The "Life of a Showgirl" Backlash is Making Me Nauseous

 

This essay is not an analysis of Life Of A Showgirl. Not exactly.

Is it even a coherent analysis, or is it just a messy, confused vent about what happens when a woman is famous? Well, dear reader, we’re going to find out together.

First, a disclaimer on my own biases, my own little standpoint theory discursion.

I have a Swiftie in my life who’s very important to me, and that definitely prejudices my perspective on this. I started out as a pretty thoughtless Taylor Swift hater myself. She was tall, blonde, and pretty, and I’m none of those things, depending on who you ask about the last one; it was easy to project the cruelty I’d suffered at other people’s hands onto her as an aggressor.

Commentators I like, like Todd in the Shadows, also were very happy to make fun of her. Did I unpack this at the time? No, that had to come later, with some maturity.

Still, nobody is ever neutral about these things, and anyone who thinks they’re an objective critic is being fooled by the very concept of objectivity.

So, let’s start with the album itself. What did I think?

Source.

The Album

Life of a Showgirl is fine. It’s pretty mid, but it’s not the worst album I’ve ever heard by a female artist – that dubious honour belongs to 0304 by Jewel, which failed so spectacularly at its concept of mixing Big Band music with showtunes that my teenage heart was broken.

Still – it has some clunky lyrics, yes, and the songs aren’t as catchy as on some albums. Is it one of her best albums ever? Absolutely not. But it’s also not the artistic massacre that some people seem to think it is.

Between this and The Tortured Poets Department, my personal analysis of the last two releases is that Swift has started putting out music for herself, rather than with her career and her fans in mind. It’s also entirely possible that she’s going through what I’ve seen happen with many authors; namely, she’s too big to critique properly, and people who should be her creative aides are yes-manning rather than editing her.

The thing about the album that I personally appreciated, though, was that she seems happy.

The internet, however, has lost its goddamn mind over this album.

Mass Hysteria

By and large, this album has been succeeding financially, but failing with fans and critics. A bunch of people I know have absolutely loathed this album, and there’s a huge backlash among both Swifties and Swift-haters alike.

The thing is, though, the backlash isn’t just a matter of dunking on clunky lyrics. There’s an aura of self-righteous triumph among critics, and a sort of woeful, “Whoa, was she really Bad all along?!” response from a lot of fans, that’s seriously skeeving me out.

Now, this backlash comes in multiple parts; let’s start with arguably the most damning and justified part.

The Woobification of Charlie XCX

The song “Actually Romantic” is apparently a riposte to “Sympathy is a Knife” by Charlie XCX. Now, podcasts I like (such as ICYMI) went into detail on this, but not quite *enough* detail.

As this essay put it, ghere’s no getting past the aggressive element and tone-deafness of writing a song called “Sweetheart” about other women picking on you, then writing “Actually Romantic” and what could be read as biphobia/homophobia. I’m not going to defend that perspective, because at best, it’s a bad look, and shortsighted.

The interesting thing is, people are mostly going from the context of the song “Sympathy is a Knife” and this song – but that’s just not the whole story about whatever has gone on between Charlie XCX and Swift.

For one thing, as the Swiftie in my life pointed out, Charlie didn’t *just* write the song. She made tweets and other cagey references to Swift online. And there was also this photoshoot, which totally is just symbolic of Charlie’s struggles with fame and definitely, absolutely, not a reference in any way shape or form to the friendship bracelets that are a huuuuuuge thing among Taylor Swift fans.

 

Source.

Add to that, the fact that Charlie XCX – who is not a tiny, up-and-coming indie artist, even though she’s obviously not Taylor Swift – was previously opening for Swift on the Eras tour, and that she’s married to a bandmate of one of Swift’s exes, Matty Healy…and it all just turns into something a little less cut-and-dried. My personal read is that they’ve probably bickered in private, and stuff has happened that the general public doesn’t know about.

But to read and hear about the internet’s reaction, you’d think Taylor Swift had football-kicked a puppy.

To summarize, then: is it homophobic? Kinda. Petty? Definitely. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? We have no way of knowing, but the internet sure isn’t pausing to consider that.

