got tangled into his luscious blue hair.

"Let's try that again. I didn't hear you the first time. A little louder for me baby," he growled and shoved his digits further in so that they were knuckle deep.

"AH! FUCK JAEMIN!" you shouted and he scoffed with a smirk on his face.

"That's more like it baby," he said and curled his fingers around your uterus lining when he felt your walls tightening on them. "Cum on my fingers and I will reward you with something even better." You didn't need telling twice for as soon as you reached your orgasm, you let your juices flow on his fingers. "Look at that." He pulled out his fingers, bringing them to his lips, and licked them clean. "Mm, so delicious."

You squeezed your knees together, the electric feeling still zapping through your core, and he ran his hand down to your knees. He pulled them apart and brought his hand back up to your underwear as he slid it down your legs. He stood up from off the floor and slipped out of his black sweatpants and boxers. His erection sprang up once it was free and he climbed onto the bed.

"Open wider princess," he demanded as he tapped your knees with his long fingers. "We're going to have so much fun tonight. Just you and me."

You spread your thighs apart and he crawled between them. He placed a hand on the bed next to your face, supporting himself, and brought his face closer to yours. He reached down with his other hand and grasped his cock firmly. He briefly met his lips with yours and lined his member with your entrance. You sucked in the air between your teeth and he slowly bottomed you out. Your hands automatically wrapped themselves around his back and you dug your nails into his skin. You dragged your nails from between his shoulder blades and down to his lower back.

"Shit," he cursed and groaned as the pain stung him for a few seconds. "That good, huh?" he teasingly asked and smirked. "Let's find out how many times you can cum in one night shall we?"

He started to roll his hips against yours at a slow speed and you allowed the blissful sensation to overtake your mind. Jaemin pressed his lips on yours and moved it to your cheek, before redirecting them towards your neck. You shut your eyes and squeezed them when you felt his pace picking up a notch. Your hands slid away from his back, leaving red lines behind, and gliding down to his elbows.

"You feel so good around my cock Y/N," he murmured.

He wriggled his elbows free from your hands, grabbed them, and pinned them above your head. His thrusts were now slamming perfectly into you and your eyes rolled to the back of your head. You had never experienced such a blissful state in your life and you wished it would never end. Jaemin grinned seeing you cage your lower lip between your teeth and used his strength to plow in you harder and deeper.

"HOLY SH-!" you gasped out loud and he repeated it, hitting your sensitive spot over and over. "JAEMIN!"

Your walls secured itself around his dick and he grunted. His cock throbbed and twitched and your insides were on fire; nerves going haywire. You knew he was on edge from the way he stuttered between his thrusts and you weren't far behind. He leaned his head back and parted his lips as he shut his eyes. His thick muscle moved on its own inside you and he groaned as hot streams of white liquid splattered your walls.

He tangled his fingers with yours and hid his face in the crook of your neck. "Cum for me baby," he said.

He strategically rubbed his pelvis, giving you the correct amount of friction needed, and you succumbed to your orgasm. He released one of your hands and caressed your leg, going up to your thigh, then stopping there. He waited until you found the right breathing pattern and kissed your lips.

"Did you enjoy it?" he asked and you nodded. "Good," he simply said and there was a malicious glint in his eyes. "Because I'm not done with you."

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shewhotellsstories · 1 year

Text

Being an agnostic is weird because every once in a while someone abhorrent dies and you find yourself hoping they’re burning in hell.

#religion #carolyn bryant #emmett till #strategic white womanhood #hate crimes

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shortskirtsandsarcasm · 4 years

Text

Rereading Little Women as an Adult

Like plenty of other young girls on the verge of their first middle school dance, I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It was a warm contrast to The Clique series and other young adult literature popular in the 2000s that centered on social snobbery and pettiness. The Little Women film (starring June Allyson) was also a staple in my house growing up, as I was not allowed to watch much mainstream media, most of all animated children’s films. However, none of the film adaptations ever gave me the same feeling I got from reading the book or made me want to give the book a reread. Until, of course, the newest version: Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation. As most people read this story in childhood, I thought it would be interesting to reread Little Women as an adult and pitched the idea to my book club and it became our April read.

Rereading Little Women as an adult gave me a different perspective on the characters and the message Alcott was hoping to cultivate. Inadvertently, it was the perfect book to settle into at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. The story and characters are heartwarming, wholesome, comforting during a pandemic where we all have to stay inside. In addition, the Marches’ story is one of survival. They are not wealthy and are living through the Civil War, already a time of financial difficulty and uncertainty. Their father, their only male family member, is away fighting for a good chunk of the story, and without him Marmee and the girls are vulnerable. The absence of March sons means that the girls have limited options for financial survival into adulthood. Meg worked as a governess before her marriage and Jo sells her short stories, but it is clear that neither is a long-term career with financial stability or independence. This societal and financial instability is parallel to the job-losses of the pandemic and

Amy has been much maligned as the worst March sister, but I heartily disagree. Amy is by far the best March. I blame the many movie adaptations for this portrayal. Amy is shown to be selfish and materialistic, which she definitely is, but no more than any other normal person is. Meg is just as selfish, but the movie adaptations do not explore it as much because she’s the oldest, and therefore a “second mother,” and cannot afford to indulge her petty luxuries. But reading the book, you can see that Meg likes to imagine herself as a martyr, and therefore keeps her selfish impulses to herself, lest she is seen as anything other than the perfect daughter (and later the perfect wife and the perfect mother). Amy’s contrast to the angelic Beth also makes her seem more selfish and nefarious than she really is. Beth clings to her image as a domestic angel on earth, even though she kills her bird by not feeding it for a week. With her painful shyness, exclusive love of the domestic, and dedication to good works, as evidenced by her many visits to the Hummel family, and her lack of ambition for literally anything, Beth slots into the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house.” Her young death cements her status as a domestic martyr and helps to gloss over her lack of personality and that she killed her pet. Through her young marriage and motherhood, Meg can also be considered an “angel in the house,” but she will never reach Beth’s mythical perfection because she desires money and material comforts (what a bitch). Alcott sets Beth up to be The Best Sister™ but my hot take is that Beth is in fact, the worst character in the whole book. The most recent film adaptation is the only one, in my opinion, that does the character of Amy justice. We see her burn Jo’s collected fairy tales in a disproportionate childish rage, but we also see her calculate her family’s future and her important role in it, as the only one willing to “marry well.” The other films portray her strategic marriage designs as purely social climbing or gold-digging, but in Amy’s temporal context, there is not much she, or any of her sisters, can do to keep her family from going under financially, especially in the event of the death of her father. She has goals to be a great artist, but even if she did become one, it would realistically not pay the bills.

