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Reviews

Book Review: Fierce Desires by Rebecca L. Davis

My review for The Washington Independent Review of Books

Rebecca L. Davis’ Fierce Desires is impressively comprehensive in scope and depth, offering an account that spans four centuries of American views on sexuality. Building on John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman’s 1988 Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Davis’ book examines the same history through the lens of the popular zeitgeist, dispatching the notion that the currently “fiercely contested” questions about sexuality and gender are, in fact, new.

The author’s thesis is that matters of gender nonconformity, non-heterosexual sex, permissible sexual behavior, and birth control have been around for ages, but that we’ve shifted away from “interpreting sexual behavior as a reflection of personal preferences or values to defining sexuality as something that makes a person who they are.”

While it’s debatable whether she proves her thesis, the book’s breadth is incontestable. Although Davis’ narrative device of devoting entire chapters to one obscure person — a colonial Virginia indentured servant named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, anyone? — is a little clunky, she nevertheless has a knack for choosing topics whose popular perception belies the historical reality. For example, she explores how Puritans were actually very fond of female pleasure within the context of marriage. And though they viewed sexual intercourse as necessary for procreation, they also believed sex was an important way to build a loving bond. Indeed, there’s precedent for long-ago husbands being censured for coming up short on their “duties of desire.”

The chapter on enslaved peoples’ relationships is particularly poignant and tackles that story in a trenchant way. Similarly, Davis always has an eye toward how race affected attitudes regarding sexuality, tracing, for instance, how defenders of slavery weaponized the specious claim that Black women were loose compared to allegedly chaste and faithful “respectable white women.”

Queer relations also receive excellent coverage here. “Suspicions about what went on in those beds might occasion gossip,” Davis writes, “but same sex and queer relationships of the 18th and 19th centuries were generally tolerated so long as they were not flaunted or disruptive to neighbors.”

The author makes the interesting point that in the 18th and 19th centuries, many queer people didn’t classify their desires or themselves as such. Neither law nor language included or excluded same-sex relationships. Furthermore, she argues, a person’s gender, not the object of their desire, determined social acceptability. This is why lesbianism was tolerated as long as the woman didn’t attempt to assert the privileges of manhood. (Patriarchy was strong back then, just as it is now.)

Davis has an especially fascinating chapter on groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, as well as chapters on Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya and pleasure activist Betty Dodson. She also engages with ideas of motherhood, delineating how, after the American Revolution, a new ideal emerged; women were encouraged to have fewer children, whom they could then better educate as “future citizens of the nation.”

Fierce Desires shines as a robust, well-researched, and expansive history of American sexuality, one written in non-academese. Its core argument — that our gender-centric system gave way, in the early 20th century, to one in which sexuality is considered fundamental to a person’s identity — gets a bit lost, but Davis’ ultimate assertion that sexuality has moved from being a reflection of social or religious status to being a marker of individuality still rings true.

Reviews

Book Review: You Just Need to Lose Weight by Aubrey Gordon

My book review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Co-host of the “Maintenance Phase” podcast and Self magazine’s “Your Fat Friend” columnist, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People is an urgent, well-sourced fatifesto ready to be nailed to the door of our collective fridge. In 20 pithy chapters, Gordon offers historical background, current research, reflection questions, and “opportunities for action,” leading the reader toward meaningful allyship and advocacy.

Fatness is so feared in our culture that a Yale University study found 46 percent of 4,283 respondents would rather give up a year of life than be fat; 15 percent would prefer to be severely depressed. “You Just Need to Lose Weight” unflinchingly pushes back against those attitudes and dispels popular myths, laying bare the speciousness of “body and health” weight-loss arguments. Cloaked as prescriptive and factual, these arguments hide a dark underbelly: fat bias, one of the last socially accepted prejudices.

In her incisive, robustly sourced treatise, Gordon takes on everything from the influential “calories in, calories out” paradigm (based on a 1959 study), to the notion that losing weight is a choice, to the accusation that fat acceptance glorifies obesity. She rejects outright the idea that being fat is a failure of willpower. “According to the NIH,” she writes, “very fat women — like me — have a 0.8 percent chance of becoming thin in our lifetimes.”