A History of Misogyny and Victimhood

The reactions I’ve seen to this album’s release have been, to put it mildly, fucking unhinged – particularly because the album itself is being read in the absolute worst faith possible, and being used as an indictment of Swift as a person. I’ve seen comments that included, but weren’t limited to, the idea that Swift is “lowering herself” with Kelce and that she “could do better” with a partner; the idea that she’s now signalling herself as a tradwife and is secretly MAGA, to the idea that her opalite necklace is a coded white supremacist nod. (On the necklace, there are 8 lightning bolt charms and 14 links between them, which some people think is a dogwhistle about the Nazi meme “1488” – recently referenced by Pete Hegseth in an infamous military address with top generals. 1488 references the fourteen words, a white supremacist pledge, and 88 references the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, and stands for “HH”, meaning “Heil Hitler”. It’s a whole thing, because fascists used to have to hide their shit, and couldn’t just say things the way they seemingly can nowadays.)

Source.

So, is Swift drifting rightward?

The problem is, it’s almost impossible to extricate the conjecture about Taylor Swift from both normal press misogyny and the problems she’s created for herself. Swift has built a career as a confessional songwriter, coding in little hints and references to past relationships in her songs, and the press and fans have been delighted to hunt for these Easter Eggs. The problem is, hunting for patterns that sometimes exist is ripe ground for conspiracy theorists. Now, Taylor Swift isn’t the right kind of chronically online politics nerd who’d understand the danger of this, but it’s somewhat directly fed into the problem of the Gaylors, chronically online queer conspiracy nerds who’ve concocted increasingly elaborate explanations for how Taylor Swift is secretly in a relationship with Karlie Kloss, a former best friend. (And of course, “Actually Romantic” isn’t exactly going to help these allegations.)

But, back to the subheading. Is Swift a victim or a perpetrator?

God, that’s a stupid setup, and yet it’s the one we’re all being offered, twenty-four-seven right now. The shine is off the apple! This will sink her career! Never mind the fact that this kind of background radiation has been in the air since, I don’t know, Reputation? Or Lover? I understand that not every news story can be a serious piece about, say, the rise of fascism or the ongoing climate crisis that I guess we’re all just fucking ignoring now. Still, the way international press and media are crowding around to join in on the Serious Speculation about whether Swift has *finally* lost her touch is, frankly, terrifying.

From the whole reference entrapment with Kanye West – where she agreed to be referenced in a song, though not in the way he portrayed her (as a naked wax doll in bed with him, in the context of sexual conquest and saying he “made that bitch famous”) – to whichever jeering article has come out about her dating history, it seems like the media is genuinely trying to knock Swift off a balance beam at every opportunity.

The White Woman Conundrum

There’s a queasy problem at the heart of criticizing Taylor Swift. Let’s talk about white women.

Now, I don’t really identify as a “woman” anymore; that particular word has always stuck in my throat. But as a “political woman”, i.e., someone perceived as a woman who experiences misogyny and etcetera? Yeah, for sure. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to lump myself in with womanhood, because that’s how I’m perceived and how a lot of my experiences fit.

There’s this weird, uncomfortable thing where white women are simultaneously protected from our possible failures in a certain way, and also the most delicious, juicy, easy target for certain kinds of misogyny. As usual, I’m going to talk about a Canadian and American context, because that’s what I know best, but your personal cultural context may include more than what I’m talking about. Whereas Black women, Latina women, and Asian women are highly sexualised and fetishized, white women are weirdly both de-sexualised and the object of desire. Everyone is supposed to be like “us”, but we’re supposed to collect traits and clothes from other cultures, trophy-like. We mete out discrimination against other women and often hand down violence, but also end up being really, really comfortable targets for hatred.

White women are both allowed to express ourselves sexually, yet also seen as virginal and weirdly de-sexed. The standard for beauty and success, but also an extremely easy target for criticism, both on the left and the right. White women are also the figureheads and standard-bearers for what is deemed to be cringey.

Now apply these thorny contradictions and nuances to Taylor Swift. As a conventionally beautiful white woman who’s suffered from disordered eating and anorexia in the past, she’s both defined beauty standards and suffered from them. As someone who’s also suffered from disordered eating, there’s something that breaks my heart about this. Even someone who defines the beauty standard both didn’t feel like she was enough.

Swift has definitely lashed out and been petty in public and private, and she doesn’t seem to see her own role in conflicts very well. The song “Karma” from Midnights, which is my favourite of her albums, exemplifies this perfectly well. She has a tendency to re-open old wounds and dig up past conflicts and relationships. She puts her foot in her mouth. She can’t leave well enough alone – and sometimes she recognizes these traits, and sometimes she doesn’t.