The two halves of Meg and Beth’s roles as “angels in the house” come together in Marmee, the mother of the March girls. She is more of a “mother” archetype than a real person. She always has the perfect lessons in wisdom at the right time and is simultaneously a gentle domestic goddess and an effective disciplinarian, even when her daughters are adults and no longer living at home. In the chapter “On the Shelf,” Marmee tells Meg that it is her fault that her husband spends all his evenings with his friend (and his friend’s young, childless wife) instead of with her and their children:

You have only made the mistake that most young wives make — forgotten your duty to your husband in your love for your children. A very natural and forgivable mistake, Meg, but one that had better be remedied before you take to different ways, for children should draw you nearer than ever, not separate you, as if they were all yours, and John had nothing to do but support them. I’ve seen it for some weeks, but have not spoken, feeling sure it would come right in time (322).

Marmee’s advice in this and all things always perpetuates the traditional gender norms that dictate that women should be quiet, gentle, and subservient, all while running an immaculate household. They should manage every situation and their husbands perfectly, but without ever letting their husbands feel managed, lest they should feel emasculated. The only advice that diverges from this is that Marmee tells Meg she should share childcare duties with her husband — a reasonable suggestion since they are his offspring as well. Marmee does limit these childcare duties to disciplining and teaching skills. Let’s not get crazy and ask John to change a diaper.

Someone in my book club pointed out that the messaging of Little Women seems particularly anti-feminist, even for the time it was published (1868) and I wish I had thought to say at the time that because this book was published in the United States, not Britain where I now live and attend book club meetings, the goalposts for what was “radical feminism” were very different. But of course, I did not think of this argument fast enough, and I will be bitter forever. If you look at the political debates — in the context of the pandemic or not — being held in the US vs the UK, you can see that much of American politics is deeply puritanical. It’s not surprising that these puritanical political ideals would be even more intense in 1868, especially since it was in the years directly following the American Civil War, a conflict about whether or not some people had a right not to be someone else’s property. The postwar political climate was all about the apportioning of rights to populations that previously had none or very few. It is certainly true that Little Women contains many outdated and problematic messages on gender roles and the meaning of womanhood, but it is important to remember that in the context of the experiences of white womanhood in the northern United States, Little Women was radical in its portrayal of young women and their individual approaches to domesticity. I enjoyed revisiting Little Women, but if I could expunge the memories of cringey middle school dances that came with it, I would.

#literature #books #book review #little women #louisa may alcott

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brotheralyosha · 4 years

Note

do you have any specific anti rupi kaur poetry opinions you wish to share? i just ask because I can't stand her poetry and it drives me crazy

Oh dear lord anon, I’ve kept quiet on my views of Rupi Kaur’s poetry for years because I wanted to avoid The Discourse - thank you for finally giving me an excuse!

Honestly, the best summation of my feelings on Rupi Kaur is in two very excellent articles. They’re both worth reading in their entirety, but I’ve included my favorite sections below.

No Filter, by Soraya Roberts

What is perhaps as consistent as the badness of Instapoetry—there are rare exceptions, Shire (who, it must be said, is more a Tumblr and Twitter poet, her Instagram being primarily made up of images and video) being one—is the general unwillingness to speak openly of its badness. Admirers focus on its genuine feeling, its emotional truth. Critics shrug it off, claiming it’s just not their thing. Which is basically how it was designed: Instagram was developed out of a project titled “Send the Sunshine” at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, not exactly a project intended to accommodate criticism. Though critical trepidation is a common consequence of the slippery definition of art—we once believed readymades sucked, too—part of this reluctance is also to do with the genre appealing predominantly to young women and haven’t young women been policed enough? Rupi Kaur herself wields this tack as a way to deflect excoriation, equating the criticism of her work to the criticism of marginalized demographics. Of the label “Instagram poet,” she told PBS, “A lot of the readers are young women who are experiencing really real things, and they’re not able to talk about it with maybe family or other friends, and so they go to this type of poetry to sort of feel understood and to have these conversations. And so, when you use that term, you invalidate this space that they use to heal and to feel closer to one another.” You also invalidate women of color as Kaur frames herself within a landscape of both female and immigrant oppression, a context in which judgment is tantamount to muting the disenfranchised. To the literary world, she has pronounced, “This is actually not for you. This is for that, like, seventeen-year-old brown woman in Brampton who is not even thinking about that space, who is just trying to live, survive, get through her day.” It is a savvy move, invalidating all manner of criticism before it has even been formulated.

But here it is: Her poetry, and much of Instapoetry, is poor. This poetry is not poor because it is genuine, it is poor because that is all it is. To do more than that, regardless of talent, requires time, and, by its very definition, Instapoetry has none. Ezra Pound’s epic collection of poems The Cantos took decades to complete. Maya Angelou has said she has found poetry the most challenging of all her professions: “When I come close to saying what I want to, I’m over the moon. Even if it’s just six lines, I pull out the champagne. But until then, my goodness, those lines worry me like a mosquito in the ear.” Even Rimbaud, who was already composing his best work in adolescence, conceded in his “Letter of the Seer,” “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” Time is what is required to think, the kind of thinking that allows the poet to imbue each individual word with a world of meaning. Harold Bloom described canonical writing as that which demands rereading, William Empson that it needs to work for readers with divergent opinions, provoking a variety of responses and interpretations. All of this implies a richness, a complexity, a variety of strata. The majority of Instapoetry has none of this. It is almost exclusively a banal vessel of self-care, equivalent to an affirmation, designed for young women of a certain privileged position and disposition, one that is entirely self-absorbed. The genre’s batheticisms remove specificity, to avoid alienation, supplanting them with the sort of platitude you find on a department store tea towel. Because this is what Instapoetry is—it is not art, it is a good to be sold, or, less, regrammed. Its value is quantity not quality.