The book takes a decisively intersectionalist stance. In tracing fat activism’s roots in the work of fat Black women during the civil- and welfare-rights movements, Gordon encourages the reader to connect fat discrimination with all the many isms: racism, classism, healthism, and ableism. She offers, too, an outstanding overview of the kinds of protest actions people have taken, including the first Fat-In (organized in 1967 by radio host Steve Post).

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” also deftly interrogates how body positivity essentially defanged the more “radical” fat-justice movement. The personal accounts in the book are especially poignant. Gordon shares a story of being called a “fat lady” by a kid whose mom gets furious when Gordon tells the kid that she is, in fact, a fat lady. Gordon eloquently explains how avoiding the word “fat” continues to “stigmatize my body and insist that describing my skin must be an insult.” She elaborates:

“For me, and for many, many fat people, reclaiming the word fat is about reclaiming our very bodies, starting with the right to name them. Fat isn’t a negative aspect of one’s body any more than tall or short is. It can, and should, be a neutral descriptor.”

Similarly, the oft-heard laments “I feel so fat” or “This dress makes me look fat” create the impression that fat is a feeling. Gordon has a helpful solution: Ask yourself for consent before engaging in negative body talk. Notice how you describe other people’s bodies and whether their size is relevant to your discussion of them. Stop treating thinness like an accomplishment and fatness like a failure. (The example of congratulating ill people on the “bright side” of now being thin is a glaring example of this sickening fixation.) And try to see food for what it is: a comfort, a celebration, a pleasure, or simply fuel.

Ultimately, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” lays bare Western society’s treatment of fatness as a moral failing. Gordon’s manifesto is essential reading in the intersectional conversation around fat acceptance and provides an excellent roadmap toward fat activism.

 

Reporting

Book Review: The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Pulling back the curtain on our nation’s dirty little secret.

If you don’t consume pornography, why should you concern yourself with the debates surrounding it? Sociologist Kelsy Burke’s comprehensive The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession makes a persuasive case that sex matters far beyond the private sphere and that pornography is ultimately about how we relate to one another. Based on five years of research and more than 90 interviews with people on both sides of the debate, the book is nuanced in its treatment of the topic and compelling in the way it situates the subject within broader society.

Burke is convincing in her argument that the crux of the matter is not simply or only pornography but “how to live an authentic and fulfilling life, which includes sexuality, in a modern world.” Porn’s ubiquity and accessibility in the internet age render it a topic that has to be addressed, and not just by feminists or sex-worker advocates.

The book begins with a history of pornography and obscenity laws. It then launches into an incredibly thorough section on the effects of porn-indexing sites. Started by the “geek king of smut,” Fabian Thylmann, who has since sold his share in the company for €73 million (yes, you read that correctly), MindGeek, by some estimates, owns 90 percent of all internet porn. Pornhub, one of its sites, draws a staggering 120 million visitors daily, placing it above Amazon and Netflix in online-traffic rankings. Generating revenue through banner ads, this behemoth is responsible for the prevailing and pernicious idea that porn should be free. But more on this later.

Burke then explores the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, in 2018. For anti-pornography activists, porn and sex trafficking are too intricately linked to be considered separate entities. Pro-porn activists challenge this conflation but nevertheless have to recognize that the sex-work industry poses some very real threats to its purveyors.

Sex workers, for their part, have sought to overturn such laws because they actually place them in greater peril by not allowing these workers to share information about dangerous clients or to form networks of cooperation online. Another unintended consequence of the laws meant to help sex-trafficking victims is that they strengthen the penal system and push sex work further underground, making it much more dangerous. These laws also make a life outside of sex work harder to achieve as banks refuse to open accounts for sex workers and employers can fire employees who do outside, part-time sex work.

The Pornography Wars explores the feminist take on pornography, too, especially the so-called Porn Wars in 1984, spearheaded by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and writer/activist Andrea Dworkin. Women Against Pornography, founded by the pair, believed that porn exploits women and is fundamentally damaging and misogynistic. The very term “sex work” is abhorrent because it elides the exploitation and coercion anti-porn advocates claim is inherent in the system.

Burke’s interviews with people struggling with pornography addiction, as well as with people in the industry, are especially insightful. As adult-film performer and author Stoya says, “My politics and I are feminist…my job is not.” There is a particularly jarring interview with a BDSM performer who has a sobering realization in therapy that the violent content she’s participating in is being watched by people so that “they don’t have to make their own memories.” This line may leave readers shaken.

