A (belated) Happy Pride & some links
Last weekend, I watched the Dublin Pride parade wind its way through our small city. It’s the first ‘normal’ parade since 2019 and that feels (at least to me) like another lifetime. In honour of the season, I read Adrienne Rich’s infamous essay on compulsory heterosexuality (PDF).
It’s a wonderful essay - reasoned, thoughtful, provocative, clear. It’s an exposition of the cultural propaganda of heterosexuality, an institution created alongside patriarchy and capitalism. Importantly, it illuminates the differences between lesbianism and the gay male experience.
She describes the workplace as “a place where women* have learned to accept male violation of their psychic and physical boundaries as the price of survival”. She writes about the “enforced economic dependence of wives”, the erasure of lesbian existence and “the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economic, and emotional access”. I learned a lot from it like that “compulsory heterosexuality” was named as one of the “crimes against women” by the Brussels International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976. She highlights how “heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty and fulfillment” and how “heterosexuality as an institution has been organized and maintained through the female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class women’s ‘leisure’.”
I lapped it up. I didn’t know how much I needed to read about “unexamined heterocentricity”!
A few weeks ago, I met my girlfriend for a pizza in Smithfield. As I walked onto the square, she called to say she was behind me. I stopped, turned, smiled, and kissed her. ‘LESBIANS’ a teenage boy screamed. It made us laugh. He shouted it as if he’d spotted a rare bird in the wild. I was delighted to see my love and nothing could cramp my joy. Over the coming days, I relayed this experience to (queer) friends. Most laughed, some grimaced.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. On another day, in another context, that encounter could have landed on my psychological skin very differently. If I felt less sturdy in myself, I doubt I’d have been able to laugh. As a woman, I’m always aware of risk. When I’m publicly identifiable as a lesbian, that risk increases significantly. It weighs on me. The fear that if I kiss my partner or hold her hand in public, I could put us both at risk. I often think: Could I handle this if it went badly? Could I get away if I needed to? My first thought is often for our safety.
I feel my skin prickle with apprehension when I walk, with her hand in mine, past the Christian preachers on Henry Street. Or when we’re out running together and are mostly invisible to passersby until we finish our exercise and embrace. I feel it when a nurse asks about my sex life wanting to know if I could be pregnant before injecting me with radioactive material. According to the medical consent form, the only sex that exists is the kind that could result in a pregnancy.
Pride is a celebration, but it’s also a protest. There’s pageantry, glamour and fun but that co-exists alongside grief, pain and trauma for many of us. It is a privilege to be gay. It is a gift to have access to the rich, diverse queer community that exists in Dublin. But that’s not the whole story.
If you are not queer, please don’t assume that everything is OK. 62% of people in Ireland voted for same-sex marriage but hate, bigotry, erasure and discrimination still exist. In the last few months, LGBTQIA+ people have been violently attacked and murdered. Trans people face horrific levels of violence and discrimination often at the hands of state institutions. Every June, corporations use “this radical movement of love and power, self-power, to sell Doritos.”
Everything is not OK.
*It should go without saying that when I talk about women, I include all people who identify as women. Those who attempt to use feminism to be divisive and exclusionary have no place in our movement.
The end of Roe
I’ve been reading about the terrifying end of Roe in the US. To summarise: “We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth.”
Some excellent reporting from abortion clinics on the day the ruling came down from The New Yorker and compelling audio storytelling from the New York Times.
I listened to Rebecca Traister on the Longform podcast and then read her piece which ends “we go forward with the will of those who came before, and those who have never stopped putting one foot in front of another, to some finer tomorrow, distant but always possible”.
Things to read
Your regular reminder that cellulite isn’t real.
The feminist case for breast reduction
Lena Dunham reflects on the ten year anniversary of Girls. “The writing was my way of trying to understand, to feel even, what it was to be part of something.”
A depressing piece about male violence and US politics.
“Sometimes friendship is an explosion, and sometimes it’s a slow, gentle burn that keeps you warmer than you ever could have imagined.”
“Caregiving was humiliating and transcendent and unending, and I was unnerved by how quickly it could decimate me.” & more Angela Garbes content.
High risk pandemic stories: a syllabus
“relationships aren’t free-for-alls.” A wise and kind piece about boundaries
This peek into the domestic lives of Emily Gould and Keith Gessen felt very 2014.
“Perhaps the most destabilizing aspect of the #MeToo revelations was learning that the movies themselves—which I had taken to be reflections of universal aesthetic norms, maybe even of biological or “hardwired” realities—were largely the imaginative products of a small group of sex criminals”
I highlighted a lot of this thought provoking piece on Celine Sciamma and her quest for a “new feminist grammar of cinema” by Elif Batuman (Love this 2018 podcast inteview with Elif too.)
“The children are no longer our future”
“The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens — its women, its racial minorities and especially its children.”
Never forget the relationship between patriarchy and mass shootings.
The euphoria of Elliot Page.
What non-profit work is *really* about. Found myself nodding along with a lot of this.
“That was him: always the hero; also the harm.”
Jordan Kisner on dead bodies.
“As the architect of Facebook’s lucrative and societally consequential user data-based advertising business, Sandberg honed what has become a toxic and secretive user-surveillance income model that has brought Facebook staggering wealth and globe-spanning control and influence.”
“Belonging takes time, but it feels good to rest and feel my backbone, my flesh squished against the chair and feel at home right here, right now.” I’ve really been enjoying Fariha’s newsletter.
Things to watch & listen to
I got a lot of joy from WeCrashed while I was sick with covid.
An unapologetically queer apartment (with a pink couch!)
Agreed with a lot of this review on '"The First Lady", though still watched it for Viola.
I've never seen this show but I think I'd really enjoy it.
Saw this film on the big screen last weekend and I loved it.
A dreamy apartment tour
On opting out.
Heartstopper - a very sweet, queer story.