The Problem with Rupi Kaur’s Poetry, by Chiara Giovanni

While more female South Asian voices are indeed needed in mainstream culture and media, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma. There is no shame in acknowledging the many differences between Kaur’s experience of the world in 2017 and that of a woman living directly under colonial rule in the early 20th century. For example: neither is any more “authentically” South Asian. But it is disingenuous to collect a variety of traumatic narratives and present them to the West as a kind of feminist ethnography under the mantle of confession, while only vaguely acknowledging those whose stories inspired the poetry.

…

Kaur’s strategic appeals to two different markets also inform the composition of her collection and her social media presence. While milk and honey contains several poems that, through coded words like “dishonor,” obliquely refer to Kaur’s cultural upbringing, that’s about as explicit as it gets: The poems are vague enough to provide identifiable prompts for readers from a variety of different cultural environments, including — in many cases — white Western readers. Thus the collection remains relatable — and, crucially, marketable — to a wider audience, while still retaining an element of culturally informed authenticity that forms much of Kaur’s brand. The few poems that specifically address race are positioned facing each other, a brief interlude in a collection that is otherwise devoid of racial politics, and once again addresses a white, Western audience in their appeal for recognition of South Asian beauty and resilience.

…

Thanks to this social media strategy of sharing pieces with little to no context, Kaur is able to target two demographics: white Westerners who might be disinclined to buy books by minority writers, and her loyal grassroots fan base that includes a large contingent of young people of color across the world. She is thus able to maintain her brand of authenticity and relatability, but in different ways for different groups; to her Western metropolitan audience, she is “the patron saint of millennial heartbreak,” while to her marginal readers she is a representation of their desire for diversity in the literary world, despite rarely touching upon race in her work. This is not to reinforce the often-damaging expectation that writers of color must write only about racism in order to be successful, only that Kaur claims to be documenting a specifically South Asian experience that never materializes.

#long post #anonymous #rupi kaur

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crazycoke-addict · 5 years

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Hints that Sandor Clegane And Sansa Stark are going to meet again in the books and Sansa has feelings towards the hound.

Sansa Stark And Sandor Clegane aka the hound are fictional characters in a book series called A song of ice and fire by George R.R. Martin and also from a HBO show called Game of Thrones. In the books, many characters have POVs in which we hear their thoughts and perspective on other characters as well, Sansa Stark being one of them. Sansa and Sandor are different but both similar at the same time. She’s a high-born lady while he’s basically a lapdog for Joffrey Baratheon hence his nickname being the hound. In a way it’s like Beauty and the beast. However the similarities is that their time in kingslanding they don’t exactly fit in, Sandor isn’t in the Kingsguard And is much of an outsider while Sansa is the daughter of the “traitor” Lord Eddard Stark. Although they do interact in the show, I feel like the books gives us a bit more information. Even when they are far apart Sansa still thinks of them in both Friend and romance alike. I believe she has feelings for Sandor and I’m pretty sure the fans can agree as well.

Sansa and Sandor meet in the first book, “Game of Thrones”. Sansa is betrothed to Prince Joffrey and Sandor is joffrey’s bodygaurd. Later in the books, he tells her the story about how his brother pushed his face into the leaving a burnt scar on his face. The reason why he decided tell Sansa this is to basically show that they live in a dangerous place and that the stories she has read about handsome princes and knights aren’t what they appear. Sansa’s father Lord Eddard Stark is executed under the orders of King Joffrey. After dismissal of Ser Barristan Selmy, Sandor replaces him despite not being a knight himself. In the Capicity, He is often assigned to watch over Sansa and despite his gruffness attitude, he shows kindness towards her and even tries to protect her from Joffrey’s sadism. When Joffrey orders Ser Meryn Trant to slap Sansa for her back talk, Sandor was the one to wipe the blood off of her lip.

In second book, Clash of Kings, Sandor strategically defends Sansa and is the only one whom doesn’t abuse her even when Joffrey orders him too. During Joffrey’s name-day when he makes his Kingsguard drink Ser Dontos to death, Sansa makes up lie by saying that it’s bad luck to kill someone on your name-day, Sandor backs her up. When Ser Meryn Trant is abusing Sansa in front of the lords and ladies, Tyrion Lannister along with Bronn and Timett Stop the abuse before It can get any worse and orders someone to cover her due to Ser Meryn Trant ripping her dress off, Sandor puts his white cloak around her. In one part of the story, Sansa is stopped by a drunken Sandor whom brings up about her almost growing into almost womanhood, Sandor asked her sing to him about knights and fair maidens since he still sees her as a little bird, in which Sansa replied that she will gladly sing to him. Although, he was rough with her during the encounter, Sansa still trusts him because he’s more gentle and protects her from Ser Boros Blunt. After seeing the departure of Myrcella Baratheon, a riot in kings landing breaks out. Sansa gets herself in a terrible situation where a group of men are about to rape and possibly murder her, Sandor kills the groups of men and rescues her before they could go any further. During the battle of Blackwater due to his fear of fire, Sandor walks away from the battlefield and goes to find Sansa. During the battle, Sansa prays to the mother to save Sandor and also to gentle his rage. Sansa goes back to her room where she meets a drunken Sandor. He tells that he’s getting out of kingslanding and ask her to come with her and says that he will keep her safe, Sansa decides to stay but Sandor leaves his cloak. Sansa wraps the bloody cloak. In the future chapters of Sansa’s POV, she talks about a kiss that happen that night, but the thing is there was never a kiss.

