It’s Green Dicktember, I Guess

Left to right (1) random screen cap of what you get if you search “orc” in kindle (2) screen cap of a re-gram of a fantasy romance fan talking about her favorite orc books (3) part of a Brother Hildebrandt painting illustrating Tolkein orcs menacing hobbits

About 9 months ago I began seriously asking myself “dang, what it is with white ladies and orcs”? Now here we are: according to the Fantasy Romance Community it is Orc-tober. Given the fetishization of orcs, that’s basically like saying it’s Dicktember. To be followed by Jizuary.

Until eleven months ago I had no idea that orcs warrant an entire erotic genre. It’s possible I knew that minotaurs were A Thang, but minotaurs’ whole origin story is sexual. And of course of I knew about vampires. They’re passé at this point.

Spicy fantasy about elves, fae, gods, and monsters has been around as long as there’s been folklore, in one way or another. Modern “romantasy” has (mostly human women) getting it on with not just the clasic “pretty supernaturals,” but Every. Thing. Else. Trolls, nagas, gargoyles, kraken, mermen, demons, and werecats. Science fiction romance mostly means space aliens that approximate all of the above and more.

And then there’s orcs. There are authors who have 6 or 7 books about just orcs and authors who have multi-species supernatural worlds with orcs being just one type of sexy neighbor, but in my non-scientific observation, erotic fiction about orcs in particular is weirdly prevalent. For every book about a lizardman, lionman, gargoyle, undead wizard, dragonshifter, or minotaur there are two or three about orcs. And there is all kinds of stuff going on with those beefy, green guys with underbites. And I’m 100% serious when I say orc erotica is the most racialized fantasy writing I’ve read in years.

There is whole series out there that deploys every trope and stereotype that was used in the 20th century United States to enforce sexual segregation of black men from white women. Except instead of the white men successfully attacking the entire sexuality and public safety of black men, and permanently depressing the sexual agency of white women, large numbers of white (human) women discover all the bad stuff is rumors put about by toxically insecure white (human) men, and all the good stuff is just true.

The orcs are stronger, sexier, *ahem* bigger, and–amazingly enough–not rapists. Both the transgressive fantasies and reactive fears about the hypersexualized menace of the Dark Other gets wrapped up in a happy ever after. Dude, it is So. Strange… If you’re curious, it’s called the Orc Sworn series and appears in two of the screen caps above, but honestly, it freaks me out. There is one whole book about reproductive coercion of human women by human men in which the human men use pregnant women in an attempted genocide against orcs. It is very much not recreational reading in a post-Dobbs world. Also the author is into exhibitionism (which, fine, just not particularly amusing for me) and I find her writing about actual sex kind of annoying. I think she’s going for dark and edgy but it’s mostly just dank and repetitive.

A less traumatic but very similar orc centered series resurrects the “noble savage” tropes of the 1980s bodice busters where various brown heroes are rumored to be savage kidnappers, but turn out to be just really manly treehuggers or whatever. The orcs go around rescuing the human women from the sexual horrors of economic vulnerability and bring them to happy orc land where everyone is anticapitalist and the orc men supply both birth control and good oral sex. That author writes graphic sex with an upbeat Saturday morning cartoon vibe.

Why is a bunch of horny stories worth thinking about anyway? And what do I mean about the white women? It could be anyone behind the formulaic nom de plumes (noms de clavier?). Because the world is terrible and terrifying and my day job requires me to think and read about some really bad stuff. I cope not just with the most escapey of escapist literature, but by picking apart the layers of the stories. And race is always one of the layers, along with gender and agency (both intimate and economic).

Taking a step back here, I am of the first D & D generation. The leading illustrations of Tolkien in my youth were the Hildebrandt brothers hippie pre-Raphaelite folkloric take. Orcs were not sexy. They were creepy. They might be impressively menacing in large numbers, but they were explicitly and implicitly gross: dripping or crusty and reeking. This is to be expected, since they originated as Tolkein’s not at all subtle amalgation of Mongol hordes and jackals.

However, the late 20th century also had sexy Boris Vallejo barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cinematic debut as Conan drew on titillating aesthetics of under-clothed muscled men brandishing big swords over their heads while also managing to draw the eye to their fur and chain loin cloth. These men accessorized with scared women who had very improbable tits. There was definitely sexual messaging there but it was highly unsafe and problematic if you were a woman. Then the crossover happened.

left to right (1) the character stats for orcs from the original D&D monster manual; (2) google search for “orc”; (3) Boris Vallejo illustration of Conan the Barbarian

A friend of my theorizes that some of this is Peter Jackson’s fault with his genetically engineered pumped up Saruman orcs. Warhammer and The Hulk probably have something to do with it too. Orcs now look like Conan. How they act depends on the brand of fantasy the author is peddling.

Fantasy writing, done correctly, is the dream shared between the writer and the reader. How people dream of otherness depends in part on their experience of being othered. I’m a mixed race woman who does not pass and I have plenty of accrued trauma from being in relationships with cis men. Not only am I married to a man, my mother was too. Heterosexual relationships are probably three of the top five sources of intergenerational trauma for cis women. All of that to say I am not going to throw shade on anyone’s kink or cope. But I have questions!

Would women of color write worlds in which chattel servitude is simply a plot device to further romantic partnership? The amount of times slavery comes up in romance novels is pretty freaking creepy, and while lack of economic and legal agency is common to womanhood across cultures, being abducted, trafficked, and reproductively dehumanized on the basis of race is not theoretical or fantastical for Black women. I get the uneasy feeling that slavery plots in paranormal romance edge into the problematic treatment of sexual assault by HBO screen writers: unexamined exploitation of trauma to supercharge the drama without regard to the weight or context of the violence.

Why do these more powerful, desirable species all seem obsessed with human (white) women? The protagonists are white women at a ratio of about 15:1. In multi book series, you can see the conscious effort, usually at about book six, to include a one human woman with pigment (and possibly a sensitivity read in acknowledgements). Also, where are all the orc women? In at least one series they literally don’t exist, which is a nice guilt-free solution to the knotty problem of exogamy, status, and sexuality. If you read much paranormal peen lit, you’ll see what I did there.

Google search results for “male orc” – see what I mean: It’s a bunch of Incredible Hulk/Conan/Beauty and the Beast kink.

“Fantasy” is desire. It doesn’t just mean magical creatures, or longing for a powerful partner who will protect, satisfy and nurture. For some of us the speculative, optimistic hook is multiculturalism, universal basic income, and clean energy. I do have a certain soft spot for a good traditional high fantasy epic setting, but high stakes plots are hella stressful. The orcs and magic romances that that keep me from falling into the abyss are the ones with a modern multi-ethnic society that happens to be populated by elves, harpies, ogres, and witches. Being an orc is sexy in much the way being Italian is sexy, except ethnic essentialism is more excusable where everyone is actually a different species. Orcs can be IT guys, financial advisors, bar tenders, or small business owners. Elves are more often than not prissy old money assholes, but they can also be engineers or HR professionals.

No surprise, there mega shitty modern orc romances. I have ventured into this territory with considerable curiosity and reserve of goodwill and some books are so bad I avoid everything by authors who even look like they share a cover artist. The space in my life for bullshit is limited and there are many demands on that capacity. But the authors whose art and work I go out of my way to support seem to cluster in this sub genre. Elsie Winters I wrote up in some detail in the previous post, C.M. Nascosta is another. Abigail Kelly has an orc side character in her New Protectorate series whose own book is coming out in a month or two and I will have a whole lot to say about the world and the characters then, but in the mean time:

[H]is pretty face was almost always set in a neutral, borderline disinterested look both men and women couldn’t seem to get enough of. But he was an orc, Theodore wasn’t surprised. Everyone thought orcs were attractive.

Consort’s Glory, Abigail Kelly (2022)

(emphasis in original)

An Ingenious folklore of (Im)probable Need

“He was a puzzle I could tinker with for years and get to know a little at a time, treasuring each little kernel of himself that he shared with me instead of consuming him all at once.”

Seduction of a Psychopomp – Elsie Winters 2023

The reading order, from left to right is 2, 3, and 1

Elsie Winters is the author of an interconnected series of 3 novels and three novellas in the fantasy romance genre. Her work feels to me like drinking a perfect cup of tea beneath a Maxfield Parrish sky. It’s like combining the powerful intellectual and emotional appeal Charles de Lint’s urban fantasy had for me in the early 1990s and the unencumbered delight of young love in Netflix’ Heartstopper that soothes my tired middleaged mama’s soul. It’s a combination that I probably started unconsciously hoping to find over thirty years ago.

Last year my brain needed to take shelter from the world and I stumbled down the rabbit hole of fantasy romance. Like any other human creative activity, there are some people who are really good at it and there are some who are absolute shite. Sorting one from the other takes some work, because “shite” is somewhat subjective. Elsie Winters is good at it, objectively in that she crafts a well-turned sentence and properly paced plot, and subjectively in that she hits all my alchemical notes.

When I was a kid my ratio of friends to books was about 1:500. I had one friend at a time, two at most until I was at least 13. I had rooms of books (mostly at libraries, but there was at least one full room of books at my house). By young adulthood my nonacademic reading paths had firmly coalesced into two strands: romance and fantasy, with a light side of science fiction. This is probably self protective when your academic and professional interests are American law and social history. This is still true.

Fantasy: “A genre of speculative fiction involving magical, folkloric or mythical elements”.

I read Anne McCaffrey (because I liked it), Robert Zelazny (because my boyfriend liked it), and Stephen R. Donaldson because I thought I was supposed to. As I’ve gotten older I’ve read tons of forgettable stuff with lurid covers, Tolkien’s minor and major works, some dreary Arthurian/post-Tolkein mishmash, Terry Pratchett, and Naomi Novik. And I have a particular nostalgic soft spot for Charles de Lint, one of the first to put the fairies and demons of legend in cars prowling the Rockies, or apartments in urban Canada..

Romance:  genre fiction with the primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and usually has an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”.

I’ve read a LOT of romances, for any number of reasons, both bad and good, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. I’ve written several (three, to be precise), although it would be a stretch to say I’ve published even one.