The Morality Trap

The thing that makes me, personally, deeply uncomfortable with the backlash to Life of a Showgirl is that people seem to be addressing Taylor Swift without an iota of self-awareness that a) she’s never going to see their thoughts, and b) most of the people who will…are just her fans.

Now, it’s really fucking tricky to criticize something that people like. Angry clicks get attention. Hell, there’s something deeply uncomfortable to me about even writing this essay, because in a way, I’m still participating in the same attention economy around Swift that I’m criticizing. There’s an ouroboros of criticism on the left in particular that really worries me; an endless well of critique and self-critique that sometimes verges on the political equivalent of self-harming your movement. Self-reflection and accountability are important, but do we really think Taylor Swift is going to experience either of those from our critiques?

What’s more likely is that a) Swifties in your life are going to see you mocking her work, and feel kind of vaguely shitty and uncomfortable, or b) feel that peer pressure to join in. Or, in my case, c) wonder just how many of these invisible and extreme standards are actually in the back of people’s minds, and being applied to other women.

Because here’s the thing that’s eating a hole in my brain, and has been since I started seeing articles about how Swift getting engaged to her football boyfriend was “a disappointment”.

How many of the standards being applied to Taylor Swift are actually representative of people’s background thoughts about the women in their lives?

White women like Swift tend to get a lot of criticism, but also a lot more forgiveness for our fuckups. We have a lot more chances to come back from disappointments and rebuild our reputations – so many nonwhite women, particularly if they’re Black, get absolutely fucking wiped out and persecuted for far, far smaller and much more dubious offenses than Swift has committed. 

So the question is, who are all these thinkpieces *for*?

Talking to Ourselves

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to process your feelings out in the open, but I do think there’s something really interesting and possibly rather bad about the way that sometimes, criticism influxes from the right and left create a confluence. Swift has been getting a fresh backlash of hate ever since she started showing up at her boyfriend’s games. Meanwhile, people on my side of the street are very earnestly criticizing her for what we certainly think are more meritorious reasons, with actual grounding.

But when does criticism just become a kind of misogynistic blur of background hate and radiation? It’s awfully hard to make a good point when you’re just part of a crowd, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed on the internet, it’s that people are absolutely shit at contextualizing their perspectives with those of others.

One person hating something is an observation; two dozen hating something is a clamour; two hundred thousand is a sort of oceanic roar, for which all the details blend together.

So, then, what do we do? Does that mean we can’t hold public figures accountable?

The thing is, I’m not so fucking sure that all this critique is really about accountability. I also don’t know if people who are talking about accountability see how they’re pretty much just playing out games of punishment and shame, just with updated language and internal self-justifications that this time, the hate is justified, and the target is big enough that really, it’s harmless.

Who’s Fair Game?

And now we come to the part of the essay that has been keeping me up at night. Who are we allowed to hate? I’m certainly not innocent of despising some famous women and people, or mocking them – preferably in private or semi-private, rather than adding my voice to the cosmic radiation static of hate and jeering that tends to blare from every portal to the internet.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been running as a public school board trustee in a local election. That will be over by the time this post is up, although results won’t be in yet. Recently, I was at a Pink Tea celebrating the Famous Five who brought voting rights to Canadian women (vote rights for white women, that is, because the five were also anti-immigrant eugenicists).

The topic of misogyny came up among some city council and public school board trustee candidates. We talked about our local member of parliament, Rachel Thomas, whose policies I strongly dislike (to put it somewhat mildly). She’s advocated against safe injection sites, voted against abortion, and voted against trans rights. While yes, she’s experienced misogyny, as older candidates pointed out, she’s also voted only in favour of certain women. The thing is, the more centrist people there were keen to protect and shelter her reputation and save her a seat at the table, figuratively speaking.

It comes back to the concept of white feminism. Can we trust those who don’t advocate for us? The question I would ask is, maybe we should focus on those who are not just failing to advocate, but directly advocating against us. But even then – how often do we let ourselves slide into the guilty secret pleasure of misogyny when we deem a woman to be safely hateable? I don’t have an answer for this one, but I’m going to be looking into the mirror about it for a long time to come.