With them being apart from each other, Sansa wishes Sandor was here with her and still has his bloody cloak with her where she kept it in a chest with her sumner dresses, when she is forced to marry Tyrion Lannister. Sansa even says that Tyrion is uglier than the hound. During the death of King Joffrey Baratheon, Sansa escapes from kings landing with the help of Ser Dontos (whom Sansa saved from death) and Petyr Baelish. Sansa is sent to the Eyrie were her aunt Lysa Arryn lives. Sansa almost gets raped again by Lysa’s singer Marillion but is saved by Ser Lothor Brune, Littlefinger’s bodyguard. She briefly believe to be Sandor who saved her and not lothor who rescued her. In one part of the story, Sansa befriends an old blind dog and sleeps in front of a fire place and has a dream of her marriage with Tyrion in which she’s in her marriage bed however Tyrion turns into a tall scarred-face man and tells her to sing to him. The scarred-face man obviously resembles Sandor. I find this part interesting, I find it surprising that people don’t talk about this part in the story because it shows Sansa’s feelings towards Sandor Clegane to the point where she even dreams of marrying him.

In A feast of Crows, where she disguised herself as Alayne Stone, she let’s Robert Arryn whom she has nicknamed sweetrobin kiss her, when his lips touch hers, she remembers Sandor kissing her.

Quotes where Sansa mentions Sandor

“He is no true knight, but he saved me all the same. Save him if you can, and gentle the rage inside him”- praying to the mother during battle of the Blackwater.

“I wish the hound were here. The night of the battle, Sandor Clegane had come to her chambers to take her from the city, but Sansa had refused. Sometimes she lay awake at night, wondering if she’d been wise. She had his strained white cloak hidden in a cedar chest beneath her summer silks. She could boy say why she’d kept it. The hound had turned craven, she heard it said;the height of the battle, he got drunk the imp had to take his men. But Sansa understood. She knew the secret of his burned his face. It was only the fire he feared. That night, wildfire had set the river itself ablaze, and filled the very air with green flame. Even in the castle, Sansa had been afraid. Outside.... she could scarcely imagine it”

“As the boy’s lips touched her own she found herself thinking of another kiss. She could still remember how it felt, When his cruel mouth pressed down on her Own. He had come to sansa in darkness as green fire filled the sky. He took a song and a kiss and left me nothing but a bloody cloak.”

“I would be gladder if it were the hound, Sansa thought. Harsh as he was, she did not believe Sandor Clegane would let any harm come to her”.

In the book Sandor Clegane’s whereabouts is unknown and it’s even unknown if he’s alive. There’s a theory that he’s the grave digger which is mentioned in the fourth book, A Feast for Crows were Brienne of Tarth and her companions have arrived on the Quiet Isle, they walk uphill passing a lichyard on the way, where she noticed a brother bigger than her struggling to dig Brother Clement’s grave. Unlike the show, Sansa is still in the Eyrie and is still Alayne Stone, her new identity. With Sansa always thinking about him to the point where she has a dream of him being her new husband, I do believe that they will meet again that is if Sandor is alive in the book.

Their relationship reminds me of a syndrome is called Lima Syndrome which is complete opposite to Stockholm syndrome. Lima syndrome is when the abductor develops sympathy towards their captive. Granted, Sansa wasn’t kidnapped but after the death of her father, she was held hostage by the Lannister in Kingslanding. Sandor whose around her a bit more due him having to protect Joffrey is the only one who feels sympathy for her. He defends her, doesn’t follow Joffrey’s orders when it comes to beating her up and even saved from a group of mob, he even asked her to escape kingslanding with him even though he knew they’ll be consequences.

#game of thrones #sansa stark #sandor clegane #the hound #sansan

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the-ethereal-serpent · 5 years

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List of the most common Pagan Goddesses :

Akhilandeshvari — Hindu Goddess Never— Not— Broken

Amaterasu — Japanese sun Goddess

Annapurna — Hindu Goddess of Food and Nourishment

Aphrodite /Venus — Greek Goddess of love and beauty

Artemis/Diana — Greek/Roman Goddess of the hunt, virginity, and childbirth, twin sister of Apollo, and an Olympian, often associated with the moon

Astarte — Phoenician Goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war

Athena — Greek Goddess of wisdom, defensive and strategic wars

Bast — Egyptian solar and war Goddess (in the form of a cat)

Baubo — Greek Goddess of mirth, jests, and bawdy humour. A bawdy body goddess, sexuality and play (in an adult sense) and ribald humour, the power of life (in a manifest sense) and procreation and enjoying — even flaunting — flirtation and sexuality. Also the one who teasingly, laughingly tempted Amaterasu out of her cave -ie, brings us out of intellect and isolation into our physical selves and connection. (At least, this is how I understand her.) The Goddess of Having A Good Time!

Brighid — Celtic Goddess of poetry, healing, and crafts (especially smith-work), holy wells and eternal flames

Cerridwen — Celtic Goddess of transformation, of the cauldron of inspiration, of prophecy

Cybele — Greek Earth Mother

Danu — Irish Mother Goddess

Demeter — Greek Goddess of the harvest and of grain, mother of Persephone

Durga — Hindu Great Goddess, Divine Mother

Eos — Greek Goddess of the dawn

Ereshkigal — Mesopotamian Goddess of Darkness, Death, and Gloom

Flora — Roman Goddess of flowers

Fortuna — Roman Goddess of fortune

Freya or Freyja — Norse Goddess of fertility, sexual liberty, abundance, and war

Frigg — Norse Goddess of marriage, household management, and love, Queen of Heaven, and wife of Odin

Gaia/Earth Mother — The Greek Goddess Gaia is the primordial Goddess of earth, mother and grandmother of the first generation of Titans

Hathor — Egyptian Goddess of the Milky Way, Mother Goddess, Goddess of childbirth and death

Hecate — Greek Goddess of witchcraft and magick, crossroads, and the harvest moon

Hestia — Greek Goddess of the hearth and domestic life

Hel — Norse Goddess daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, Queen of the Dead

Hera — Roman Goddess of the Hearth, of women, and of marriage

Inanna — Sumerian Goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare

Isis — Egyptian Mother Goddess, matron of nature and magick, Goddess of creativity and the underdog