One of the reasons I tried to write romance was because I wanted the exuberant adrenaline of my favorite movie genre (science fiction action) and the soothing dopamine of romance all in one package. Action movies are notably terrible to their protagonists on the romance front (see: every Marvel movie except Ant Man).

Then I realized that other people have already got it figured out.

Fantasy: a fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes”

Oxford Languages

Fantasy romance–#FaRo if I’m trying to coach the algorithm—recognizes the ways in which “romance” in the genre sense and “fantasy” in genre and psychological sense are the same thing. The desire to populate a fantastic world with one’s desires: whether simple or complex, and spin tales of the world as you would like it to be can take many forms. The cynical side of this is about the degree to which, for many women who love and desire cis men, feeling physically safe, much less having regular orgasms, is about as likely as a world populated by elves, mages, and werewolves.

It’s amazing how much of fantasy romance–purportedly fun escapism and/or recreational erotica–is really allegory about surviving sex trafficking or the intersection of sexual and economic coercion. Elsie Winters is not one of the writers whose whole oeuvre derives from resolving the underlying tensions around women’s lack of sexual and economic agency. Although she’s a better narrative stylist than many who do, and would probably do a better job at it.

Romance: something (such as an extravagant story or account) that lacks basis in fact

Winters doesn’t appear to be trying to take on the social Big Questions of sex. She probably falls in the category of “Comfort Reads”. (I’ve learned that labels and acronyms are very important for a diligent consumer of fantasy romance.) Her books are not totally low stakes rom-coms, but the plot of her books doesn’t turn on potentially world ending drama and traumatic personal peril. Her protagonists are fighting crime and social discrimination, not averting zombie apocalypse or surviving years of sexual slavery.

Her characters experience angst, uncertainty, and fear but they are also going to be making Twilight jokes, not being forced into marriage by the specter of starvation and violent blackmail. In addition to lighthearted banner, Winters throws in the occasional easter egg reference to other widely read fantasy romance writers, because fantasy romance writers all read one another’s work and cheer each other on across their social media channels. This adds to the general feel-good, wine-book-group, support-mamas vibe.

“It’s got little eyeballs!” he said too loudly, and I flinched. “Sorry,” he said, dropping into a whisper. “I’ve never seen a plant with eyeballs!”

I gave him a side eye, considering some people might consider me to be a plant with eyeballs. Sylvan were pretty closely related to dryads, after all. “I just explained, they’re not plants, they’re not even related to plants—” “

Yeah, yeah, I know, but those are little plant dudes with eyeballs. You can say what you want.”

Green Eyed Monster – Elsie Winters 2021

The big joke about a lot of romance books is they have [tee hee]…SEX…! It’s bothered me for years that no one blinks if we take kids to watch Star Wars where literally billions of people die, Luke Skywalker’s beloved guardians are depicted—on screen—as smoking corpses, and kids get to learn the words “torture” and “bounty hunter” while being marketed Yoda stuffed toys. At the same time NFW would Lucas have ever had Han and Leia get happily, consensually naked together on screen. Or even show them getting out of bed after implied nookie.

Even without a “Think of the CHilDreN!!” aspect, writing consumed by and for adults has a “seriousness” scale that accords violence and sexuality (at least good sex, versus sexualized violence) very different levels of respectability. Seriousness in this case isn’t quite the same a literary merit. An adult can ride a bus ashamedly reading a spy thriller or murder mystery in which people get shot, dismembered and stabbed on the page, and the characters participate in or discuss in detail all kinds of assault and homicide and people will treat it as “casual” reading but not laughable or shamefully vulgar. Some of this is just sexism (John Grisham is inherently more respectable than Jackie Collins because he is a man writing for men), but some is more complex negativity towards sexuality. And the more something is about sex, with no other obvious “purpose” the more awkward we’re supposed to be about it.

Elsie Winters’ protagonists have (cis, het) sex. On the page. The ones with penises get erections. However she’s not writing “erotica”. If you want a book that’s half a writing exercise about fluids and positions, there are other writers who are totally into that (with all the species in Tolkein’s canon), and again, some can make that a fun read, and some are annoying and boring. “Erotic fantasy romance”, like any other erotica, pushes the bounds of what we are supposed to admit to reading, and thus admit to thinking about, enjoying, or creatively imagining as part of public discourse.

Fantasy: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need

Merriam Webster

The reason to read Elsie Winters’ Boundlands books isn’t too push those boundaries, so much as it is to appreciate people being happy. Sex is just grown up, kinda vanilla sex, if people in their 20s or early 30s always had joyful, non-toxic sex. But more than that her characters are adorable. Reading about them is a Grinch heart-grew-three-sizes experience. My heart needs that these days.

He had no way of knowing this—he couldn’t have—but a proffered stick, a nice one, was the magpie equivalent to a marriage proposal. I watched my hand lift of its own accord and grasp the stick, taking it from his hand. My bird brain was doing an end zone victory dance, even as my rational side was telling me there was no way he meant it. Bird brain didn’t care. He’d just proposed.

Magpies & Mayhem – Elsie Winters 2022

All The Little Enoughs

close detail of GrackleCrackle by Laura Liz Ruprecht

A man I knew not very well died this past week. His name was Roland Haertl. He was well into his 80s, so I can hardly claim to be surprised, but I’d just seen him on our regular Zoom call, for the writing class we shared for the last two years. The small overlap of our lives, and its mutual amusement and regard was a kind of joy I think I can only appreciate in my own middle age.

Born in 1936, Roland was roughly the age of my mother, but had perhaps more the temperament and life experience of my father: exuberant and confident of his own wit, a survivor of war, familial separation, and geographic displacement. In our shared class he was writing a memoir of a very full life that began in what is now the Czech Republic, and wound its way across oceans, through financial success and misadventure, parenthood, and several marriages.

An engineer and entrepreneur by training, prose was not perhaps Roland’s best skill. But he had a way of capturing love and remembering beauty that spoke to me. His approach to reading and commenting on others’ stories was both gleeful and blunt. His writing conveyed diverse interests, his unfiltered appreciation of humanity, gratitude for his own considerable good fortune, and an appetite for knowing more, even as the years weighed down his limbs and he cheekily drafted his own obituary. 

We were more than acquaintances, but I’d feel presumptuous calling us friends. A small corner of each of our lives fell into a small space in the other’s and it made that small bit of my life sparkle. Lives need those little interstitial pieces, with each bright spot here or there falling into a larger mosaic that sometimes I can’t even see.

I only met Roland in person a few times. When we met, he gave me a kiss on the cheek and an affectionate squeeze of the fingers. One of the first pieces of his that I read was his memory of sharing a pear with is grandfather, so when he hosted a gathering for our class, I brought him a jar of home canned pears.

When I was younger, at least into my twenties, if not longer, connections to other people came in large, gaudy chunks: passionate crushes, desperate need to fit in with friends, struggles to differentiate self from others that filled my whole field of vision. I had brief, interesting acquaintances in those years: the woman who taught me to make bobbin lace when I was a tween, a Kiowa WWII veteran who I met in a laundromat in Oklahoma in college, but I experienced them as detours from the larger path.

By my forties I could detect and value more diffuse relationships: long connections over space and time with college classmates and distant relatives. I learned the comfort of a web of subtler connections, and how to cultivate friendships that endure without either frequent or intense contact.

GrackleCrackle by Laura Liz Ruprecht (partial)

I might have known and appreciated Roland in my twenties or thirties, instead I knew him mostly as a Zoom square among a dozen others, for two years, as I entered my fifties. And we had the intimacy of one another’s stories: how he scarcely saw his father between the ages of 3 and 10, how I never knew my father as anything but an older, thwarted man. His stories were sometimes poignant, and never apologetic, although at times I thought they ought to be.

An imposing iceberg of a life can emerge a bright fragment in someone else’s story. I got to share a little bit of the end of Roland’s long, rocky and sometimes raucous path. He shared a bit of mine and I’m grateful.

One of the last things I wrote that Roland read was a bit where I ruminated on mortality—a topic he certainly had more experience with than I. His comment was, “I liked it! I read it! Twice!”. Here is the piece Roland read. Twice.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Enough

I logged into Facebook on New Years Day to find a post from a former neighbor who moved to Medford a few years ago and who posts on Facebook maybe once a year. This year’s post was a picture of her husband Matt, who died last year of pancreatic cancer, a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday. She said “I still love him, and I miss him every day”.

I’m getting to the age where loss of my peers doesn’t seem so shocking as it did even five years ago, but I still feel some disquiet. When one of my dearest college friends passed away in 2019, her wife said at her memorial, “Ellis wanted more life.” She was not looking to be remembered for her graceful acceptance of her fate. And not only that, I wanted more Ellis. It was not enough life.

I think one of the (several) reasons I “hoard” people is to search for clues about what is enough, constantly measuring, comparing details. I keep track of the casual acquaintances, connecting on social media with elementary school classmates I haven’t seen since 1986 and will likely never meet again in person, sending Christmas cards to childhood friends or distant cousins whose politics and voting patterns are inimical to my values. I stay in touch not only with old boyfriends, but keep track of their nieces and nephews. I nourish a constant stream of data to tell me how much is “enough”, whether measured in years, love, or otherwise. 

I am roughly a year older than Matt. Our oldest children were born within a month of one another, both part of the crop of about 8 babies born on our street that summer. Those babies are 16, most with younger brothers and sisters. Matt was a tall burly blond man. Perhaps one of his boys was able to grin and look him in the eye, measuring against his height, before he died. They won’t be able to look out and catch his eye in the crowd when they finish high school.

Whose “enough” counts? 49 is generous in some parts of the world. If the classical measure of a man’s life is Three Score and Ten, then Two Score and Nine sounds close. But if 49 is enough life for a man, it is not enough for Matt’s boys.

There was a time in my life when I was “the one without a baby” among my peers, and I would admire and envy the babies my friends brought to barbeques, or book group. One such baby who came to book group was solemn newborn named Maisie, with a thick tuft of brown hair. I kept loosely in touch with Maisie’s mother as we both moved away from the town where we met, then one day her social media held nothing but a link to Caring Bridge: a website primarily for communicating about health journeys, frequently terminal ones. Maisie had cancer. She was six. The treatment updates became less optimistic, and a rare update written by her father described how he found a bridal magazine in the hospital room and asked about it. His wife sternly informed him she and Maisie were planning Maisie’s wedding. A thousand miles away I cried in my office. There was not enough of Maisie’s life for Maisie’s mother.