But Taylor Swift is also not a goddamn activist, despite what people would like her to be; she’s a pop star, and an extremely normal person. I have been developing a terrible, creeping suspicion that all these billionaires and people in power are, in some regards, terribly normal and petty, and utterly unprepared for and unable to understand the power they wield.

That does not mean we should not hold them accountable – but it does mean that we should, amongst ourselves, fucking interrogate both our priorities and the meaning of accountability itself.

What we need are nuanced discussions. What we have is a trend cycle being doused in the gasoline of AI slop and propaganda.

And at the end of the day, I wonder – has all this cultural criticism of creative works amounted to a hill of beans?

Kurt Vonnegut dryly commented, “During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

I guess what I’m saying is, treating Taylor Swift’s marriage and parental dreams as a failure of her feminism is extremely stupid bullshit in the context of vicious backlashes against queer rights.

Pick your fucking priorities, people, and think more carefully about the standards you apply to women and femmes in your lives. It’s just a mid album, but there’s something fundamentally gross about being this excited for a woman’s downfall.

 ***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people’s manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

I'm Like Other Girls

 So, people who remember the 90s and early 2000s, or even the early 10s, might remember the recurring cultural fixation on being "unlike other girls." A Youtuber I particularly enjoy just put out an excellent video essay on the topic, and it covers a really interesting angle that isn't necessarily being talked about much. 

A quick note about gender to preface things - some of the people who look like "other girls" are either transgender or non-gender conforming, and the issue of gender for trans people, especially re: gender performance for both personal reasons and survival reasons, is really complicated. I don't experience dysphoria for my presented or physical gender, but I wanted to mention that when I say "women" and "men," I am primarily talking about cis people - but I am aware trans people can also experience periods of trying desperately to conform while hiding their inner selves/real gender. (The real gender is the one by which someone identifies, just to be clear; also, genders and the expression/performance thereof can shift over time.)

So, with that note out of the way, kindly consider the latest iteration of feminine cannibalism.

Where it comes from 

It seems as though a lot of the people who talk about this are baffled about the causes of this hate. A millennial who remembers the brief period of modern society before the internet can confirm that it was very possible to be bullied for failing to conform to societal beauty standards - something that was particularly common in the 90s and 2000s. 

The thing is - it wasn't so much the actual "popular girls" who were nasty. It was mostly their seconds-in-command or the girls who wanted to be them. The invisible middle-layer of girls who were neither social outcasts nor truly universally liked. In the brutal hierarchical world of junior high (and sometimes high school), clawing for attention, especially from guys, is a vicious game. 

The thing is, parents also made some of these comparisons. Something absolutely burned into my mind is the moment in the Muppet Cinderella, featuring Brandy, when her aunt says, "you look like a girl from one of those rap videos!" in a dismayed and scolding tone - and the character's uncle comments, "you look like a girl from one of those rap videos" in a significantly warmer tone, while looking his niece (!) up and down. It was a tiny moment, but I can still recite those two lines of dialogue from memory roughly sixteen years later...and that says a lot. 

Authors, we need to knock it off

Being that I'm not only a writer, but that I also edit in the industry, I can absolutely confirm that a ton of romance books written for adults and by adults still have this internalized misogyny - including books by queer men. A lot of people are starting to unpack this deep-seated and knee-jerk hate, which is pretty great, but quite a few people still don't - and it sucks. A nemesis who may be promiscuous, blonde, shallow, vicious, or all of the above crops up quite often. Romance movies are so, so bad for this - and what shocked me was that most of those terrible romantic comedies I saw growing up were written, directed, and produced by men, especially men who sneered at the whole format. So...basically, men were presenting a "cool girl" and saying that she was better than other women. And as Aonso and some of the other creators linked in this essay put it, we wonder why women hate each other and themselves.

When it changed for me 

Two things happened when I was a teenager that made an important crack in my understanding of other women - first of all, I started to be attracted to girls. It's possible to hate people you're attracted to; look at incels, for example. Hell, that term was coined by a bi woman and was used by her and other queer people who felt undateable, and were trying to fix themselves so they could find love. (As usual, the worst kind of men invent nothing, and make what they steal, worse.) 