Ishtar — Mesopotamian Goddess of sexual love, fertility, and war

Juno — Roman Queen of the Gods and Goddess of matrimony

Kali — Hindu Goddess of Time and Death, slayer of demons, protectress (As Kali Ma: Divine Mother Goddess)

Kore — Greek Maiden Goddess of bountiful Earth (See also Persephone)

Kuan Yin , Kwan Yin Ma , Quan Yin — Chinese Goddess of Mercy and Compassion

Lakshmi — Hindu Goddess of Wealth and Fertility (Goddess as Mother/Sustainer)

Lalita — Hindu Goddess of Beauty

Luna — Roman Goddess of the Moon

Ma'at — Egyptian Goddess, personified concept of truth, balance, justice, and order

Mary — Mother Goddess, Queen of Heaven, Goddess of Femininity

Maya — Hindu Goddess of Illusion and Mystery

Minerva — Roman Goddess of wisdom and war

Morrigan — Celtic war Goddess

Nut — Egyptian Goddess of heaven and the sky and all celestial bodies

Parvati — Hindu Divine Mother, the embodiment of the total energy in the universe, Goddess of Power and Might

Pele — Hawai'ian volcano Goddess, Destroyer and Creatrix

Persephone — Greek Goddess daughter of Demeter, Queen of the Underworld, also a grain— Goddess, Maiden Goddess

Radha — Hindu Divine Mother

Rhiannon — Celtic Goddess of the moon

Rosmurta — Celtic/Roman Goddess of abundance. She is also the Goddess of Business Success.

Saraswati — Hindu Goddess of Knowledge, the Arts, Mathematics, Education, and cosmic Wisdom (Creatrix)

Sedna — Inuit Goddess of the Sea and Queen of the Underworld

Selene — Greek Goddess of Moon

Shakti — Hindu primordial cosmic energy, Great Divine Mother

Shekina — Hebrew Goddess of compassion in its purest form (feminine aspect of God)

Sita — Hindu Goddess representing perfect womanhood

Sol — Norse Sun Goddess

Sophia — Greek Goddess of wisdom

Spider Woman — Teotihuacan Great Goddess (Creatrix)

Tara — Hindu, Mother Goddess, the absolute, unquenchable hunger that propels all life.

Tara, Green — Buddhist female Buddha, Tibetan Buddhism - compassion, liberation, success. Compassionate Buddha of enlightened activity

Tara, White — Buddhist Goddess known for compassion, long life, healing and serenity; also known as The Wish— fulfilling Wheel, or Cintachakra

Tara, Red — fierceness, magnetizing all good things

Tara, Black — power

Tara, Yellow — wealth and prosperity

Tara, Blue — transmutation of anger

Tiamat — Mesopotamian dragon Goddess, embodiment of primordial chaos (the Velvet Dark)

Uma — Hindu Goddess of power, the personification of light and beauty, embodying great beauty and divine wisdom

Vesta — Roman Goddess of the hearth

Voluptas — Roman Goddess of pleasure

Yemaya — Yoruban Mother Goddess, Goddess of the Ocean

White Buffalo Calf Woman— Lakota Goddess

Source : http://www.wicca-spirituality.com/wiccan-goddesses.html

Image Source : https://pin.it/omtirfpt2fdxnp

#Pagan #Goddess #Pagan goddess #Wicca #Wiccan #Witchy #Diety

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ts1989fanatic · 4 years

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Taylor Swift And The End Of An Era

Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift embodied the contradictions of the decade in pop music

“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” Taylor Swift sings in the chorus of “The Man,” a song from her latest album, Lover. She chose the up-tempo tune to open her “Artist of the Decade” medley at the AMAs last month, and it’s a return to familiar Swiftian themes; she claps back at unspecified, sexist critics who fail to acknowledge her “good ideas and power moves.”

Whatever one might think of Swift’s underdog complex, it’s not surprising that the end of the 2010s finds her exhausted. Her transformation from tween country sensation to tabloid-friendly pop star to polarizing Twitter talking point and, finally, to celebrity supernova, required — at the very least — plenty of stamina.

There’s no question that straight white femininity still occupies a privileged place in the cultural landscape, which helped pave the way for Swift’s rise and decade-long pop dominance — even as she became a zeitgeisty symbol of that privilege and a target for those seeking to contest it. Yet as many of her similarly situated peers have faltered, she has endured as one of the last pop behemoths of her kind.

Time and again Swift strategically read and rode the decade’s cultural waves, deciding not just which trends and genres to jump on but, perhaps more importantly, what to pass on. As pop music became feud-centric reality television, there was Taylor; as stan culture transformed the way listeners interacted with performers (and each other), there was Taylor; as artists’ rights in the streaming era entered the conversation, there was Taylor; as politics infiltrated music, there was (sort of, eventually) Taylor.

There are definitely plenty of other contenders for Artist of the Decade (a title both the AMAs and Billboard recently bestowed on Swift) — artists who have hugely impacted pop music over the past 10 years and managed to ride out the seismic, industry-wide shifts they’ve contained, from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga to Kanye West. But you don’t have to think Swift was the “best” or even most significant artist of the decade to acknowledge that her cultural domination, and her ability to pivot and reinvent herself, captured many of the defining tensions of pop music over the last decade.

It’s hard to remember (in internet years) that before 2010, Swift was just a teen pop star and not yet a cultural lightning rod. She was already taken seriously as a musician and had plenty of cultural capital coming into the decade; in 2009, having already won Artist of the Year at the AMAs, she was about to accept a Video Music Award for Female Video of the Year when Kanye infamously interrupted her speech. In early 2010, she won Album of the Year for Fearless at the Grammy Awards, beating out Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.

Her early stardom revolved mostly around the fact that she was a precocious young country artist who wrote her own songs, without the risqué edge or sexy-but-wholesome cognitive dissonance of someone like an early Britney Spears to worry white parents and inspire pearl-clutching tabloid magazine covers. And it wasn’t really until Speak Now — when Swift was already a mainstream star but still categorized as country — that she began teasing the media and her fans about the ways her autobiographical lyrics mapped onto her real life, especially regarding the men she was dating.