Can one aggregate lives to get to enough? I know it doesn’t work that way, but I knew Maisie had an older brother and a younger sister. She died when my own two older children were tiny. I suspect her death played a part in my having a third child. I couldn’t bear to leave one of my children alone after my husband and I are gone, feeling they stood a better chance of being enough together.

Ten years ago this month I went to a funeral for the son of one my law partners. Joseph was just out of the Coast Guard Academy, training on the crew of a rescue helicopter lost at sea. I cried for his parents, and the universal rule that a parent should not have to bury a child. But ten years later I still cry for Joseph’s only sibling, his less athletic older brother who always came panting up the hill second when they went running and Joseph beat him to the top every time. His stoic, dry eyed eulogy for Joseph finished, “I’ll wait for you at the top.” Joseph certainly didn’t have enough life, but his older brother didn’t have enough of Joseph’s life either.

“Insurance” is not a good enough reason to have a child. Any wise person will tell you that. But when Joseph’s brother grieved him, I remembered Maisie’s brother and sister.

Matt’s death, the ending of a life that no longer overlapped with mine at all, caused me to tally the lives in my internal reference library, looking for one that I thought was “enough”: in duration, or depth, or some other measure. The women in my family reliably live into their 90s, and several to over 100. I think of myself as being half past life. But is it overly generous to live so long—an embarrassment of riches, perhaps?

Simply being not dead isn’t enough either. I think about my parents, or my father-in-law, who all lived to at least 80, but whose lives faded in one way or another before they flickered out entirely, leaving a layer of unrealized hopes. Or my sister’s former brother-in-law, dead this winter of a drug overdose at 45. Whatever the source of his pain was, it drove him to pills and repeated incarceration. His own life was not enough for him, long before it ended.

Deaths of people I scarcely knew—a girl met once as a newborn, a young man I saw once as his proud father introduced him around the office, a broken former welder and absent father two divorces removed—leave little trail markers along my path in life, like a single wolf track in the mud, or a bit of broken seabird egg on a beach. I’m scrying meaning from tiny bits of others’ whole stories.

It’s no easier to learn from lives where the whole story rests its weight on mine, like my Granny. I am born of her blood and her death is a dark gouge in my inventory of lives. I felt sure her life wasn’t done at 77, although her health had been troubling her. Perhaps because she died by violence, and whatever “enough” means, it shouldn’t mean one’s last minutes are pain, rage, and fear.

For now, after pondering for some days, I decide my Uncle Andrew might have had “enough” life. Married to one of my father’s older sisters, he was a genial, scholarly man who died at 96, in his sleep. He survived war, famine, displacement, immigration, possibly a mysterious tragic love affair, and the loss of two of his own children. He lived out his final years mostly sound of mind, in the luxury of a retirement community in northwest Portland. He basked in the epitome of Chinese patriarchal good fortune, seven successful adult grandsons, who wept at his funeral. I wept too, but surely that was enough life.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Roland Haertl self-published his memoir “Escape to Freedom” last year. It is on Amazon. He supported the ACLU and the Democratic Party, which is particularly salient since he was among the last generation to have lived under actual Nazis.

More about Laura Liz Ruprecht mosaic art here

The Birds, Bees, and Yul Brynner

“Important question for science. Is this man Sexy?”

This is the kind of question perimenopausal women ask their sisters and close friends when they’ve been too sick to do anything except watch cheesy action flicks on Netflix for a week.

This man is so fancy he can look good in one of the dumbest fantasy action costumes I have ever seen (Into the Badlands-Gaius Chau)

This is Lewis Tan, an Asian American Actor in his 30s. To be clear, I think he is hot. And I am certain I am not the only person who thinks so. LT is sexy–in the way mainstream masculine pulchritude is “sexy”. This includes People Magazine’s 2020 sexiest man of the year (Black Panther and Creed actor Michael Jordan), and a large number of white men named Chris (Hemsworth aka Thor, Evans aka Captain America–2022 Sexy Man).

These are all men whose professional persona includes marketing unattainable polished physique in ways designed to provoke Warm Thoughts in people who fancy the masculine flavor of human. But I had to do a qualitative survey about LT because he freaked me out.
What is this “sexy” of which you speak?

Tan, like me, is the son of an east Asian father and a mother of western European ancestry. Spoiler alert: my sisters, peers, and my teen daughter all wanted to yuck my yum and thought he was weird looking, needed a shave, too muscly, and “looks like he’s trying to be sexy and dangerous when he’s clearly a Natural Addle-pate”. I agreed about the shave thing. I mean sheesh dude, you’re Asian. If you can’t grow a better beard by your age, you just have to quite trying.

I followed Lewis Tan down a sad and hilarious rabbit hole because I was genuinely startled to find a man of Asian extraction served up as a sex object. I’m a middle aged mixed race woman who has grown up in the shadow of sexualized ethnic stereotypes, and I have to check with all my people to see if I’m crazy or just traumatized when I see a hot guy. (Google image searches of LT produced non-pornographic cheesecake pics, featuring a goofy look presumably meant to be sultry, with or without a shirt).

Let’s rapidly rewind about 100 years of pop culture, during half of which I’ve been alive. When I was born, Bruce Lee was the hot Hollywood flavor. He is credited with being the man to convince Hollywood that you could have an Asian leading man, and Asian men weren’t creepy, sexless, dorky, or all three. Bruce Lee died when I was two and I guess Hollywood figured he was a one off, because in the 80s all we had was Mr. Miyagi or Long Duc Dong in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles.

If you doubted someone could be creepy AND sexless AND dorky all at the same time, fear not, Hughes had you covered. Imagine growing up, if you were Irish or Italian and the only people you saw on screen who looked “like you” were Micky Rooney and whoever is currently being typecast as an incel, or if you’re lucky, Steve Buscemi. No Paul Newman, no Steve McQueen, no Harrison Ford, no Harry Styles. If your sexuality was developing, you might wonder how anyone got laid, ever, and speculate your co-ethnics reproduced by budding off clones.

Fun fact, in the early days of Hollywood silents, there was a Japanese man—Sessue Hayakawa—who actually did play romantic roles. But apparently he was also portrayed as creepy. Not surprising if you consider the extreme anti-Asian racism in California in the 1920s and 30s. In the 50 years between Hayakawa and Bruce Lee, I’ve been able to find pretty much one Asian or Asian American romantic leading man. I’m not counting Yul Brynner who was Russian, but had some east Asian (Mongolian) ancestry via his mother. That said, it was more legitimate for Brynner to get famous playing the King of Siam, than for Mickey Rooney to don the gross yellow-face in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

More fun facts, Yul Brynner was born in almost the same year and the same part of the world as my own father (the Russian far east, versus north eastern China). This may explain why my mother thought Yul Brynner was sexy. He may possibly have been the only man I ever heard my mother use that term to describe. Which is probably why my mother went to the literal other side of the world to get laid.

Yul Brynner in the 1950s; my dad in the 1950s; my mom in the 1960s

Some time when we were all in our 20s, my brother said to his three Asian American sisters: “you know how there are those guys who want to date Asian women”. We all shuddered. We knew. It’s a thing Asian American girls learn in middle school. “Well…Mom was that kind of guy. Except a woman.” Our collective jaws dropped. Now, it’s a very different thing for a white American guy to perv on Asian American girls because he has a weird geisha/exotic/submissive/Suzy Wong fetish, mostly because of power dynamics and sexualized presentation of women generally, but my brother had a point.

Mom was born in a part of the world where there were zero Asians, and the general marital patterns were such that I have a straight face when I qualify my grandparents’ marriage by saying they “were not related”. In junior college Mom met a boy of Lebanese extraction, whose parents ran a restaurant down the mountain in Roanoke. She dated him. In college she met a Japanese American man, probably a resettled Nissei from the WWII internment. She dated him long enough for him to ride his motorcycle up into the mountains to visit, thoroughly shocking my Great Aunt Irene. In graduate school she met a Pilipino graduate student, but their affair was doomed because he was Catholic.

After that she was off to what was then Formosa in the Far East to marry the international man of mystery, twenty years her senior. When she got back to the U.S. with her family in tow, at least some of her kin were gracious about Mom’s audacity at breeding with the yellow man. When I was a newborn, Mom and Granny took me to church and one of my Great Granny Trudy’s cousins looked at me and said “We love ‘em all! No matter how mixed they are!”

Mixed me spent the next 20 or 30 years coming to terms with what it meant to be exoticized and fetishized, while at the same time having no credible objects of desire in popular culture who reflected my own mixedness. I’m the generation whose bedroom walls were covered with posters of Shaun Cassidy or Leif Garrett, followed by Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe. Of course there was Prince and Michael Jackson, but when I looked for the face like mine, the closest I could find was George Takei, who was old (and wouldn’t have wanted to grope girls, even if the Star Trek writers wanted to give him some of those scenes). Lou Diamond Phillips (half Pilipino) was the closest there was to diverse heart throbs.

What’s a gal to do, if she likes the butch flavor of dude? Martial arts movies? Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan started making a mark in the 1990s. Chan’s brand is pretty much asexual. And balletically violent action movies and badly dubbed kung fu flicks aren’t everyone’s cup of sexy sauce. All during the eras of Ethan Hawke, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney, I went about my business, dated dysfunctional but very masculine white guys, cultivated my neuroses about sexual attraction, and then to my considerable surprise, abruptly married a man with a white mother and a Chinese Taiwanese father. Hot hapa guys are a thing. Who knew?

Now I am aging out of the demographic whose romantic and sexual interests are remotely culturally relevant. There’s all kinds of ways that’s silly and unfair. Without getting wrapped up in a Real Rant about double standards or even actual pedophiles like James Woods, I’ll just say that in a world where Jack Nicholson was considered dateable any time after 1985, women my age should be able to appreciate the Lewis Tans and Chris Hemsworths of the world with no guilt whatsoever.