The other thing was - after a terribly unpleasant stint in private school in eleventh grade, which was a terrible five-month period, I returned to public school - but I started to dress the way I had always secretly wanted to. That meant (sigh) the boy-jeans that fit me under sarongs, long circle skirts with embroidery, peasant shirts, and that kind of thing. I had always loved clothing like that, and a brief stint of wearing a uniform made me decide firmly that I was going to wear the clothes I loved, damn it. 

And somehow, people not only thought that was cool - but they liked me and were friendly. It helped that the high school had a reputation for being nerdy and academic, but it was still an inner-city school, which made for a diverse population. And here's the twist - not only did I not get bullied, I had a great year and a half there, and I even friendly relationships with some popular girls. Finding out that pretty girls, even actual teen models, could be fun, smart, and sweet changed everything. 

I had a bad period with my counselling faculty in university as well, which sparked a nearly fatal depression - but that didn't make me hate all other women. The thing is, "nerdy" and "unconventional" girls can be just as vicious and mean as the "popular" ones - and to my later surprise, men can be every bit as petty and vicious and underhanded. I've seen it in professional communities, both my own and in the medical and business worlds, and I've even seen this kind of backbiting in queer communities. So why does it keep happening?

The core of the problem 

In psychological terms, it appears that most girls and plenty of women (and men) seem to not only view others based on their external interests - but as Aonso puts it, they assume that other people aren't as genuine about their interests, and are either "faking it" or doing it for "clout" or "attention". The thing is - a lack of theory of mind, understanding that other people have their own inner worlds, combined with a presumption of an external locus of control (i.e. letting the world's judgements determine what's important to you and what you should do), perfectly describe the things we assume about other women. But - it's easily disproven by talking to these "other girls". One of the greatest revelations of my life was discovering just how many "dumb" girls were pretending to be stupid just to avoid intimidating men and others. 

A fundamental lack of empathy for "other girls" is the justification for hating them. In the earlier decades, bullying definitely was an issue, but it doesn't fully explain why this hatred for the "other girl" is so deeply encoded. 

Combined with the mournful loneliness of societal prejudices experienced for failing to conform, as well as social rejection, plenty of "not like other girls" girls/people turn inward and try to find something about themselves to like. Being unlike one's tormentors is generally the first thing to notice - and accepting one's differences, especially if they result in being othered, can be comforting. 

However, just because it's a coping mechanism doesn't mean it's healthy. Destructive social dynamics are the price of being a member of a social species. The only way to deal with it is fighting the internalized social protocols of Western culture (i.e. don't talk about what's Important to you, don't say things that will make waves, even if they're really nice compliments; be innocuous but not too boring, etc). The patriarchial standards based in the most toxic core of North American culture, especially WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and whiteness culture, are killing all of us. But they don't have to, because we are already more than what we've been taught to be.

What I think now

In addition to this, a memorable social psychology class of mine focused on the ways that "alternative" people - which, I suppose, includes yours truly - still conform to dress codes within their own subcultures. When one considers an "alternative" girl next to, say, a sports team, of course she looks different. But stick that girl on tiktok and look under the right hashtags, and it's easy to see more visual similarities between clothing styles of alternative people. So - those "other girls" just need to band together and enjoy each other's company and similarities, and with the internet, that's possible like never before.

So, other girls? They're great! Finding out that first of all, pretty girls aren't actually vicious monsters out to destroy relationships and friendships, was wonderful. There are a lot of other people who adore reading, writing, talking about social justice issues and politics, tabletop RPGs, knitting, moody folk and rock music, true crime of the cult and con artist variety, history, shiny rocks, magic, making jewelry, baking and cooking, fashion, drawing, tea, and learning languages (to cite most of the interests I can think of at this exact moment). Not only that, I've learned to present my interests more appealingly in conversation, so they're more approachable and so I can hit the highlights for people who are interested but less knowledgeable. Discovering the joy of shared interests and the skill of sharing my interests has made my adulthood a rich and socially satisfying period, and I can only hope others can attain this level of warmth, friendship, and support.