People are still wondering whether Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” is about Uncle Joey, so it was startling for a young woman songwriter and musical celebrity of her commercial reach to use her songs to consistently craft such intimate stories about such equally public men, including Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, and John Mayer. And there was something uniquely bold about the way Swift started using her confessional songwriting and melodic sensibility to “get the last word” on her relationships, as People magazine framed it in her first cover story.

People hardly batted an eye in 2018 when Ariana Grande’s first No. 1 hit, “Thank U, Next,” literally name-checked her list of ex-boyfriends, and that’s in no small part because of Swift. Because even as reality TV stars like the Kardashians and Real Housewives were figuring out how to create multiplatform storytelling through social media, Swift was already pioneering the strategy in the big pop machine. Yes, she opportunistically used this to shame exes, create fodder for talk shows, and garner magazine covers; and even then, it raised some hackles about the way she was using her power. But it was undeniably compelling theater, and even nonfans were watching.

That multiplatform mixture of music and drama wouldn’t have succeeded without the undeniably catchy earworms Swift’s diary entries were wrapped in, or without the devoted fanbase of Swifties that she cultivated online. This all helped her break chart records with her most explicitly pop albums, including 2012’s Red and 2014’s ’80s-inspired 1989. The latter garnered the biggest first-week sales for a pop album since Britney Spears in 2002, helping Swift keep the tradition of the monocultural pop star alive.

But as Swift’s music saturated airwaves, and her willingness to tease behind-the-scenes details of her life in her songs moved beyond ex-boyfriends like Harry Styles (“Style”) into swatting at other pop stars like Katy Perry (“Bad Blood”) the public began to sour on Swift’s strategic use of her personal life in her music. (To Swift’s credit as a performer, no other pop star could sing the lyrics “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes” about a dispute over a backup dancer with a straight face.)

Juxtaposed with Swift’s self-celebrating “girl squad” feminism, her opportunism — and seeming hypocrisy — started to rankle. By 2015, even racist sympathizer and critic Camille Paglia came out of the woodwork to anoint Swift a “Nazi barbie,” calling out her tendency to treat friends as props. And all these contradictions of Swift’s persona would come to a head when Swift’s seemingly buried feud with Kanye came roaring back the following year.

It makes sense that her clash with Kanye and Kim Kardashian West became the first time she experienced a real backlash. Unlike the drama around her dating life or with Perry, it was the first time Swift was up against equally savvy adversaries — celebrities who, like her, were professionals at merging their public and private lives.

The fight was a meta moment by design, inspired by West’s song “Famous,” where he raps: “I made that bitch famous.” In retrospect, it seems clear that West, as much a publicity-seeking pop diva as Swift, was trying to get the last word after going on an apology tour about the interruption heard round the world. Swift claimed to be annoyed over what she saw as the song’s credit-taking message, and she tried to make it part of her own narrative. “I want to say to all the young women out there,” she intoned in her speech accepting a Grammy for Album of the Year in February 2016, “there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”

In another era, Swift’s storyline might have won the day. Her publicist denied that she had approved the line in the song, despite Kanye’s claim that he had checked with her before releasing it. But celebrity narratives, to some degree, were no longer being decided just by white-dominated mainstream media. Black publications were the first to tease out the racial undertones of Swift’s lie in the ensuing “he said, she said,” specifically as a white woman playing on the ingrained sympathy and benefit of the doubt that white women are given in US culture.

Still, it wasn’t until Kim’s Snapchat leak that July — where Swift could be heard approving the song — that the Swift-as-victim narrative became a framework for understanding her entire career. Contemporary white pop stars like Grande and Miley Cyrus had faced musical appropriation backlashes, but this time it was Swift’s entire persona — not just her music — that were under scrutiny.

Swift’s memeable response to the leak — “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative” — was followed by her own disappearance from the media landscape. By the time the 2016 election happened — amid the chatter about white women’s complicity in electing Trump — Swift’s refusal to take a political stand solidly cast her as a cultural villain, and her symbolism as an icon of toxic white womanhood was sealed.

If the clamor of social media (especially Twitter) was central to the Swift backlash, it was also central to her eventual resurgence. Over the past decade, social media (especially Instagram) has tipped the scales in celebrity coverage and helped celebrities tell their stories on their own terms, almost without intermediaries. Swift knew how to use that to her advantage and decided to play the long game.

By refusing interviews for 18 months, wiping her social media clean, and focusing on cultivating her Tumblr fanbase, Swift removed herself from the cultural conversation for a beat. This kind of brand management helped her keep an ear to the ground while in a self-imposed exile. But it’s as if the culture couldn’t stop conjuring her; rumors about her absence spread, including that she had traveled around inside a suitcase.

In August 2017, she wiped her social media clean and reappeared with a snake video — reclaiming the serpent emojis — in what was ultimately the announcement for her Reputation album, and which remains one of the most iconic social media rollouts ever. “Look What You Made Me Do,” the lead single, was endlessly memed — Swift couldn’t come to the phone, a perfect metaphor for her cultural disappearance and, perhaps, a kind of ghostly remake of the Kanye call. The album succeeded because it seemed as though Swift was finally open to owning her melodrama and messiness. She subsequently broke records with the tour and album sales.

Still, her political silence was affecting her image and music. By 2018, insipid corporate wokeness had become the order of the day, and Swift Inc. again pivoted musically and culturally. Swift came out for the Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms, framing her support in terms of LGBTQ rights and racial justice. And this year, the second single from her latest album, Lover — “You Need to Calm Down” — was a perfect encapsulation of her politics of messiness, conflating anti-gay prejudice with Twitter drama. (And somehow turning the video into a celebration of pop queens supporting each other). This fall, she has made sure to include über-stan–turned–pop star (and video coproducer) Todrick Hall at her awards show moments, attempting to expand the range of racial and sexual identities included in what used to be her mostly straight white “girl squad” feminism.