The book goes on to explore whether feminist (or ethical) porn can exist and what it looks like, as well as how our society perceives “genuine pleasure” and whether we can — or should — concern ourselves with distinguishing between the real and the fake.

Burke allows the contradictions and complexities on both sides of the debate to shine. “People experience pornography differently based on their sexual identity, experiences, and beliefs about sex,” she writes. Sex workers, too, she acknowledges, have inconsistent feelings about its harm or harmlessness.

The Pornography Wars concludes that, polarizing rhetoric and the way in which both sides have defined themselves vis-à-vis a distinction from the other aside, the overlap between porn-positive and anti-porn factions is larger than we might think. Because pornography is connected to broader social systems — including capitalism, the criminal justice system, and the media — any analysis of it without considering those connections is incomplete.

Finally, Burke outlines three points both sides agree on. First, that it’s a bad idea to keep porn habits hidden. Second, that talking to kids about sex and porn is necessary, considering its ubiquity. And finally, that nobody should be watching free porn. The two factions also share concerns about safety and consent, the risk of violence, and sexual health for sex workers.

The Pornography Wars is truly one of most cogent and sophisticated deep dives into our collective dirty secret that I’ve ever read. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Reviews

Book Review: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Body Work, is “not a craft book in the traditional sense,” she states. Nor is it a flowery ode to the writer’s life. Instead, it’s a practical, clear-eyed take on the intimate (and intricate) connection between our bodies and our bodies of work. Throughout, Febos beautifully narrates the ways in which writing is “integrated into the fundamental movements of life,” asking readers to go beyond writing about their lives to writing their lives.The author, whose previous works include Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood, is a keen social critic, and she makes a cogent argument as to why women’s writing about trauma has been dismissed as unartistic, trite, and self-indulgent:

“Resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part a resistance to movements of social justice.”

Indeed, while male navel-gazing has been valorized as the kindling for many a Great American Novel, when the introspection comes from women, it is scorned as so much whining no one wants to hear about yet again. (No wonder the words “histrionics” and “hysteria” sound so similar.) Febos makes an impassioned defense of self-reflection as a subversive act that personifies the notion “the personal is political.” Further, the freedom it creates benefits not just the writer but society. From it, we all wrest a bit more license to be honest about our truths.

Her essays are well researched, and much of the excitement here comes from the way in which she curates writing from Native and other non-mainstream voices. In “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” Febos discusses the work of social psychologist James Pennebaker, who found that writing about trauma is healing. She also examines how her “own internalized sexism” shaped her view of what a “real” writer does — craft fiction in the traditional American sense. This essay made me think about similar criticisms leveled against actors for “playing themselves” and thus “not acting.”

As you might guess, her chapter on how to write about sex is less about the mechanics and more about refusing to be shamed into silence. Her inclusion of an Audre Lorde essay on what sex actually is — and it’s not just sex — is especially well developed. When someone in an audience asks Febos if she feels any shame writing about the act, she responds, “I am shameless.” But shameless is not the same as vulgar or vacuous. Rather, writing about sex “might free me from shame and replace the onus of change onto the society in which we live.”

Even though Body Work is not meant to be a manual on memoir writing, it offers a useful, nuanced take on many issues that come up when tackling any sort of nonfiction. The third essay, “A Big Shitty Party,” explores writing about other people — a thorny subject faced by journalists and anthropologists alike. “It is profoundly unfair,” asserts Febos, “that a writer gets to author the public version of a story.” It is moments like this where her vulnerability and thoughtfulness are truly illuminating.

Febos also discusses ways in which writers can strengthen a story by taking a “casualties be damned, this is my artistic vision” approach or, conversely, by declining to add something “when a detail felt cruel.” She is never reckless in her own story-making; this is not slash-and-burn truth-telling. Rather, she explores how one can stay true to their recounting of an event while maintaining care for those woven into it.

The must-read Body Work is a captivating, eloquent paean to the power of working through a “pain that has been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.” In its pages, Melissa Febos posits self-appraisal as a brave act that is both intensely personal and also communal. “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room,” she writes. “That’s how it gets bigger.”

 

Reviews

Book Review: Still Mad by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Literary critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in this follow-up to their The Madwoman in the Attic, offer a comprehensive, sweeping engagement with voices from the tradition of second-wave feminism. Spanning the 1950s to the present, Still Mad contextualizes — historically and personally — the works of singers, poets, essayists, and prose writers while exploring the creativity that started on the page but moved far beyond it.