But here’s the thing, I’ve spent decades responding to the notional charms of men who look a bit like posters for Aryan manhood. The available array of mainstream hotness has certainly expanded to include the likes of Idris Elba, but the only time a man of Asian-Pacific extraction has been People’s Sexiest Man of the Year was Dwayne Johnson (African American and Samoan heritage).

So there I was, checking to make sure a (sometimes shirtless) action movie star is sexy. Is it just me? Did I miss something? Is this a trick? Would I think this guy was sexy if he was part of a decent data set? Wait—there actually is a data set. There is more than one hot hapa dude, so I can actually compare. Lewis Tan is prettier (to me) than Henry Golding. Golding in Crazy Rich Asians was mighty fine but he was also literally the first creature of his kind I had ever seen (unless you count Brandon Lee, who died in 1993 and was thus mostly a special effect in his only mainstream movie).

Now there’s crop of hot young actors closer in age to my children, which makes commenting on their “sexiness” a touch awkward (Charles Melton or Archie Reynaux). But there are swarms of young or youngish Asian actors of diverse backgrounds (south Asian, east Asian, Pacific Islander—hello Jason Momoa!) who are out there being unapologetically sexy. Many of them are of mixed race, so their names don’t signal their ethnic identity. I’m watching these beautiful creatures, of all genders, come bursting out into movies, television, magazine covers and waiting for the other shoe to drop (type casting, fetishizing). At the same time I am happily envious of my children and others who can come of age learning that people like them are gloriously appealing, even in silly heteronormative ways (and they don’t have to go to another continent to hook up).

No Mourners No Red Flags

Netflix Shadow & Bone Season 2 drops this week. I sure hope it doesn’t suck. I’m suspicious by nature and I’ve seen some bad-ass shows turn dumb-ass for no good reason. But I watched the first season On loop for a couple weeks when it came out. And I Had Questions. I wrote the below in 2021. I got more, newer thoughts later.

Alina and Mal having a companionable moment.

What the hell is it with het women and creepy, stalkery cis dudes? Especially controlling, narcissistic ones? I mean, I kinda know. I’m a middle aged woman who has made some hella stupid decisions involving pricks. The struggle (and/or the love) is real. But for FFS, why? And can we please just stop encouraging it. We are not going to “save” these fuckers by loving them. We won’t be safe. [cn: sexual assault, heterosexual dysfunction of the highest order]

Now about the show. It’s a bit like if you combined Game of Thrones and Harry Potter except neither sucked. Epic, magical, emotional, but without all the rape, sadism, racism, normalized emotional abuse and inbred cult vibes. Young protagonists discovering their power, saving the world with their besties, but without so much mutilation, hazing, and free range uselessness. Which isn’t to overlook their struggle and trauma, there’s plenty of that, but it’s contextual and recognized. The sexual abuse isn’t played-up shock porn (or a plot device to motivate the masculine characters). It’s there (off screen) because human trafficking and abuse happen, especially to women, and it affects us, even the ones who survive and become powerful.

There is very little nookie in this show. The sex that happens in season one is a single totally consensual, casual same-gender hookup between people who appear roughly power balanced. All of these elements are kind of novel. Casual sex isn’t for everyone, but incorporating sex as a fun treat Jesper grabs on the run is a good thing. Moreover, the story allows this without suggesting the character is a dysfunctional ho, or the NPC is being paid. (When Jesper is being dysfunctional, it’s because he has a gambling addiction, not because he’s getting laid). It’s an upgrade from the fantasy trope of “pirates/rogues” grabbing barmaids like they’re no different than beer steins. And of course there was No Gay when I was a kid. The idea that same sex attraction is just one of several normal, acceptable flavors makes me happy.

Meanwhile–the creepy dude. Genre fiction (not just fantasy, but romance, and even mystery) would have us believe actual monsters are hot. The vampire, werewolf, demon, etc as romantic lead is stale as hell at this point, but women are still writing and consuming it. Everything from Twilight to Discovery of Witches has some wacky, dangerous guy (the “Alpha Male” – gagging sound) who is chemically wired to be controlling and obsessive, but somehow just wants to hangout with some sweet ordinary chick, and magically rolls over to have his belly (or something) rubbed by the human heroine who has literally centuries less life experience than he does. I get it–“fantasy” means something you like to think about but not necessarily something you want IRL, up close and personal-like. But why some of us like this shit matters. So many women are unsafe around their partners, and men generally that we end up with elaborate sexual fantasies about men who are exceptionally unsafe to everyone except us. [note, none of this is a coded “blink if I need help” about my own actual spouse, really.]

S&B sets up a standard Harry Skywalker-type protagonist (Alina) with a standard Luv Triangle: the faithful friend (Mal) versus the exciting, seductive, sophisticated older man (Kirigan). The power dyad is pretty familiar too: a two halves/light-dark situation, like Kylo and Rey, except the neckbeard stalker in black is more appealing, despite having an actual neckbeard. And people are lapping this up on the internet: extolling the chemistry between Alina and Kirigan and saying “oooh, which will she end up with…” (Can I just say I HATE ship names. And get off my lawn).

And I’m over here like, are you fucking kidding me? Yes, Ben Barnes is very sexy, but the character is an abuser. Kirigan diverts Alina’s mail, isolates her, manipulates her, and lies about everything, all while claiming that he’s her soul mate and they’re the only ones who understand/complete each other. How are people getting to the end of this and saying “hmmm….She could pick vanilla, or she could still pick chocolate….” No. You cannot pick a guy who did that shit. It is not romantic. I mean, sure Darth Vader got a redemption arc, but this guy does some seriously nasty stuff (and I’m not talking about his geopolitical ambitions).

The other guy, the warm fuzzy one, is a bit funny looking but way hotter, on balance. (Am I allowed to say that about an actor who is less than half my age?) Mal embodies some other potentially problematic fantasies–the sweet, soft hearted boy who grows up into a big butch brawler, but is still a softie. However, it’s a much healthier idea for Alina to be credibly attached to a guy who she knows well, rather than the guy who suddenly shows up in a swirling cloak with strong “I’d hit that” energy. Vampires, werewolves, the Regency Rake, Navy SEALS, wizard anti-heroes are all supposed to have instant WAP effect when they say creepy stuff like “you’re a lesser life form” followed by “you belong to me”. On the other hand, Alina and Mal probably saw each other piss when they were six. That’s not romantic either, but it’s real.

In fairness, the closest anyone in the show besides Jesper gets to getting it on is also Alina and Kirigan and she is making choices and has agency. There’s explicit consent to the groping part. The more complex emotional relationship between Alina and Mal doesn’t get to sex, or even kissing. I find this mildly disappointing, but shrewd story telling. I will say tho, it always confuses me why death is PG-13 and sex is rated R. Consider the defining sources for my generation: Lord of the Rings (in print), Star Trek and Star Wars. People get shot up and dismembered. ALL the TIME. There’s mass genocide and torture. But the most sexy times is some clothed smooches. If anyone had showed or mentioned a nipple, ever, us 70s kids would never have seen it. What the fuck people? How are boobs more scary and problematic than blasters? Or being disemboweled by orcs?

Kirigan slices people in half in this show but he does not commit sexual battery, nor does his attractiveness depict sexual assault as adjacent to seduction. As sex in fiction goes, that’s pretty good. (The bar is low, and arguably Han Solo didn’t even make it). However, by the last couple of episodes, Kirigan perpetrates some extreme, intimate consent violations and the fact no one’s genitals were involved doesn’t make him much less of a rapist. Why the heck do people want the female protagonist to look at all favorably on this guy, when she could be with someone who respects her, and whose dialogue specifically articulates respect for her boundaries, self determination, and differences?

The Kirigans of this world are scary demons and to stay sane, I think we have to believe we can save and tame them, so they will protect us from the other demons. The odds are high, if you’re a het leaning woman who likes masculine flavors, you’ve been inoculated with Rudolph Valentino, Georgette Heyer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or countless tawdry redbacked Silhouette Romances to be drawn to darkness like a fly to a pitcher plant. I’ve absolutely made the mistake of getting in the rack with a demon. I paid a price, but not as high as some people.

Worse (for me) is the insidious effect of being demon spawn. Certain genre fiction would have you believe that the boisterous, violent, predatory, and/or drunk big bad wolf will become a loving father who loves changing diapers. A man who was never parented correctly and developed all sorts of dysfunctional coping mechanisms just needs to be loved out of the shadows. It’s easier to believe you’re the exception than walk away when you see the red glow of the warning lights, particularly when you were raised under the same banner of red flags. My father didn’t beat us or exploit us, but his drama to nurturance ratio was pretty much backward and we grew up in the cult of his personality.

If you survive and are capable of forming a pair bond with someone who respects you, there aren’t that many Mals out there. There’s romantic narrative about warm cuddly, egalitarian guys too, but far fewer men are conditioned and reinforced to behave that way. (Note, this is not to buy into the “Friend zone/women don’t like nice guys” narrative. Those guys are not nice guys.)

Everyone needs to self soothe sometimes. I’m old and tired and sometimes my ghosts and mistakes come around and whisper in my ears. Women who are with safe men, are loved by them and love them back, are one form of balm to my troubled spirits. When Mal and Alina wrote their “true north” letters to each other, I cried. I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. (And I’m also looking forward to checking out Lewis Tan…)

A picture specifically manufactured for a paranormal romance cover. I dunno if you have to title it “Last Alpha” to use the image.

Pockets, Pantylines, and Performing Femininity

Fashion plates I did in 1979 or so. Posted on Instagram after I found the picture in my mother’s effects after she died

Actual Goodwill find. Don’t know what do do with tem, but they are so pretty [image: 3 vintage long dresses from the 1970s, on hangers]

Come my darlings and you shall hear the tale of the middle aged lady and the pocket. Featuring the power suit, sexual harassment, and soupçon of menopause.

Once upon a time, in the 70s, there was a little girl who wanted a floor length prairie dress with flounces and puffed sleeves. Mostly she had rust colored corduroys, jeans that were too short, and hand-me-down shirts from her cousin. But she did get to borrow a long dress from her friend. She wore it to Sunday school and spread it in a perfect circle around her at story time. It had fuchsia flowers and polyester chiffon sleeves. It didn’t have any pockets, but who cares, it was the most beautiful dress in the world.