For all of Swift’s success at updating her persona, she’s never quite regained her massive radio dominance — but no pop star can depend on the success of singles for over a decade. In fact, Swift is one of the most interesting figures of the decade because her stardom is caught between the old-school era of album buying and our current streaming moment.

And, inevitably, Swift has turned her own industry issues around streaming and artistic ownership into a wider commentary on artists’ rights — which happens to work as a canny form of further brand management. She framed herself as an ethical businesswoman when she called out Apple for not paying artists, and she battled with Spotify over streaming royalties but without really pushing for wider systemic industry change.

Earlier this year, Swift started a new artist-versus-industry fight about her music masters being bought out from under her by nemesis Scooter Braun. It’s a complicated story, one that Swift has framed as being about “toxic male privilege,” and the fact that Braun mocked her during the Kanye era — once again blurring, in her trademark mode, the personal with the public and the systemic with the individual.

Instead of being seen as opportunistic, Swift seems to have succeeded in framing her campaign as a fight for unsigned and less powerful artists’ rights, which has resonated at a moment where content creators are all pitted against the 1% of the tech and corporate worlds. This time, even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a squad member any star would envy — backed her up.

Swift’s response to being anointed Artist of the Decade by the AMAs and Billboard provides interesting insight into how she sees herself now and where she thinks the next decade is going. She chose Carole King, one of the preeminent symbols of pop music authenticity, to present her AMA, squarely placing herself in a genealogy of great women singer-songwriters. She also enlisted shiny next-gen pop stars Camila Cabello and Halsey to join her during her performance of old hits.

In her Billboard speech, Swift name-checked newer stars like Lizzo, Becky G, and Billie Eilish as the future of the industry. Tellingly, they are women who, so far, have not played into the tabloidy pop dramas that dominated the 2010s. If this decade has shown us anything, it’s that blurring public and private through music can reap big rewards, but it also opens up stars — especially the women of pop — to more intense scrutiny and a higher degree of personal accountability.

In a Billboard interview looking back on the decade, Swift spoke about her relationship to fame and learning to hold things back. “I didn’t quite know what exactly to ... share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade,” she said. “There was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music.”

Like Lana Del Rey denying she ever had a persona, or Lady Gaga stripping down with Joanne, there seems to come a point when white pop divas need to declare themselves authentic and all about the music — as if their ongoing narratives aren’t part of the show. But the way Swift used her image and the never-ending soap opera that swirled around her to make space for her music in an increasingly saturated attention economy was itself a kind of art. ●

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desbianherstory · 5 years

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In a coffee shop in Mumbai I waited nervously to meet 'the community'. I had just moved back to the city after years abroad and begun the search for other lesbians. Already I had been warned by Sakshi, who had come to make contact with me and make sure that I was not a reporter, that levels of trust were low. This was not only because of the need for confidentiality but also because women from The Outside, she told me tactfully, tended to take up so much space; tended 'to assume that their priorities are ours'. We were sitting by the cash register. When the phone rang and the server asked for Sakshi, I was close enough to hear the voice on the other end, demanding: 'Well? Shall I come to meet her? Is she Us?'

When I first started working as a reporter at the Times of India, the breaches of trust I engaged in while trying to promote lesbian visibility were multiple and unthinking, unprepared as I was for the difficulties of being both Us and Not-Us. When the group in Mumbai began working towards the first nationwide retreat for 'women who love women' I helped organize it, participated in it and then wrote about it. It was a conflict on many levels: between organizing collectively and yet representing 'Us' as an individual; between what I knew readers needed to hear and what I didn't know that lesbians were unwilling to share.

I also had to think about Us and Not-Us on many levels when I began the work of compiling Facing the Mirror, a collection of writings by lesbians in India. As soon as word of the project spread, I started receiving letters from men, offering to write about lesbian fantasies, about threesomes, about wishing to be lesbians for a day, about their lesbian wives. I had never expected this.

Some Indian lesbians themselves objected to the Facing the Mirror project on political grounds. One told me that there was no purpose to putting the existence of Indian lesbians into words, since it would just cement and make public the divisions between lesbians and women at large - divisions which we should be working to erase.

'Militant lesbians aren't aware of the existing spaces,' she said. 'Think about the ladies' compartment of the trains, you see women together there all the time. They hold hands, and from their faces you know that it is bliss.'

I tried to persuade her to change her mind - after all, that very week there had been an article in a women's magazine talking about the scourge of lesbians in train compartments. Such single-sex spaces of safety were increasingly rare, increasingly threatened. But she merely shook her head, told me that both the verbalizing of same-sex desire and the violent reactions against that desire were marginal to the vast reality of an Indian tolerance.

'All this - it has nothing to do with India,' she said.

Us and Not-Us. these words took on a new valence for me after Deepa Mehta's film Fire came out in India, at the end of 1998, and was immediately attacked by the Hindu right for its depiction of lesbianism. Fire, a tale of two women married to two brothers, developing a relationship with each other in the congested streets of middle-class New Delhi, was not a film made for Indian audiences. The symbolism was pureed like baby food, the metaphors of fire (Sita's trial by fire from the Ramayana. the evil custom of bride-burning. home-fires and hearth-fires.) so deliberately labelled 'For Export Only'. The film had even less to offer Indian lesbians. In its portrayal of two married women falling painlessly in love, there was, as the lesbian writer VS pointed out, no attempt to take on the 'anarchic and threatening emotions that accompany sexual practices generally considered perverted, criminal and taboo'.

Nevertheless, lesbians watched with alarm as the attacks on the film gathered intensity. Even though the Censor Board had, to everyone's surprise, cleared the film without cuts, right-wing groups like the Shiv Sena and Rashtriya Seva Sangh were in no mood to accept that verdict. On 1 December, Pramod Navalkar, Minister of Culture for the state of Maharashtra and no stranger to controversy - he would often claim that he enjoyed driving around Mumbai wearing a long blonde wig 'just to see what kinds of men will try to chase a white woman' - told newspapers that lesbianism was 'a pseudo-feminist trend from the West and no part of Indian womanhood'. The next day movie theatres in Mumbai that were screening Fire were attacked by mobs of men and women from the Shiv Sena. Ticket windows were smashed, hoardings were torn down, and audiences beaten up. The day after that theatres in Delhi were targeted.