Next time that little nasty whisper rears its head, or next time some guy mentions that a woman is "not like other girls" - ask, "what's wrong with other girls?" Embracing the shadow-side of other-girlness, and learning how to do makeup, dress provocatively, and appreciate one's own sexuality (or lack thereof) will not magically turn a woman into a brainless zombie or a soul-sucking, seductive vampire. If anything, we should explore these societally-shamed tropes, and appreciate the diversity of people who both identify under and branch out from the feminine gender. We have barely even begun to create societal roles for nonbinary people, but trans and nonbinary folks are also bringing forth a lot of creativity and wonderful content. Masculinity and femininity should be umbrellas, not cages - but self-hatred has never unlocked a cage from within. 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and their cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

Accidentally Progressive Misogynists

It's no secret that I'm a feminist, but I also grew up reading and adoring the words of Dead White Men, as they're often referred to now. Today, however, I want to focus my gaze on two peculiar bedfellows: Hemingway and H.P. Lovecraft.

When I first read Hemingway - for school, surprisingly enough; most other authors of "Great Literature," I sought out on my own - I was struck by the female protagonist's ferocious personality. In Matilda, Roald Dahl's main character comments to the kindly librarian that she "doesn't understand some of the things he says sometimes about men and women." That stuck with me, and when I got to Hemingway's books years later - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms - I definitely expected them to be, well, more offensive.

Hemingway's women are often scrappy, tough, and give as good as they get - and frankly, the men in his stories are often a pretty ragged, sorry, rather troubled lot. A femme fatale dame may be seen as death walking on a long set of legs, but the fact that she even poses a threat to Man and the Natural Order implies something very interesting about this so-called and imagined "rightness." But let's stick a pin in that discussion of "rightness" and quickly mention my other target: Lovecraft.

A Spooky, Lonely, Racist Old Man 

Now, it may surprise my gentle (or not particularly gentle) readers that I still have an abiding fondness for Lovecraft's work. The man himself was a lonely, sad fellow who had so many compulsions and fears that he barely functioned. His phobias - or at least, things he wrote about as being frightful - included dogs, cats, rats, cellars, cold rooms, the ocean, cephalopods, fungus, weird colours, Black people, Native Americans, other Brown people, Jewish people, Mixed people, non-Christian religions, women, mixed neighbourhoods, the dark, mirrors, and of course, madness, ruin, and mutation.

When talking about Lovecraft, some people (like his esteemed but regressive and unmannerly biographer Joshi) try to skirt around the ugly stuff, or downplay it - as in a rather awkward conversation I once had with a publisher in a significant Lovecraftian fiction house that shall remain unnamed. The woman insisted that Lovecraft had married a Jewish woman and therefore could not hate the Jews, and that for the time period, he wasn't that racist...

The counterpoints to this are painfully easy to make, but suffice to say that readers who are not convinced that Lovecraft and Hemingway are assuaging their own fears of other's perceptions and hiding from rather easily-proven points. Both are racist and somewhat misogynistic; both were also rather good writers. We must accept both premises rather than trying to justify or negate one or the other. The world does not always accept easy and comfortable categorization into "good" and "evil" or "bad."

Now, of course, as a white woman, I have a certain amount of societal cushioning that just makes it easier to endure and set aside certain things. And yet, there is a core to these two authors' works that calls me back, even when they surround or allude to rather detestable ideas.

In addition to a sort of mystique and fear around "The Other," whether speaking of women, non-white people, or combinations thereof, there is also a peculiar and almost beautiful longing.

There is something ineluctable about both Lovecraft and Hemingway that compels me deeply. It's the same tendency one can find in, surprisingly enough, such hated halls as the Incel (involuntarily celibate) forums of the latter day. They feel absolutely helpless before what they believe to be the absolutely monumental power of The Feminine, or The Threat of Non-Whiteness, or Pagan Decadence, or Homosexual Weakness. They constantly hint at or state outright that they are fighting these "fallen" influences - as though that's a fight they're constantly losing internally. One is reminded of the erotic angel-wrestling scenes alluded to in Angels of America, when Joe, the Mormon man with a bad case of sexual repression, discusses his gay longings.

The failure fetish

The thing with Hemingway, and often with Lovecraft, is that their stories are often about white men failing. Sometimes their characters die in moral triumph, but they die nonetheless. It's as though they want to fail, or as though the only way to escape the moral question altogether is with death. The striving and inevitable failure is almost compulsive, a kind of "l'apell du vide" (call of the void) where they have an ineluctable longing and tendency towards that which they claim to abhor.