Now I’m a cranky middle aged lady tossing over my wardrobe: comfy yoga pants? NO Pockets! Cute boho tunic? WTF, no pockets! Going To Court Suit? NOPOCKETSBURNITALLDOWN. The cleansing fire of 40-plus years of fashion and gender trauma is pockets.

Dressing as a femme presenting person is head trip. You spend decades layering on all these expectations: is it attractive? Is it too attractive? Does it make you look like a prude? Does it make you look like a slut? –and why is that bad, exactly–? Is it too much work? Does it look like you put too much work into the look? Is it trendy? Which trend is it? What brand is it? Did I get make up on my blouse? Did I get menstrual blood on my pants?!

I mean sure, when I was growing up boys had some codes too. I don’t know who taught the preppy boys to wear their polo shirts with their collars popped up and the headbanger boys that they were only ever going to wear jeans, big sneakers, and band shirts, but they figured it out somehow. But damn the girl code was complicated. I had no clue and less money, and while I wanted some boys to think I was pretty, I would have been satisfied with people not making fun of me.

Important style milestones included:

• You can get away with taking an Izod alligator off of your cousin’s shirt and sewing it onto a K-mart track suit.
• You cannot get away with wearing a swim suit to a Hawaiian themed party and pretending it is a tropical themed tanktop
• Getting viciously sexually harassed at 13 and never wearing shorts again until well into college

Fortunately I went to a high school where half the kids wore all-black held together with safety pins. Several kids regularly came to school with their hair in full-on foot-tall spiked hawks. No one was going to give me shit for not knowing how to use a hair dryer or a curling iron. I didn’t get bullied, but cute teal eyeliner alone wasn’t bringing the boys to the yard.

In college I stumbled into butch. Being girly was hard work and produced no good results. Butch was a natural segue from theater club stage crew blacks. Wearing army surplus pants, carrying my keys on my belt and my wallet in my hip pocket was safer in public, and women thought I was hot. Guys didn’t think I was hot if I wore black t-shirts with the sleeves rolled up like Bruce Springsteen, and cowboy boots with my overalls, but I felt better. Also overalls, fatigues, and Levis all have pockets. Like five or six pockets even.

Here’s the thing: girl clothes in the late 20^th century weren’t comfortable. Girly shoes were shit (no Dansko MaryJanes!). And bras were fucking weird. Your options were department stores where you got “training bras” and your mom got the heavily seamed structured things, or there were fetish-y catalogues like Frederick’s of Hollywood. Victoria’s Secret was just cracking the mainstream. And no one explained anything. There was no social media, just your friends sitting around in the dorm living room passing the Vicky’s catalogue around saying “What the hell is this? Why is she sticking her ass out like that? Her stomach is air brushed! Have you ever seen anyone wear a thong in real life…?”

I seriously thought the reason bras had underwires was a conspiracy by the patriarchy to torture women. I boycotted bras for years. It took me until I was in my 30s to realize the reason bras had underwires is because they actually make a structural difference for women with big tits. I do not have big tits. I could barely claim with a straight face to have a C cup when I was breast feeding. But I get ahead of myself.

I had crash course in bras and femme in my mid to late 20s because I was 1) living with my youngest sister and 2) in professional school and had to learn the lady-professional uniform. Apparently the reason people wear thong underwear, or pantyhose under slacks is to avoid panty lines. Because you can have comfortable underpants or sleek grooming but not both. I was too confused to notice at the time but the kind of sleek slacks that call for a thong or pantyhose to look good? No Pockets.

I’m right in the generation where professional women were branching out of the yuppie uniform of the 1980s: navy suits that aped men’s suits, accessorized with the blouse with the soft bows, the shoulder pads, and close toed pumps carried in your brief case, while you wore tennis shoes on the train. No one in my family was a white color professional though, so I had to learn in the field. I went to my first lawyer job with three suits and 4 shell blouses from the Chadwick’s catalogue, thinking I could and should put them in rotation indefinitely.

It’s more complicated than that.  

First of all there’s the problem of role models. When I started working at law firms, a firm pretty much had 20 old white dudes, 10 young white dudes, 4 older middle aged women who had were sociopaths due to having survived law school and early law practice in the 70s or 80s, and a handful of stressed out women closer to my age. My fashion learning curve went like this:

• Stacy? Everyone hates her and she wears real fur to court. Fuck no.
• Pam? She really is wearing the two piece suits in rotation, but she can afford more suits.
• Paula? She has a black polka dotted dress! (go to Ann Taylor and buy black polka dotted dress).
  • Maureen? She has a flowered skirt that she wears with her black jacket! I can get one more day out of my black suit jacket! (get flowered skirt and red blouse at next shopping trip).

And so it went. Note none of this vigilant observation covers whether an outfit is comfortable. Also, I was being critiqued regularly in the work place on whether I was “friendly” enough, which was kinda a drag, not gonna lie. Then I had to learn what was acceptable on casual Fridays. And golf weekends. And summer dinners at partner’s houses. (more trips to Ann Taylor for cute sweater sets).

I kinda had a bead on things by my mid 30s, but then I spent about eight years pregnant, nursing, or being smeared by toddler hands (or all three). I did discover somewhere in there that when all else fails, a bra itself is a pocket.

Now I’m over 50, my private sector career cratered, and professional fashion has gone through the pandemic. My eyes have been opened to the truth. I can wear sensible shoes and Eileen Fisher to the office, but pricey shapeless knits don’t have pockets either. Inventing “dress yoga pants” isn’t enough. A man in full lawyer drag has something like six separate functional pockets. A woman has trompe l’oeil slashes in her jacket that are sewn shut.

Fifty and no effs left to give means I can finally prioritize what really matters. I refuse to wear clothes without pockets. I’ve decided to wear homemade aprons and leggings to work. I make aprons with pockets. I have little carpenter aprons made from dish towels. I have a smock made from an old table cloth and a 50s housewife apron made from a cotton bathhouse kimono. I’m cosplaying a combination of my great granny Trudy and a foul mouthed anime gremlin.

Like just about every other woman in my corner of social media pop culture, we want what begins with P and ends with S. Pockets.

homemade apron, with pockets

specksandkeepings dress, found at Goodwill. With Pockets

homemade apron. WITH POCKETS

A Taste for the Exotic

Part of growing up culturally interstitial is Exotic Food. One of my kids said to me recently “you know how people don’t really like school lunch? Some of it is actually kind of good. Like tater tots,” and I was transported to the Bach Elementary auditorium in about 1978 when the school first started serving hot lunch.

The pre-hot lunch days (first grade) meant I brought my lunch in a tin lunch box, and lunch consisted of a peanut butter and honey sandwich and some cashew nuts wrapped in wax paper. We always had cashew nuts around the house because Dad used them to make chicken and cashews, a popular choice from his catering offerings. Cashews came in a round tin and were salty. My brother and sisters and I were always trying to sneak cashews out of the tin. Dad let us have a few, but in retrospect, I’m sure they were expensive, so he wasn’t letting us go all out. He included them in my lunch as a treat.

Cashews were just about the only salty snack food in the house, except for the occasional peanut, but they weren’t exciting. At school there was all kinds of fancy stuff. Other people had sandwiches with bologna. I learned where bologna was found in the grocery store and would take Dad over to point it out and plead for this delicacy. After a few years, he started buying processed ham sandwich meat, but reluctantly. I was nearly a teenager before Mom and Dad lost all discipline and actually bought bologna sometimes. At which point Dad realized it could be fried, and then bore a passing resemblance to the hard salami our Jewish friends brought from Chicago. We ALL liked salami.

For a short while, cashews were a useful form of barter. In those days there were no rules about trading lunch parts and while I’m sure some kids had terminal nut allergies (particularly to cashews, which contain trace amounts of the poison ivy toxin urushiol), no one seemed to worry about it. Other kids didn’t have cashews and a few times I managed to trade my cashews for part of a twinkie. Twinkies were the ne plus ultra of exotic food. I didn’t even know what they were for a while. Hostess cupcakes and fruit pies, regulars at the first grade lunch table, were recognizably food. Twinkies’ plastic perfection was mysterious. Why was there white stuff inside? How did it get in there? What did it taste like? The ability to obtain even part of a twinkie was an economic and social triumph not to be surpassed for years. I was terribly disappointed when I tried a twinkie in college, and realized they are pretty much tasteless. 

With the advent of hot lunch the excitement of scoping out other people’s lunches went away. No more waiting to see what strange substance would emerge from the Charlie Brown and Sesame Street thermoses—sticky red spaghetti-oes? Golden chicken noodle soup? So uniform and brightly colored compared to white rice, mungbean threads, and cabbage. Now I had the same lunch as everyone else, but that same lunch contained new culinary vistas that kept me on my toes for at least a full year.

Hot lunch came on a tray, and you watched the trays get filled as you went down the line, staring into the hot table. Mrs. Weiss with her white coat and hairnet scooped out a veggie and an entrée, and a lunch helper added a dessert and milk. Every day there was something to learn about the possible textures and physics of food. I had seen spaghetti, but I had no idea it could be dispensed, premixed with the meat sauce, using an ice cream scoop. I knew about corn, because on the rare occasion mom had to make dinner, she almost always made creamed peas and corn. But canned corn served with no sauce all by itself was novel. And it was delicious! Sweet, and slightly greasy. Corn days were good days. Pea days were bad days. Peas and corn at home came from the freezer. We didn’t have canned peas. That was one area where I felt my parents were correct in the general prejudice against all things canned, boxed, or vacuum sealed. Canned peas were revolting in color, taste, and texture. I’m pretty sure I got in trouble for complaining that they smelled like bodily effluvia.

Tater tots were almost as good as corn. I was quite unprepared for tater tots. I’m not sure how long it took me to figure out that “tater” mean “potato”. Dad did not cook white potatoes, only sweet potatoes. Mom made either mashed potatoes (one of my favorite special treats) or baked potatoes, which were fine, but a lot of work to eat. Tater tots were golden, symmetrical, and rolled around actively on the tray when you moved, always at risk of leaping to their doom on the floor. They might be crisp and a bit dried out, or they might be soggy, but they were always salty and perfectly bite sized.