In the ensuing debate in the upper house of Parliament only detractors of the film could actually bring themselves to say the word 'lesbian'. 'Do we have lesbian culture in our families?' one Member of Parliament demanded, defending the attacks. 'The Mahabharat and the Ramayana don't contain any lesbianism,' agreed another. On the other hand, the MPs insisting that Fire should not have been attacked would do so only in the most general terms: it was as though lesbians were purely symbolic, unnamable markers of the director's right to creative freedom, of the audience's democratic rights to watch what it chose, or of the Shiv Sena mob's fascist intolerance.

So some lesbians in Delhi gathered on a tidal wave of despair, unable to believe that years of discreet organizing had culminated in such intense and unwelcome visibility. It was almost incredible that we should have come together at all for we were a dispersed, fragmented lot, rent by dissension over who 'we' were - a national lesbian conference had recently disintegrated over the issue of whether white women were welcome in a space designated Indian. Even more disturbingly, over the span of a very few years the community had divided itself neatly into lesbian archives, sexuality help-lines, education and outreach groups. The informal networks we had fostered in our homes splintered gradually by ideology, particularly disagreement over funding.

Some of us believed that funding would only help us, giving us the resources to reach beyond our largely middle-class, English-speaking circles. Others of us were apt to quote the staunch activist who maintained that a foreign donor supporting any radical effort was about as plausible as Oxfam nurturing the Quit India movement 50-odd years ago.

But, in spite of our histories of disagreement, lesbians in Delhi joined forces in the wake of the attacks on Fire. We worked with desperate energy to plan a protest rally, scheduled to take place within 48 hours of the Shiv Sena's violence, and reached out to all our old allies from secular groups and from the women's movement. To our dismay we encountered that same unwillingness to name the issue a lesbian one - again, it seemed, our concerns were to be subsumed in favour of the 'bigger picture'. The word 'lesbian' was not to be used in the press release, one women's group insisted. Instead, we needed to highlight our support for the film's theme of 'the hypocrisy and tyranny of the patriarchal family'. After all, we could not possibly expect groups at large to champion a 'narrow' concern like lesbianism.

We gave in and the protest went ahead. Hundreds of people showed up outside Regal Cinema - the theatre that had been ransacked by the mobs - holding candles, chanting, raising placards. But for the first time ever in India, lesbians were visible among the other groups marking the specific nature of their anger. In the sea of placards about human rights, secularism, women's autonomy, freedom of speech, was a sign painted in the colours of the national flag: 'Indian and Lesbian'. Who would have thought that staking that saucy claim to our share of national pride would result in such a furore? You are not Us, we were reminded at once, by a chorus of voices. The deputy editor of the national weekly magazine India Today expressed particular dismay that 'the militant gay movement, which has hitherto operated as website extensions of a disagreeable trend in the West, could now come out into the open and flaunt banners in Delhi suggesting that "lesbianism is part of our heritage".' He went on to announce: 'Thievery, deceit, murder and other... [criminal] offences have a long history. That doesn't elevate them to the level of heritage.'

But that same searing moment of visibility and defiance threw together a small group of activists - a varied lot, from trade unionists to professional blood donors, men and women, heterosexual, homosexual and other. What we had in common was a sense that we should take the energy of the protest forward in the form of a campaign for lesbian rights. Why the emphasis on lesbian rights? 'To articulate the troubled connections of lesbians in and with the women's movement,' we declared in our mandate. 'To talk about the social suppression of women's sexuality in general, and to address the aspects of lesbians' lives that make this struggle distinct from the gay men's movement.'

The Campaign for Lesbian Rights was a revelation for me. For the first time, lesbian issues were occupying public space - we met in the Indian Coffee House in the centre of Delhi, a hotbed of anti-establishment politics with a permanent Home Ministry spy, and we sipped six-rupee coffee and strategized aloud. We handed out thousands of leaflets on 'Myths and Realities about Lesbianism' in parts of Delhi that were commonly considered hostile to activists - industrial areas housing hundreds of factories, a Muslim university, outside the headquarters of Delhi Police. We attended public meetings organized by women's groups, human-rights groups, student groups. We wrote a street play, the familiar rhythms and gestures of that form inscribing the experiences of grassroots activists among us who had listened to women in villages all over rural North India talking about saheli-rishte - intimate bonds between women.

I relearned the lesson that a movement is accountable only to the people, and, to that end, that rejection is only the beginning of dialogue rather than the end. We fielded questions like 'What have lesbians done for society that we should support you?' and stood our ground and continued the conversation, our commitment spurred by the knowledge that, as a group opposed to external funding, our work depended on our ability to persuade fellow activists, fellow citizens, that they should contribute a rupee or two to our cause.

Progressive groups, who addressed all kinds of dispossession and oppression through the lens of human rights, would tell us that lesbian rights was no fit realm for them to enter because sexuality was about 'personal choice'. And so we walked a curious double line, saying: 'All choices involving consenting adults deserve respect, and in the face of compulsory heterosexuality, human rights means making that choice real', and 'Lesbianism is not necessarily a choice'. It's hard to describe what it meant to us, then, to receive a letter from the Human Rights Trust acknowledging our work as 'part and parcel of the broader human-rights movement'. It was the recognition that lesbians were part of a larger group of people, attacked and discriminated against in a panoply of ways, but with this in common - that we could give a name to the violations and to the rights we were seeking.

Most importantly, though, the Campaign reshaped what I thought of when I said 'we'. I have in front of me a citizens' report on the suicides of a lesbian couple in an Orissa village, brought out by aids Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan, one of the Campaign's constituent groups. Written by two heterosexual men, the report is titled, touchingly, For People Like Us.

—Ashwini Sukthankar is a Mumbai-based writer and activist. Her book Facing the Mirror: Lesbian writing from India was published in 1999 by Penguin India.

#Ashwini Sukthankar #fire #indian lesbians #history #writing #caleri

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