Both men are fascinated with "the Other" even as much as they often abhor The Other's differences. Whether it's femininity, breaking the binary, or things "too horrid to name" (presumably gay stuff and BDSM, one supposes), Lovecraft kept coming back to the strangeness, especially genderless beings. The essential normalization of white, cisgender male masculinity - a completely artificial depiction of it, one might add, which is ahistorical and entirely synthetic, despite the way modern-day "Red pill" types and Republicans fetishize it - is rampant. And yet it is also tremendously fragile, in a way that echoes Christian morality. Even the slightest pleasure is a window through which evil can peer, or whisper, or tempt one from righteousness. And yet, are these evils not rather banal? If one's life and moral uprightness can be destroyed by an incautious application of glitter, is it not a rather sad, hollow life?

Extremely mediocre art by Michelle Browne.

The hidden longing

There is something incredibly empathetic hidden at the core of these works. The "terrible, unknowable" urge compels them to investigate the forbidden - and to understand things beyond their own world of experience. Similarly, in the Warhammer 40K novels and setting books, trying to understand the Chaos Gods or Xeno forces such as the Tau or Eldar can result in being "tainted" - in effect, empathy is both one of the Empire of Man's greatest weapons and greatest weaknesses.

But this longing is always the undoing of characters - when they dare come too close to the things that tempt them, whether those be horrifying powers, immigrant women whose children are going missing, or gods who walk as Black Men (as in Dreams in the Witch-House), all that is "good" and "noble" in these men is destroyed.

It's always because of family influences or heritage or interests, or then their experiences, but even unwillingly, the characters develop empathy and get closer to the cosmic horrors. The guy was racist, but part of him knew, I think, just how wrong he was. Not something he could face down.

In the later years of his life, Lovecraft started to write with more empathy and kindness about the otherworldly cosmic forces and aliens his characters ran into. Ernest Hemingway, who died of depression, met a fate that thousands of men fall prey to each year. One man died of poverty and isolation; the other, of unresolved mental health issues.

That unwilling empathy in these lauded dead white males is often lurking there, and it's so sad that they and other racists effectively cut themselves off from others' human experiences.

And perhaps, that's the greatest lesson - to conform to these artificial standards of masculinity is the real doom. Where a world of wonder and discovery awaits, the real horror comes from living within a prison - and thinking it's the only way and most correct way to live. And that ironic fate is not one I'd wish on anybody, especially now that people have a chance at living differently.

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

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Why I Hate Men

Hello hello!

Before I get down to brass tacks, two notes apply. First, I will be talking about harassment and violence in this post, as well as sexual assault. Second, when I talk about men, I am referring to cis and mostly heterosexual men. My experiences with trans men are more limited, and further, trans men do not have the systemic access to power that their cisgender counterparts do.

If you don't know what "cis" and "trans" mean, go here! Or even here. I will also be talking about patriarchy and male privilege, so before you tell me those things don't exist, please click on the links and do some research, so we can all save some time.

I hate men. 

First of all, #NotAllMen. For one thing, my romantic partner is a man, and some of my closest friends, the people I trust most in the world, are men. But still--in the space of a few years, I've gone from decrying criticisms of patriarchy and saying that patriarchy isn't a real thing, to actively participating in misandry and criticizing popular masculinity without remorse or apology--as much as possible, anyway.

How did that happen? How did a nice, egalitarian woman end up "hating men"? 

Well, feminism has definitely played a role in it, but there's more to it than that. It's given me a lens and a mirror, to reflect on and inspect my own feelings and thoughts. What I slowly discovered was that there were an endless number of habits I'd taken on that were solely for the sake of keeping men comfortable in conversations.

And more, I wasn't the only woman doing this--we were all doing it. From automatically defending men in conversations about rape and abuse, to citing "but I know so many decent guys", to folding into and agreeing with men's opinions whenever they piped up about a topic--even if those opinions disagreed with our own. If a man was upset, I, or someone else, would immediately try to comfort and console him. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you add all of that up, it results in a lot of emotional labour.

It goes deeper, too. Take those tendencies away from the allegedly banal setting of Facebook, and contextualize them within relationships. It's hard not to agree with one's father out of a sense of filial duty, even if one disagrees. Worrying about a partner's needs over one's own, even when they would willingly listen to your objections or requests.

As I started to notice those habits of my own, I noticed them in the women around me, too. People who don't fit in the rigid and limited gender binary, such as my trans friends and friends who don't like gender labels, STILL had many of the same habits of consoling men and being timid about expressing their own opinions.

