a thing like that

The power of a pretty girl… totally unquantifiable. But this much is certain: there is nothing a beautiful girl in the West cannot have, for a time. And I don’t speak from any far off hilltop–I’m as much a sucker as anyone. I’ve risked everything for a certain look, for tapered fingers or a particular mole. So I hear you when you say it’s not what she says, not what she does, that it’s on her. It’s something she wears and however skin deep it may be on her, it penetrates you right to the marrow. Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. I think about them. Sometimes I want them and sometimes I worry about them–even though it’s not my business to do. I wonder about them. I wonder if you are the pretty girl in question. I wonder what you do with a power which, though potent, makes you vulnerable to every probe, every demand, every infiltration? I wonder what you do with a power that turns you into an open atlas upon which any idiot can map their own route?

arabellesicardi:

The sexual nausea associated with all these monster-women helps explain why so many real women have for so long expressed loathing of (or at least anxiety about) their own, inexorably female bodies. The “killing” of oneself into an art object – the pruning and preening, the mirror madness, and concern with odors and aging, with hair which is invariably too curly or too lank, with bodies too thin or too thick – all this testifies to the efforts women have expended not just trying to be angels but trying not to become female monsters. 

It’s impossible for me to be happy; psychologically and chemically impossible. So I’m going to help some little girl out there. I’m going to let her know that I have stretch marks on my ass, and bunions, that I don’t have my shit together at all. Please say that I don’t have my shit together. I want to give that girl some hope. I want her to know that she doesn’t have to have her shit together. She doesn’t. It’s okay if she doesn’t. I’m going to prove that, and then I’m going to die.