In their introduction, Gilbert and Gubar outline their intent to feature works which “they consider to be the ongoing second wave of feminism,” as they believe “the debate in which women continue to engage swirls around the issue of how many ‘waves’ of feminism there have been.” While that’s a questionable assertion (perhaps this debate is taking place in the rarefied halls of academia), parsing the conversations surrounding the feminist zeitgeist decades ago is important to understanding the choices the authors make regarding which writers to include here.

Still Mad is striking in its breadth and scope but especially in that selection of authors. Structurally, Gilbert and Gubar write chronologically, which enables them to trace the fluidity of the featured authors’ thinking. For example, the section on Audre Lorde follows her career from “lesbian biomythographer” to one who “dismantles the master’s house.”

Aside from a couple of questionable diversions, such as interludes on the (mis)education of Hillary Clinton and the Trump presidency, Gilbert and Gubar stay the course of weaving together passages from literary pieces, quotes from people in the writers’ lives, and keen sociocultural analysis. And while there is clearly a bias toward poetry, Still Mad impresses with the creativity of its selections (for example, Nina Simone is featured) and the compelling way it makes connections between seemingly disparate currents in the feminist movement.

The book’s deep dive into Adrienne Rich (including her tenuous-at-best link to Judaism) isn’t quite as interesting as the section on Audre Lorde, in which the authors capture the tension between vulnerability and anger that feminists felt and continue to feel. Lorde’s alienation as a “Black in a lesbian world and a lesbian in a Black world” drove her to ever more ardently seek out words that would rupture those boundaries. When she said that the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house, she was referring to the inadequacy of existing language to disrupt this boundary-making.

So, new words and tools — a new vocabulary — must be forged to chip away at these walls. The title of Lorde’s “Sister Outsider,” Gilbert and Gubar write, reflects “her commitment to the sisterhood of the women’s movement as well as her insistence on positioning herself as an outsider questioning its boundaries.”

Still Mad also reveals the way in which activist anger was and is a part of the personal lives of these writers. Lorde, for one, from her position as a poet writing from the underpaid trenches, excoriated the economic injustices that her fellow academics were perhaps sheltered from.

Another especially compelling part of the book focuses on Andrea Dworkin and the sex wars. Few have written about the anti-pornography crusader, whom Gloria Steinem called “an Old Testament prophet.” Gilbert and Gubar capture the separatist movement that Dworkin is credited with starting — one that viewed men’s values as opposed to women’s and which created female-only spaces such as rural communes called “womyn’s lands.”

Still Mad explains the strategy behind Dworkin’s anti-pornography polemics: namely, to legally codify pornography as a civil-rights violation. Regardless of one’s opinion on sex work, there is little doubt that Dworkin was an effective, passionate advocate for elevating the testimony of women actually involved in the sex trade over that of commentary based on purely abstract or philosophical arguments.

A brilliant inclusion is that of Gloria Anzaldua, whose Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) is among the most seminal feminist/intersectional works (and one too often overlooked). Her “mestiza consciousness” is one of the best descriptions of those living in the borderlands of multiple identities. Because this experience is so unmooring and disorienting, Anzaldua uses both linguistic and spiritual-healing practice as a salve to suture the wounds wrought by white patriarchy. She refuses to “accommodate” English speakers, instead code-switching between slang, English, Spanish, Chicano Spanish, and Tex-Mex to build a creole reflective of this unrest and dispossession.

Still Mad is rich and carefully and creatively curated; it is madly in love with words, which remain some of the best tools we have for dismantling the master’s house. The way Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wield them as weapons of personal and political redemption and healing will leave readers speechless.

Reviews

Book Review: Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Why the kids aren’t alright.

Put down your avocado toast and close that Zillow page — the latest salvo in the intergenerational war between boomers and millennials is here, and you don’t want to miss it. In Can’t Even, media scholar (and millennial) Anne Helen Petersen offers an insightful treatise on the “burnout generation” that is a far cry from the essentialist portrayals of both generations that dominate the current discourse.

Rather than dissect who is to blame for the plight (and it is a plight, histrionics aside) of millennials, Petersen offers a moving discourse on why the kids are not alright and, even more importantly, why they are not, despite how they’ve been characterized, the spoiled, lazy, feckless generation.