This sounds like quibbling, says part of my brain. Isn't it making something out of nothing? But that part is still subject to all this socialization. How can we talk about any feminist issue when our complaints are downplayed? It's easier to say a woman is entitled and whiny than it is to admit that there are cultural links between, say, child marriage in the much-criticized Middle East and groupie sex culture from the 1970s.

It sounds minor, but these aren't the only habits I've developed. Every woman I know habitually treats walking alone as a small test of will. We carry our keys and memorize how to punch people and make sure we know where our Swiss Army knives are in our purses and pockets, "just in case". The chance of sexual assault is just treated as a fact of life, something to dread but accept as a risk. Women plan their routes around trying not to be alone, and go to bathrooms as a group, for just this reason. It becomes unconscious--until, at some point, one wonders why they always reach for a knife or a cell phone when walking alone, and considers that maybe, just maybe, that's messed up.

But what about men? 

Men themselves have reacted in a variety of ways to my changing perspective. A lot of my male friends have expressed discomfort or protested my opinions. More disconcertingly, the same friends will use pretty manipulative arguments to counter my own. Invoking the sacred bonds of friendship--all the more ironic when one has barely talked to a person in private, if ever--and using personal attacks were the most common "counter arguments" I saw. Fortunately, a surprising number have supported this misandry and verbal defiance of societal training, for which I am endlessly grateful. Every time a man does not attack me, verbally or physically, I am relieved.

When I was younger, women would bully me. I hated women, and trained myself to think that men were somehow better; more logical, more objective, and kinder. As I've grown up and started expressing uncomfortable opinions, I've found that male socialization is pretty much the same as female socialization, and that men gossip and express indirect aggression and use personal attacks, too. But where women eventually learn that these attacks do more harm than good, men don't--and I think a lot of women let men get away with them because we're trained to comfort them.

Now that I've actually been on the internet for a while, too, I've noticed that men or apparently male commentors tend to be more dogged and persistent in their attacks. After a while, I could tell the gender of "anonymous" commentors pretty easily just from the style of their comments.

But why kill all men? 

First of all, misandry is mostly a performative thing. At no point would I or any other feminist I know of pick up a gun and just start blasting men left and right, gunning them down. Nor would I suggest that feminists, including myself, go around dealing out rape to fix up gay men and make them like women. Nor would I say that women have the right to keep their male partners in line, as god intended, using force if necessary. Nor would I say that men are obligated to perform sexual services at our whim, and to keep the house clean. I wouldn't say that men need to look good at all times or they're slobs, and deserve harassment. I would not turn a blind eye to abuse of a man by his female partner because "that's just their relationship". I would not assume that his job is to be at home, raising the kids, or in the back of the church, remaining obedient and silent. I would not assume that a man is "asking for it" with the way he is dressed. I would not follow around and harass a man on the internet until he wrote many tearful blog posts about his harassment and stalking. I would not kill men because they had rejected me. I would not say men should not be believed when they say they have survived ugly incidents of sexual assault.  I would not say that men are complaining too much when they ask for more speaking parts in movies, or say that men's mere presence is ruining science fiction and video games. I would not support legislation against male reproductive rights, questioning whether men should be forced to care for accidentally sired children and deal with them from the first moment the cells start to divide--claiming, of course, that clusters of cells and children or babies are the same.

But apparently, men will do this to women, and when we complain about their treatment, continue to say that they're being unfairly maligned. And so that is why I "hate men": it is my way of whistling in the dark, of dealing with the statistical fact that about 1 in 4 North American women are sexual assault survivors--including too many of my friends to count. Being a woman means living under siege.

And you know what's worse? Change "men" to "white people" and "women" to "people of colour", or apply the pattern to disabled people, and the propositions still 'work'. Our world is messed up, and we need to change it.

And I do mean "we". For women, that means striking back against our training and tearing down our fears. For men, that means giving women room to speak, and a willingness to be uncomfortable, and even to give up some power. So, men: let women make jokes in which you are not shown in the best light. Strike back at your own sense of entitlement. Listen to black people, and First Nations people, and Asian people, and brown people (in no particular order) when they talk about their experiences. Listen to trans people and nonbinary people. Listen to disabled people.

Listen. Consider. Do not assume you are right.

Just listen.

***

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