Entrees could be unpredictable. I wanted to like the hamburgers and hot dogs. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about them. They looked questionable, in their deep steel tray, surrounded by just the wrong amount of congealing greasy water, but they were still closer to treats than everyday food. Pizza was better, in rectangular slices, usually cheese only, sometimes sausage or pepperoni. What was scary was sloppy joes. The mix was not only messy in a gory way, but it was weirdly orange and the texture was suspect. Ground meat shouldn’t slide around. And worst of all it was sweet. I’m sure it was supposed to be a BBQ kind of flavor, but whatever the geniuses of 70s era institutional food were using tasted syrupy and Just Wrong. It was the only thing I refused to try a second time.

I don’t remember much about dessert, because all sweets were good sweets. Fruit cup might be a bit disappointing and boring, but I don’t recall dessert ever seeming like it came from an alien world, which is what made hot lunch so exciting. I eventually got used to hot lunch and by middle school I went back to packing my own lunch because the line for hot lunch was so long I wouldn’t have time to eat it. By then Dad had expanded his list of things he would buy at the store to include Lender’s bagels, so for lunch for most of middle school I had a plain bagel and a very generous chunk of cream cheese. Apparently you are supposed to spread cream cheese in a thin layer like butter, not put a thick slice on like a whole sandwich filling.

By highschool, my schedule didn’t include lunch because I was in an orchestra across town. Instead I would run across the parking lot to the deli and get the bread ends hacked off the rye loaves used for sandwiches for 5 cents each, or if I was feeling flush, rolls from the French bakery. I’d eat them with butter on the bus to orchestra. Sometimes I had a container of frozen peas. If I put frozen peas in a dish in the morning, by noon, they’d be thawed out, and bright green. They would be sweet and just the right amount of chewy. Pea days were good days.

Hope in the Middle of History

• 

• 

• 

Crazy shit mostly doesn’t happen to me, at least not the fun kind. But somehow this week I got to rant about elections and hope to young people in the company of a formative mentor of my youth (and some folks way yonder fancier than me). Hope in the middle of History is hard sometimes and I’ve never been a glass is half full kind of person. Crazy shit is the new normal, and at least sometimes it’s beautiful.

Thirty years ago this fall I was in the first semester of my last year of college and I signed up for a history seminar with a new professor. I was already an American History and Ethnic Studies major, my advisors were set, my thesis underway, but I needed the history seminar and she was the one teaching it. Her name was Sharon Ullman. I don’t remember the exact title of the class, but it was a combination of methodology and study of marginalized populations and it flipped a switch in my brain. I liked history, but until then it was static—transcribed in the rearview mirror. Professor Ullman made it relational, a lens to observe the present, and comment on the future. History wasn’t just writing up and critiquing the past, it was sorcery: we were summoning demons with Michel Foucault and binding them with meticulously collected first person narratives of soldiers and sex workers.

I tried to turn my second semester into a pretzel so I could take another seminar with Professor Ullman but couldn’t swing it. She made time for me anyway, taking me on as a sort of informal third advisor, talking through my thesis with me, and giving me what I experienced as frank advice that respected me as an academic thinker in my own right, some of which stuck. For example, she said the United States wasn’t actually one country, but several disparate ones that didn’t work well together. And, when I showed up with a new source book for my thesis she said, “Philosophers. They always think they’ve figured out something new, when the rest of us got it a while ago.” For a hot second, she almost made me think of becoming a history professor. She made it seem cool. Not just because she was cool, in the sardonic way of certain queer academics, but because she clearly liked what she was doing. She sternly warned me that law school was Some BS. It was.

Our paths didn’t cross again. I left a crochet coaster in her mailbox once at Reunion. It wasn’t until the last few years when we connected on the BookofFace that I started thinking of her as “Sharon” and not “Professor Ullman”. But sometimes, when I turned my social media into a banshee wail of rage about the Constitution, fascism, race, and gender, I could feel the distant sonar ping of my senior seminar syllabus. Then Wednesday we met for dinner in Philly, because I had a conference and she was free and lives in the City. We had a lovely dinner talking about the world and things, and how yes, in fact the United States is not one nation and we wish we wouldn’t see it fall to bits just now, thankyouverymuch. She remembered a thing about me I did not: my own description in the moment, thirty years before, of my brain stretching, illustrated with a handgesture and a scritchyscratchy noise. We talked about a panel she was moderating, as part of the Project for New Media and Politics at Bryn Mawr. This is her last year teaching and it would be her last panel, with some regular speakers (journalists, political scientists, other academics) talking about the election.

I spent Thursday in my conference, vaguely contemplating trucking out to campus, deciding I was too tired, wanting to see the college, feeling the train was a bother, etc. Back and forth until the last minute and I thought, “okay I’ll sit there and live tweet the panel talking about important stuff.” I stepped off the Bryn Mawr train for the first time since perhaps my 10^th college reunion. The walk to campus seemed shorter than I remembered. The cool fall air on my skin and the lamplit sidewalks were exactly as I remembered, but without the background angst that coiled through my early adulthood. I arrived at Sharon’s office in the gothic Old Library, as I used to, and she said, “I just lost two panelists! You in?” Thus I found myself in the lecture hall where I had sociology and history lectures, and watched foreign films, facing a bunch of students who looked shockingly familiar, despite the fact they were all born 10 or more years after I left. They included the daughter and the niece of a couple of my classmates.

There I was, an off duty civil servant, family care advocate, and irregular freestyler of history and society, on a panel with Will Bunch, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Philadelphia Inquirer and multiple distinguished academics: Matthew Kerbel, Vice Provost and Professor of Political Science at Villanova University, Carol Hagar Professor of Environmental Studies and Political Science at Bryn Mawr (the legit sub from the bench). It’s like being in a band in college and getting asked to sit in with Metallica or something. It was a blast.

The theme of the talk was obviously “Democracy on the Ballot” because if we don’t get this one right, we may not have another election. People are going to war against the polls and counts anyway. The battle will rage into January. It’s not just democracy on the ballot, it’s a livable planet, it’s our bodies if we’re women, or trans, or queer, and it’s the notion of competence in government itself. I talked about the close election in Oregon, to that last point (and yes, I made sure to qualify “opinions my own, etc”). I learned stuff about polling, “modeling the electorate”, and cool analogies like the Red Tide versus the Blue Undertow—thanks Prof. Kerbel! Will Bunch has been covering culture and politics since the 1982 midterm election, and talked about the unpredictability and intensity of this election, including in Pennsylvania where there’s a rabid Christian Dominionist running for governor. There’s nothing like the terror of a pro to discomfit an amateur. Prof. Hagar talked about the intersections with the rise of fascism in the EU and the way Europe is scrutinizing the election.

Nothing in our life times is like the moment we are in, and it is exhausting. A million people dead in two years from a poorly managed pandemic, the complete loss of guiderails around what it is acceptable to say in public, the power-at-all-costs mentality, a one-term President who still holds massive influence over his party. The chaos erodes our ability to process the enormity of events like the January 6 insurrection, the true magnitude of which is still developing. Midterm elections normally bring out the people dissatisfied with the party in the White House, and everyone else naps. This midterm reflects all of the non-standard factors above, plus Dobbs, which early analysis shows is bringing out women voters. Kerbel discussed the off cycle special elections, like Kansas voting in favor of reproductive health. I could tell he and Bunch both were being cautious, not wanting to come down on the side of doom, laying out a few crumbs of optimism, but explaining layers of unpredictability: conservatives tend not to respond to polls, anticipated recordbreaking voter turnout, anticipated violence, women and POC reporting out in high numbers in the early voting, etc.

The students asked about the rise of extremism. Several of us talked about the rise in racism and Christian nationalism generally and in the military. I have members of my extended family who I think would not realize being called a Christian nationalist is not a compliment. They would probably realize being called a white nationalist is not a compliment, but I suspect them of secretly thinking it a righteous thing to be. Sharon pointed out that as part of the 20 year war in the Gulf and South Asia, we have a generation of these people coming out and going into law enforcement, locally and nationally (e.g. the Border Patrol). While there are “low information voters” who think a congressional inquiry into Hunter Biden will lower gas prices, there are lots and lots of people for whom racism and gender totalitarianism are favored objectives in this election. It’s not an incidental outcome of their counterfactual understanding of economics.

One audience member asked, how can we have hope? I listened to the other panelists talk about the odds and the outcomes. No one was willing to come down on whether we keep the Senate and/or the House, but either or both are possible. And Sharon pointed out the history of social transformation in this country is slow, but it happens with persistence. We are in the middle of it and it is hard to see. Things may be harder before they get better. As I listened, I looked at the students in their sweatshirts and jean jackets, a couple taking notes, hair in messy I’m-studying-go-way mode. I can barely remember what it was like to be them, they are so new they glow. They look like unfurling maple leaves, translucent and fragile. But their shine is also sharp. They are knives of fresh steel being tempered in the same fire I was. As it so happened I was the last to speak, after the other panelists noted Sharon’s service to the New Media project and panel, in this her last year of teaching. This is (pretty much) what I said:

Four hours ago I was sitting in my hotel room after a full day of meetings thinking, “I want to go…but…it will be about the elections, which will stress my shit out. And I’m tired.” But it was like Taylor tower was calling me, sending a signal through my lantern tattoo, pulling me out towards campus. [show BMC tattoo to youngsters] I am going to literally cry here, which will be a giant cringe. Hope is personal to each of you. What works inside of you is specific to you. But it is also collective. Hope is in relationship, because we are a social primate. I like looking out and seeing my troop and yelping at them. It is your connection to your people that will get you through. I got here and found myself on this panel with Sharon, exactly 30 years after I was in the first class of students she taught here. And I’m so happy to be able to have that perfect circle. And I look out at all of you, so close to the age of my own children, sitting in the same seats I sat in, and I feel hope. You are what gives me hope.

I did cry. And I do have hope.

ACTION

John Fetterman: the Senate candidate for Pennsylvania, who stands to lose to the oiliest, snakiest of snake oil salesmen because he has a speech impediment as a result of stroke. Meanwhile, the Republicans are running a man in Georgia who can’t talk because he actually can’t think—Support Raphael Warnock to try to prevent that.