“Okay, boomer, sit down and read” is an apropos prescription for this book.

In 2019, Petersen published a Buzzfeed article titled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” which drew millions of readers. Wry title aside, Can’t Even, an expansion of that earlier piece, is well researched and sobering in its findings. The book examines a variety of areas of millennial lives, including work, education, social-media culture, relationships, and parenthood, zeroing in on issues like student debt, workplace burnout, and millennials’ astronomical levels of anxiety and hopelessness.

The section on millennials’ childhood is especially engrossing. Petersen uses the concept of “concerted cultivation” to explain how the parenting style of the previous generation sowed the seeds of the thorny relationship between millennials and work. Dispelling the popular trope of millennials refusing “to adult,” the book illustrates the very opposite: that millennials have been adulting since they were kids:

“The child’s schedule takes precedence over parents’; the child’s well-being and future capacity for success is paramount; baby food should be homemade; toddler play should be enriching; private tutors should be enlisted if necessary…Every part of the child’s life should be optimized to better prepare them for their entry into the working world.”

And, of course, the first step toward that world is education. Here, too, Petersen is masterful in foreshadowing the inevitable burnout. She describes millennials as the “first generation to fully conceptualize themselves as walking college resumes.” Because — you guessed it — getting into college (let alone paying for it) isn’t as easy for them as it was for boomers.

Getting a job isn’t as easy, either. Can’t Even offers an excellent analysis of how millennials graduated into the “worst job market in 80 years,” one with an excessive list of demands:

“To be valued, you need plans, lengthy resumes, ease and confidence interacting with authority figures, and innate understanding of how the job ladder works. You need connections and a willingness to multitask, and an eagerness to overschedule.”

Not to mention that being groomed to find a job one is “passionate” about created a toxic mentality disconnected from the realities of the working world. Fracturing the cliché that millennials heedlessly hop from one job to another, Petersen shows how it was boomers who instilled the “one’s work is one’s identity” mantra into their children. With that conflation came the predictable — and incredible — stress millennials feel about their careers.

One thing missing in Can’t Even is a broad discussion of how class factors into the boomer/millennial dynamic; the author only briefly suggests that concerted cultivation is, in part, a reflection of class anxiety. That is, while only wealthy boomers may have been able to afford things like private tutors, less-affluent boomers could at least sacrifice all their time and limited resources in the name of their child’s future success.

Speaking of time, Can’t Even presents a thoughtful commentary on free time. Connecting it to the groan-inducing “unstructured free time” term from child psychology, Petersen’s conversations with adult millennials are moving and unsettling. These people can’t even have fun: “Any down time began to feel like I was being lazy and unproductive, which in turn made me question my self worth,” one subject shares. So much for the popular image of the carefree, brunchin’ millennial.

The moments when Can’t Even grapples with the burnout that has now become the hallmark of the millennial generation are insightful and leave the reader hungry for more. I, for one, would’ve been happier with fewer statistics and more of those first-person testimonials. Nevertheless, like a good millennial, Petersen has done her homework.

Can’t Even is a must-read both for millennials and the generation that made them. In the immortal words of Tupac, “I was given this world; I didn’t make it.” This book illustrates exactly that: that millennials are living in a world that’s a far cry from the one they were groomed to inhabit. And all that hard work they were taught would lead to a better life has led, instead, to nothing but a need to work even harder.

Reviews

Book Review: Kink: Stories, Edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Its titillating subject matter aside, this collection is strangely uninspired.

Kink’s veritable all-star-writer roster and exciting subject matter belie how drearily humdrum the collection is. The anthology tackles BDSM and other “unconventional” relationships yet fails quite spectacularly in whipping itself into shape (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Contributions by bestselling authors Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Carmen Maria Machado are surprisingly un-titillating.

In attempting to capture complex emotions, however, Kink succeeds at times, such as in “The Cure,” where Melissa Febos writes, “She didn’t care. Her not caring was voluptuous, sensual. It was a most substantial absence. It filled her like a good meal. She had had enough.” Elsewhere, the narratives are weighed down by tropes, as in Larissa Pham’s “Trust,” where we get the ubiquitous empty-shell metaphor: “She feels delicate and hollowed out, like an empty seashell.”

Of course, writing about love and desire is not easy, and some of the stories do it in a straightforward, moving way. Here again is Febos:

“The first time he slept with a woman who asked him to hit her, it felt like a window had opened inside him. He’s not sure what happened, exactly — that she saw something in him and touched it, or if the thing in her was so powerful, it moved the thing in him. All he knows is how it felt — where there was blank space, a rupturing.”

In other tales, we see these supposedly “alternative” relationships normalized: “After some discussion, they decided they’d both benefit from professional guidance. It was like doing yoga, they figured. Hazardous, at first, to go through the poses without an instructor’s help,” writes R.O. Kwon in “Safeword.”

Kwon’s story is a trenchant commentary on the commodification of desire and how, when the self-care ethos meets capitalism’s “we have a solution for everything you desire” motto, even our intimate lives aren’t sacred or private. (When it comes to consumerism, there is no safe word.) Kwon also shows us that practitioners of BDSM are not immune to the groan-inducing banality of eroticism becoming a chore:

“He was tired. His right shoulder hurt. He didn’t want to hit Julie anymore — he wanted to get out of here. He wanted to untie her and take her home, soothe her and have sex with her, his wife, whom he loved. But he kept going. Finish the session, he told himself.”

“Emotional Technologies” by Chris Kraus similarly demystifies the supposed danger and subversiveness of BDSM relationships by narrating the ways in which they’re dating scenarios like any other:

“He told me he would put me on probation. If I consented, we were entering the second stage. The rules were: He’d decide when and how often we would see each other. He’d decide when and how often we’d talk on the phone. I would not know his address or phone number, but I was free to leave him as many voice mails as I wanted, providing that they made him hard. I found this very liberating. How many hours had I spent in ‘normal’ dating situations, pondering the etiquette and timing of the post-fuck call?”

One of the few outstanding pieces in the collection is Garth Greenwell’s “Gospodar” (translating to “master”), in which an American teacher has a tryst with a Bulgarian man in the latter’s home country, where the LGBTQ lifestyle is still hush-hush. Greenwell’s prose is evocative and precise:

“He lived on a middle floor of one of the huge Soviet-style apartment blocks that stand everywhere in Sofia like fortresses or keeps, ugly and imperious, though this is a false impression they give, they’re so poorly built as already to be crumbling away.”

Unfortunately, Kink ultimately fails in its power play for the reader’s excitement; I had to force myself to get through it, and not in a good way. While its subject matter still sorely lacks literary representation, this anthology doesn’t contribute much to the conversation.

Reviews

Book Review: The Horror is Us by Justin Sanders (Editor)

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Riffing on that famous quip that “horror is other people,” the authors in this slim, affecting anthology from Baltimore-based Mason Jar Press speak of the horror that is us. The stories are pithy — most run just a few pages — but powerful in their parsimony.

Laura Walker’s “A Trick of Uncertain Light,” for instance, at first appears to be a simple tale of a girl stranded in a car on a dark desert road who encounters a guy driving a tow truck. But she’s not a girl in a car; she is “a rabbit feeling the primal liquid-boned fear of desert prey.” And the man in the truck hasn’t stopped out of concern. “Something’s not right. I can feel it the way you can sense the threat of storm when the wind kicks up before the clouds start rolling in.”

The imagery is evocative: “He cuts off my response, slices into the fear of the moment, spilling it.” Fear is spilling toward an inexorable end here, one that is not described and, hence, looms even larger. “Besides, there are things that bullets can’t stop from happening.”

Abigail Teed’s “Rise” and “The Pine Witch” by Alexandria Baker are both about a return to something from the past. The former has Native American mythological elements, while the latter features Wiccan notes. Continuing the theme of the everyday gone awry, the coven in “The Pine Witch” isn’t too far removed from members of a sorority house, sort of like a modern (and far less corny) take on the 1996 supernatural-thriller movie “The Craft.” As with other stories in the collection, the menace is unnamed — and thus all the more terrifying — and the words relentless in their simplicity: “I closed my eyes and reveled in the smell of burning flesh.”

Another brilliant offering is Justin Sanders’ “Baphomet and Blue,” about a Neo-Nazi death cult. The subject matter is all too believable and seemingly plucked from the headlines — police racism and brutality — but it’s given a sinister twist. A music fest turns brutal as participants wreak havoc and enact the violent reality idealized in the songs. As the author points out, “White power music is the number one method for recruiting new members.” Evil sometimes wears a badge instead of a pentagram.