Stacy Abrams – GA Gov candidate and one of my original touchstones for competence and its symbolic and practical place in American politics

Tim Ryan – Running for Senate in Ohio against poser JD Vance, who traded on his family’s suffering and impoverished roots to make a ton of money, and then moved off to be a Coastal Elite. He’s carpetbagging Ohio with tech billionaire money

Catherine Cortez Masto – running to keep her Senate seat for Nevada. There’s some scary shit happening in Nevada around local elections infrastructure. She needs to win, and win unambiguously. 

Prop 3 – The Michigan ballot measure to protect reproductive health, liberty, and privacy

Family Forward Action – Oregon’s little community organizing engine that could. They will be out hitting the streets for Tina Kotek and multiple pro working family candidates in Oregon.

Mike Franken: the retired Admiral running against Chuck Grassley in Iowa. This is a long shot, although the polls are surprisingly close. Iowa government is basically entrenched agri-facism. An Iowa friend said the only way Grassley could lose is if he’s dead, and maybe not even then. But my hatred of the Senators who rammed Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett up our skirts runs deep.

Luck and Liberty

Free to Be Cast

How many hapas does it take to make an Asian…

On June 24 I arrived in Michigan at dawn and conked out for a nap. I woke up to a piece of the end of the world. Then I spent the next 48 hours immersed in my own good luck and that of those I love. Then I donated to several guerilla health care funds. Money is not a substitute for liberty, but it is the best I have to offer, because not everyone has luck. Liberty should not depend on luck (or money), but in this country, it does.

About my luck—remarkable good fortune that has little to do with what I “deserve” or “earned”. I went to an extraordinary high school, graduating 33 years ago. There’s lots of places you can learn about “Commie”. There’s a whole-ass documentary about it in fact. Starting in 1972, a few hundred kids at a time (some times as low as 150, never much more than 400) went to a small public alternative high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan where the classes were small, the teachers and students wanted to be there, and kids had extraordinary control over their own educational fate. The particulars changed a lot between the 70s when it started, the 80s when I was there, the 90s when my brother and sisters graduated, and the 10s and 20s when my nieces attended. It didn’t work for everybody. For some students Community High School was perfect. For others it was simply the least terrible place.

It’s easy to romanticize freedom, self-determination, love of learning, and access to art and music. We had all of those things, but it wasn’t a bully-and-harm-free utopia. Kids overdosed (sometimes fatally), got permanently damaged in drunk driving accidents, and were sexually abused or exploited (sometimes by teachers, frequently by each other). Bad things happened, and specifically I mean some of the boys assaulted their girlfriends, or other girls who they happened upon on vulnerable situations.

But I was one of the lucky ones. That particular piece of my luck has lasted me over three decades becoming joy that shines like one of those giggly-rainbow window decals we could buy at gift shops like Middle Earth and Yellow Brick Road in those same years I was at Commie. The other two high schools in town had orchestras and marching bands. We had a world class jazz program. (I’m not joking. They did tour internationally.) There were approximately two AP classes: Art History, and Calculus. Commie kids could take classes in the community or make them up as we went along. You could get PE credit for skateboarding, or for auditing a professional modern dance studio class. You could PE credit by walking around the block with Elmo Morales’ Run-Walk class, even if you smoked a cigarette the whole time. Language Arts could be Mythology, Cinema, the student newspaper, or the Bible as Literature. The Gym was tiny, the weight room was stinky and sordid—I think. I’m not sure I was ever in the weight room, but I Heard Stuff. There were zero sports teams. I enjoyed that last part.

I had to fight my dad like hell to let me go because he thought all the kids smoking on the front porch and wearing all black were nasty, disreputable, and criminal. My dad was a Chinese immigrant whose value system was more 19^th century than 20^th (and I’m talking Chinese 19^th century, not American 19^th century), so he actually thought use of tobacco products was akin to prostitution. Once I got there, I made the most of it. I tried to start a classical chamber orchestra my first year. That didn’t last, so I joined the orchestra at one of the bigger high schools, because you could take any class at the other public high schools you could fit in your schedule. Same went for U of M classes. I tried to take a French class at the University, but there was no one around to tell me which one was a good fit, so I fucked it up and had to quit. I had much better luck the next year when I took a Medieval and Renaissance history class.

I did theater, Model United Nations, and all of the nerdy history and literature classes I could cram into my schedule. I went on the student-fled peace march that seemed to have no purpose but to lie down in the road at the intersection of State and South University Streets. I discovered that math didn’t suck and managed to take three years of math. I taught myself the entire first semester of my junior year of high school because my parents had a thing where they’d lend us out to relatives from time to time, just to see the world. I lived in Taiwan with some of my father’s family that fall. Before I left in August, my teachers assigned some reading, gave me all the materials, including the tests, and I came back and took the exams in January. And they gave me credit for studying Chinese language while I was over there, even though not a single one of them saw me doing it—it was 1987–no zoom classes. I could have cheated. I didn’t. I graduated with a 4.0, a national merit scholarship award, and lots of sweet commendations from my teachers. I did not then, nor have I ever developed much appreciation for jazz but if I ever hear a jazz band play Pomp & Circumstance, I cry buckets.

I didn’t have to do it that way. There were lots of kids who regarded going to class at all, never mind getting good grades, as optional. Up to a point, the teachers left them to it. You could be the kid whose senior year consisted almost entirely of classes at the University (my friend Wendie), or you could be the kid who took an extra year to graduate because they flunked 3 out of 5 classes due to sleeping in and/or being drunk. You could be the kid who failed so thoroughly they got sent back to Huron or Pioneer High School (my “neighborhood” school—which was roughly 4 times farther from my house than Commie). You might or might not fail there too. Kids mostly went to Commie because mainstream high schools (including the kids and teachers there) freaked them out, bullied them, or just sucked. The teachers at Commie mostly loved us (I mean, they also played favorites or ignored red flags sometimes). The teachers (invariably called by their first names—Betsy, Ann, Mike, Ava, Rocky) saved the ones they could, mostly by letting us fuck up and forgiving the ones who were motivated enough to eventually unfuck themselves. That doesn’t work for everyone. There were kids who had severe mental illness and/or drug abuse problems who needed help they couldn’t get at a small, hippie school. For kids with IEPs in the 00s and after, it was a joke.

The kids in my graduating class and adjacent classes (1987-92) went to the Marines, to Harvard, Yale, Washtenaw Community College, Stanford, University of Oregon, the trades, to jobs waiting tables, driving cabs, working security at the 8-Ball Saloon, or making sandwiches at Zingerman’s Deli (next door to the high school). Some attended Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, nursing school, the Naval Academy, Oberlin, Antioch, Eastern Michigan University, the University of Michigan, and art and music conservatories all over the country. Some graduated where they started, some didn’t. Some also ended up dead within a few years, or homeless. Remarkably few seem to have gone to prison though. For a tiny school the fraction of the size of the other high schools in town, Commie did pretty well.

I happened grow up in a town that allowed me that experience. Not everyone wanted it, and by the late 90s, not everyone who wanted it could have it. The school went from having to recruit 8^th graders to keep the classes full enough to keep funding to having kids camp out for two weeks to get a spot on the roster. I went to school with kids whose parents had kicked them out or who could barely them keep showered and fed, much less holding a tent camping spot for two weeks to get into high school that didn’t suck. Missing that last spot in line would force them to trade 10 minute passing periods and the choice of having your first class at 8:00 or at 9:00 for whatever weird schedule that started everyone at 7:19 and blatted a bell in your ear every 50 minutes. Community had an open campus, no detention, and no bells (but we did have two of the foulest, unholy piss-soaked fire escape stairwells where people smoked during breaks).

Lest there be any confusion, I was not a particularly carefree kid and high school was not some idyll I thought of as the high point of my life. I enjoyed school, and felt lucky to NOT be at Pioneer, but I was deeply neurotic and frequently lonely, while surrounded by peers I liked and even respected. It would simply have been worse at Pioneer because for me the primary measure of how close I was to not losing my mind at any given moment was how much control I had over my situation. Public education in the United States has historically been about compliance and conformity. Commie allowed me to do what I did well, which happened to be succeeding academically and intellectually, without also stressing my shit out by making me perform mainstream compliance while immersing me in a peer group that would enforce conformity by social intimidation.

Whatever the formula that worked for each of us, the total structure worked well enough to generate a remarkably high ratio, 30+ years later, of pretty reasonable social contributors. My peers include numerous professional educators at all levels from preschool through university, several arts and cultural figures with national name recognition, successful artists in numerous fields, and most importantly, thousands of decent, loving humans who are leading kayak tours, selling flowers, cutting hair, raising kids, rescuing dogs, changing surgical dressings, serving drinks, and just being functional, wholesome primates. Many of us would say Community High School made us who we are. Some definitely say it saved lives because otherwise more of us would have dropped out or turned experimentation with drugs into permanent, destructive self-medication, both of which have adverse sequalae in chronic illness, poor economic stability, and early death. I think that could have been true of at least one of my siblings. The bad fate *did* happen to some anyway. Every reunion there’s a board naming those who have passed. Commie has had *maybe* six total reunions, ever. Everyone who has ever attended goes, every five-ish years since 2002 or so. The board gets bigger each time, but some have been on the board since nearly the beginning.  

So—context: Commie and I are almost exactly the same age. The first class started in fall 1972. I “started” in fall ’71, so that first class took their first steps in the halls the same time I took my first steps as a biped. The school and I were teenagers together. As it turns out, Commie and I had another peer who didn’t make it. Roe v. Wade was decided in January 1973, before the first class finished their first year. I was 15 months old. I marched down the aisle to the jazz riffs of Pomp & Circumstances two and half years before George the First appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court (with the active advice and consent of Joe Biden). My first niece was born 3 months before the Bush/Gore election. George the Second appointed Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court. That niece graduated from Commie in 2018, the year Kavanaugh first contaminated the Court. Brett Kavanaugh graduated from his posh east coast prep school in 1983. That year I was a sixth grader learning about Commie by going to see my own future theater company perform Romeo and Juliet. I later became friends with some of the Commie class of 1983. They aren’t sitting on the Supreme Court, but I am confident they aren’t rapists either.