Comic-book writer Scott Bryan Wilson’s “The Enthusiastic Butcher” is a keen dissection of our social-media-obsessed world. Its protagonist cuts deeper and deeper into himself (on several levels) in a vanity-fueled quest for attention and an escape from a life of loneliness. “He was like a king washed up on a desert island, his subjects sending him messages in bottles.”

The tale is a trenchant commentary on the terrifying ways in which we as a society keep pushing beyond boundaries personal, ecological, and global. The first cut is the deepest — or not, it seems to suggest.

Though spare, The Horror Is Us is nonetheless incisive and provocative. Its stories are smartly curated and fleshy, making it a must-read for any fan of the horror genre in its most modern iteration.

Reviews

Book Review: You Exist Too Much: A Novel by Zaina Arafat

My review of the Washington Independent Review of Books

Love addiction is vividly brought to life in this exceptional debut.

Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much is an engrossing character study of a young, bisexual Palestinian American woman. Much more than an exploration of intersecting lines and identities, the debut novel revels in their clouding: “Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space…I enjoyed occupying blurred lines.”

This is not a book about isms, however; it is squarely centered on its unnamed protagonist, whose voice is enthralling. Oscillating between prescient self-awareness and oblivion, she transports readers into her rich emotional realm. Her identity is beautifully captured when she travels to Palestine with her mother, who “knows the rules instinctively, in that part of the world, and I only learn them by accident.”

While she fits in (mostly), she also doesn’t: “Anytime I heard of another Arab girl’s engagement, it snapped me out of my gayness.” Her parents’ fraught relationship is also wryly captured: “If my mother was Hamas — unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled — my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded.”

While the book engages with both the narrator’s heritage and her queerness, it is ultimately a story about love addiction. Lest you groan in anticipation of high doses of schmaltz or wince at the prospect of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” being stuck in your head (sorry, not sorry), the novel’s brilliant exposé on a real psychological condition will leave you, well, addicted and wanting more.

Arafat’s description of the protagonist’s stint in a rehab program to treat her anorexia and love addiction is one of the best accounts of the rehab experience I have ever read. The writing is precise, keen, and relies on observation and no pathos, which is somewhat odd considering the subject matter. It is also well-researched. Arafat reveals love addiction for what it is — codependency, which she defines as “the inability to have a healthy relationship with the self.”

The protagonist is in love with being in love, which puts her on a never-ending Don Quixote-like quest in pursuit of the feeling. And much like Quixote, she is chasing chimeras:

“When love addicts develop a relationship with the object of their affections, they stop seeing who that person actually is, but instead focus on a fantasy image.”

Arafat captures why this addiction is particularly damaging, rejecting anyone’s glib dismissal of it as a made-up disorder. The protagonist’s emotional gyrations are captured powerfully: “I had been clinging to her I love yous like a refugee clings to a threatened nationality.”

The author writes about other characters in the rehab program with compassion and depth, too. There aren’t many books about recovery from this particular addiction — less flashy, perhaps, than drug or sex addiction — which gives the book a bright spark.

You Exist Too Much tackles bisexuality with equal care. The title is what the protagonist’s mother says when her daughter comes out, and its interpretation is rich in ambiguity: The Palestinian mother would never have had the permission or space to be anything but heterosexual. She interprets her daughter’s orientation as a demand for the right to live free of old constraints. But the phrase is also an incisive commentary on the daughter’s fixation on unavailable objects of affection and her lust for a life filled with emotional highs.

This novel is truly captivating. I read it several times over and found something new each time. Arafat’s writing extracts emotion from every word and builds vast psychological landscapes. One of the best releases in 2020, it cements Zaina Arafat’s position in the ranks of Carmen Maria Machado and Lydia Yuknavitch. I cannot wait to see what she will offer readers next.

Reviews

Book Review: The Pleasure Plan by Laura Zam

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

This honest account of a quest for pain-free intimacy pulls no punches.

With its pink-purse cover and self-help-conjuring title, Laura Zam’s The Pleasure Plan has the auspices of yet another treatise on the elusive art of sexual-spark kindling. And while there can never be enough books written on the topic, this one has a slightly different audience in mind — namely, those of us too “broken” for a conventional sex book and for whom there is nothing normal or conventional about intercourse.

Not to mention that this book is more a quest to avoid pain than to find pleasure in the face of dyspareunia, vaginismus, or sexual aversion disorder. As the author puts it, “I have every hooha hangup in the DSM.” Though the condition affects between 10 and 20 percent of women, the author herself didn’t know it had a name — or names — until she was in her 40s.

Lest you’re inclined to think that incredibly painful intercourse is no big deal, people with disorders like vaginismus often cannot even wear tampons. Psychologically, they experience during sex something akin to PTSD. Intercourse is “like being a virgin every single time. Madonna, this is not sexy,” the author explains. And since sex is the lingua franca of our society, you can surmise what a death knell this can be for relationships.

The book — which grew, in part, out of the author’s “Modern Love” essay in the New York Times — starts on a happy note: Zam has met and married her husband, Kurt, but hasn’t told him about her “hooha hangups.”

Insert screeching-halt noise here.

You might be wondering how someone could not know his partner isn’t only not having a particularly good time in bed but is enduring lightning-bolt levels of pain. You might also wonder why the author hasn’t revealed this fact to the love of her life.

This dynamic is less a commentary on Zam’s particular relationship than an indictment of the social norms that drive women to literally grin and bare it. These norms also discourage women from admitting to anything other than a perfect sex life. As Zam puts it, “Privacy has stolen my life force.”

But tell her partner she does, and she goes a step further, undertaking the Sisyphean task of trying to remedy her problem. Like a lot of us “broken” ones, however, as a survivor of childhood trauma, she first must untangle how much of the issue is psychological, how much is physical, and how much is both — a case of “my mind is telling me yes, but my body is screaming a hell no.”

Zam begins a tortuous tour of 15 specialists, exploring EFT (emotional freedom techniques), hypnosis, tantra, trauma therapy, group couples’ workshops, pelvic-floor physical therapy, vaginal weights, and dilators. Unfortunately, vaginismus is poorly understood and difficult to treat, and the situation isn’t helped by various medical professionals’ dismissive stances.

For example, a hypnotist asked Zam pointedly, “You do want to stay married, right?” before doling out the several-hundred-dollar advice to “Just do it.” A sex therapist refuses to see Zam before sending her to a physical therapist first because “she doesn’t deal with vaginal pain.”

(Please, dear reader, don’t start in about how patient Kurt must be for going through this with her. Enough about others. Let’s talk about us, not the long-suffering partners we have a really hard time finding in the first place.)

While Zam’s book is filled with levity — which I interpret as “laughing to keep from crying” — there’s nothing funny about being in so much pain that every attempt at intimacy feels like something to be endured. “Do I love Kurt in these moments? I don’t know. I am too far away to notice,” writes the author. “I strap down my animal sadness so I don’t saturate the bed with the wrong kind of moisture.”

Zam interweaves into The Pleasure Plan stories of her family and growing up as a commentary on trauma and resilience. It makes for engrossing reading and, likely, some vigorous nodding in agreement from people who identify as female and who, like the author, laugh to keep from crying.

Although the clinical term of “vaginismus brought on by fear of penetration” is one way to describe the Hydra she is fighting, “I don’t want anything inside me” captures it more aptly. In its face, Zam perseveres long after most would have given up. At times, the methods of the “healers” she consults are downright hilarious, such as the cringe-worthy approach of “repeating vapid, lascivious language while in a pseudotrance.” (No, it doesn’t work.)

The response to Zam’s book has been overwhelmingly positive, and she has been praised for her bravery in writing it. Of course, a subset of critics harps on Kurt’s patience and understanding. But forget him for a moment. This is about her pain, remember?

The Pleasure Plan isn’t a quest for pleasure. It is an attempt to contend with physical and social pain — the pain of being rejected as a weirdo too broken to repair. Sex is enormously important in our society. If one can’t function sexually, is one doomed to a lifetime of loneliness?

The book is full of questions and exercises to help readers develop their own plan and asks, “Where are you stuck in your sexual healing?” Alas, this presupposes that we all want to become unstuck, when many of us have simply dropped out of the, er, marketplace altogether. Maybe in her next book, Zam could address some alternate forms of relationships where intimacy is not expressed through intercourse alone, open relationships, or even asexuality.

Despite this small cavil, The Pleasure Plan is a must-read not just for people affected by dyspareunia, but for anyone interested in learning more about a complicated condition foreign to most. The book will move you and keep you reading no matter your gender or “hooha hangups” — or lack thereof.