A Rock Concernt on the Lawn

There is a Capulet in this picture

For 50 years an experiment in education has given young people the skill, power, and respect to direct their own education. One of the anchor experiences of my life, and that of thousands of others, who just happened to be raised in a particular Midwest college town, at a particular time, was that of being able to control my own life as much, or even more, than was good for me at a critical developmental phase. I flew across the country to be with people with whom I may share “only” the experience of the last three years of my childhood, which in turn we share with only fifty years’ worth of small graduating classes. On the same day, six religious extremists, two of whom went to the same posh boys’ DC area school, and two of whom are sex offenders, destroyed 49 years of human autonomy for roughly half the United States autonomy.

50 year old me was able to fly across the country because I have a good job, with good benefits, a stable family life, and numerous other structural privileges. I have those things because I have many years of a solid career and excellent education behind me. One of the earliest and most important parts of that education was Commie High, where I learned, among other things, to choose the path that was right for me. The fact I was never trapped in a room with a sex offender is a little more complicated. That did actually happen to girls at parties with Commie boys. But unlike a lot of American high schools there wasn’t a football, basketball, or swim team who the entire school enabled to be gang rapists.  

The narrowness of the gap between my path and others has always been visible to me. I was young in time in our national history where, if some of the bad things that happen to girls, and the bad fate that is not in our control had happened to me, I could still have exercised some control over my path. In 1993, after college, I came back to Ann Arbor and worked at Planned Parenthood. I saw people I went to school with pass through the doors of the clinic (for pregnancy related care and otherwise). There has never been a time when I didn’t know what could happen to women and girls who aren’t lucky.

The Commie 50^th reunion let me spend a weekend literally and figuratively embracing people whose simple existence makes me smile. I was happy to see a few of my oldest and closest friends, but for me the most joy came with seeing those who I don’t necessarily know well, although there are some I have socialized with periodically. I didn’t need to see them long, or talk with them much, but to know they are there makes me feel better. We all need family not-of-the-blood, and we need more than just the sisters and brothers, but also the neighbor’s brother-in-law who married Aunt Barb, the favorite older second cousin who told gross jokes and fished you out of the river. Commie gave me all of those. I am so very grateful to be able to see people whose fates mingle with mine, and I see that we are getting old, and we are (mostly) okay. And we remember and mark the lives of those who maybe weren’t okay, and who didn’t make it this far. Each one of us had luck. The fortune of being born, and being able to make some choices that were good for us. That made us better, saner, safer, healthier, wiser than we might otherwise have been. And the good or lucky choices we had helped us weather the bad decisions we made.

If Roe v. Wade was a woman, she would be 49 years old. If she had been a Commie student, she would have graduated in the class between me and my brother. And I would have written her name on the “In Memoriam” board a few weeks back. If “just” being able to manage your own secondary school experience can transform so many people, what is the magnitude of being unable to control ones own body? The simple fate of being born with a bat and balls instead of a catcher’s mitt now decreases the gratuitous risk of dying in horrible septic pain from one of the commonest human conditions. Being woman/girl-identified has always increased the risk of being intruded upon against ones will, of being occupied against ones will, and forced to endure loss, pain, danger, death, and permanent curtailment of so much of life’s branching possibility. I happen to have enjoyed some luck of birth and a good high school. Others are born with a rich daddy (Brett Kavanaugh’s dad was a cosmetics lobbyist). I went to school with several women with chronic autoimmune illnesses. One is on the memorial board. A pregnancy, even a well managed, wanted one, could mean more of their names.

For fifty years Community has been teaching people how to choose. And by teaching us to choose, we learn how to fight. For most of my own fifty years I have been steadily fighting to control my own path (I was stubborn as hell well before high school). I got to choose each silly, hard, fascinating step of high school, I chose which college to go to (because Commie helped me to have such choices), I bulled my way through far less successful educational experiences than the halcyon days when Brian and Marilyn let me combine my Social Studies and Latin final papers for both their classes. I’ve had shitty days and whole shitty years when everything felt rotten and miserable, and like the most functional, competent, self-sufficient period of my life was between 16 and 22. It’s not great to be 35 or 40 years old and feeling that way, but it was because I could make my own bloody damn choices and have them stick, even when I was chronically depressed and my brain wasn’t even fully cooked. And half of those years I was at Commie.

Since I left that particular bubble moment of memory and love, I have felt rage ebbs and flows. It is simmering inside me, and also burning out there on the margins of my vision: the fear, the pain, the colossal outrage knowing my children, my nieces and nephlets, the children of my friends and peers, are less safe. When they lack luck, the Court has thrown them to the wolves. If they’re the ones held down in a dark room at party, or too drunk to say no, they may become the names written on the memorial board. At the same time I am holding that little spark of luck and joy from my classmates and teachers. I’m return to blow gently on it, fanning it so I can turn the flame like a dragon’s torch on my enemies. I wish I didn’t have to take it into battle, but thank you my friends for the fuel.

Gen X: Can We Talk About Our Puppet Thing?

1) I don’t even know… 2) True Fact: my high school theater company did Free to Be 3) Yoda with a bunch of kids he kidnapped out of their cultures and familioes for religious indoctrination

I saw a tumblr snippet the other day about how we need a Beauty and the Beast remake in which the Beast is a normal (hot) human actor and everyone else is a muppet who thinks he’s ugly and creepy AF. I gotta say, I’m not so sure about that. I’m the age of person that was well exposed to muppets. And I think us Gen Xers could use some examination about our puppet situation. We’ve talked out how the Giving Tree tried to convince a whole generation that love means having shitty boundaries and no sense of self-worth—if you have she/her pronouns, anyway. Seriously, how many kids’ books in the 70s used “she” for anything except that poor bloody tree? What the fuck, Shel Silverstein?

So you know what else Gen X got? Puppets. Lots of puppets. Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, the Muppets, Alf, and those gender-explicating babies in Free to Be You and Me.

The Neighborhood of Make-Believe puppets were legit and old-school, just like Mr. Rogers. It’s fine that Mr. Rogers has his hand All. The. Up the King’s ass because it’s Mr. Rogers, and we were down with his use of simplified crafts for symbolic communication and developmentally appropriate engagement. Even if Lady Fairchild was creepy, Mr. Rogers had your back.

Free to Be You and Me was the GOAT. It had music, Atalanta shoving it to The Man, hippie psychedelic graphics, and those babies were a vibe. 10/10—would watch again.

The Dark Crystal, though. That kinda started to go…well…dark. There’s a lot going on with the Gelflings, Skexxies, Podlings, and uncanny valley shit, but then you get the poor little dessicated slave Podlings and bam—pupaphobia—with your sweetened rainbow marshmallow breakfast cereal.

Then there’s Alf. Have you ever seen a donkey’s dong? Between Alf and Snuffleupagus, there must have been a lot of TV folks covertly serving a niche fetish for uncut gingers.

I had witness in a trial once who looked just like Sam the eagle. Opposing counsel looked like Beeker

And don’t even get me started on Labyrinth. Puppets are the perfect backdrop for David Bowie’s codpiece.

Now I’m not here to come for the king. Kermit the Muppet turning his face concave with irritation, confusion, or embarrassment was super relatable. Miss Piggy is more of a lightning rod. On one hand she was fierce. Since the only other femme-presenting types on that show were the band gal who didn’t hardly talk (or have eyes?!) and Gonzo’s Chic(k)s, Piggy had a big porkfolio. She had to be larger than life. She was the OG fashion icon. But that “moi” thing was utter cringe and she had a real consent problem with Kermit. She was the best face of the narcissist. I’ll be honest. I wasn’t a fan. In fact, when I found out Frank Oz voiced both her and Yoda, I cried.

That brings us to some deep cut pupaphobia: Yoda.

You know what that green shorty snotrag’s problem was? He was a gotdam amphibian. Which would be fine if he stayed in his wet, swampy lane, but noooo…he goes and sets up as head cleric for a whole mystical order of warriors in which primates are heavily represented. Then he makes all the primates abjure emotional relationships and presto, Luke has to pick his sister over training (and ends up abandoning his family anyway), Anakin has to abandon his mother, can’t process his trauma, has to get laid in secret, and goes full psycho. Thanks a lot you coldblooded, poorly disguised Asian caricature. Just because you look like a sac doesn’t mean you should be imposing your values willynilly across species lines. Or on other species’ willies.

Which brings us to the Icons: Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie with their chill, aro domestic partnership, the yellow bird buddy, and Oscar representing for all the people who just can’t with any of this, they’re great. Cookie Monster modeled some really sketchy disordered eating, but he had a great singing voice. I mean, he made as much sense as Elvis. Or John Candy.

All of that brings us to Grover. You know what turned 50 last year? The Monster at the End of the Book. That is the worst boil-on-the-arse-of-literacy book ever. That toxic cobalt poco POS spends the whole story successively losing every last ounce of his chill because he was scared of the Phantom Menace or some shit. He tantrums, he blames, he makes scene after scene. Then, he has the gaslighting audacity to say “YOU were so scared. I, Grover, was trying to reassure YOU. YOU were irrational. What you feared is in fact me, and I am “lovable, furry old Grover”. If a six yearold can get adrenaline poisoning from sheer rage, man, I tell you I’d have died every time someone got that book near me

You know who else turned 50 in 2021? This gal. Fifty, out of fucks, and giving the finger.

So, fuck you, Grover. I’ve been dying my hair blue and if I see the blue dye running like blood down my hands in the shower I say to myself “there was a monster at the end of the book, you little prick!” Fuck you, Yoda. I don’t care if you’re a cute tiny cannibal baby now, Darth Vadar is your fault.

Do it, people. Tell those darlings you were supposed to love through gritted teeth to bugger right off. Think Kermie is annoying? Kiss my ass, Kermie. Oscar gives you a bully vibe? Kill it with fire! Fraggles creep you out? Fuck you, Fraggles! Carebears make you angry? Fuck off into the sun, Carebears. Barney make you want to hit something? Tell Barney to eat your entire ass. Fozzy Bear a creepy uncle trigger? Tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Lamb Chop gross you out? YEET.You don’t have to yuck someone’s yum, but you also don’t have to grin and bear it. Fuck it. Marie Kondo that shit.

1) Once again, I don’t even know 2) Me, losing my mind with rage when I was six 3) image taken from some blog called “who is Jareth and why does he have a bulging penis?”