critiquing your dick pics with love

Last week, three young men were found guilty of gang raping a 19-year-old German tourist in Auckland, New Zealand. The “exceptionally distressing” case has been covered extensively by the media, so I won’t rehash the details, but as I read the sentencing at 4am this morning between my baby’s night feeds (fun!), I came across an interesting detail I hadn’t seen mentioned in the press.

“What you don’t need to do, as far as I can see, is say fucking dead chickens is wrong because sex has a sacred essence.”

The kernel of truth to the backlash to Fair Play-style arguments is that the approach by liberal feminists can sometimes be so patronising and unproductive as to be obviously doomed to fail: see, for example, the real phenomenon of women hurling Shit I Do spreadsheets at their unsuspecting husbands, who are often presumed to be oblivious and entitled just by virtue of being men, and to be doing less mental work. They might be, but my sense is that if you count restraint as invisible work, both men and women’s emotional labour is going unacknowledged. At the very least, the conversation becomes a lot more interesting—and potentially more welcoming to men.

There I am, (hypothetical me, of course,) standing at the foot of the bed before my husband’s damp towel, murderous rage swirling in my temple, fist clenched, jaw clenched, my tongue moving behind my teeth to form the “L” sound in “lazy prick” before I’ve so much as consciously processed the scene, this habit of a lifetime—to scold and insult—straining at the leash, and can you blame me, really, when this is all I had modelled by my cruel French stepmother after I was orphaned, when I’ve been called a lazy prick (and worse!) one thousand times, yet look at me, look at what I do: I summon patience, I take a deep breath, I retract my tongue and I let it go. My husband isn’t perfect and I love him. This time I’ll simply hang the towel. Some other time, when I’m calmer, I’ll remind him in an impossibly sweet voice that his habit irritates me. That it’s objectively not the most sensible thing to do with a damp towel. We’ll talk about it, broker some rapprochement. Forgiveness, compromise, communication. I am clearly behaving well. No sighing, no tit for tat, no insults. Not even a little bit of murder.

I guess my problem with stock language is that it’s anti-communication. The more you repeat a phrase, the more stale the meaning becomes. We know this about cliches, that they render the freshest, most profound insights totally ignorable: the best things in life really are free, but you piss away all meaning when you put it like that; you make a thin paste of words. And this is true of therapeutic cliches, too: “sitting with your feelings” is a good thing to do when your emotions are redlining, but why always say it that way? Why can’t you say “let anger course through your veins” or “sadness feels bad but it’s better not to bottle it”? Why make people strain to see that you’re saying something useful?

This is a strange way to think about the effects of sex on the body, but it’s an insane way to think about the effects of sex on the spirit, even really bad sex. The human spirit, like the vagina, has a strong bouncing-back quality. This is one of the famous things about it. Armed with a sense of meaning, the human spirit can withstand the Holocaust. It can withstand rape—multiple rapes, gang rapes, anal rapes, rapes that take place when you’re a child. It can withstand every single ordeal a one-night stand can throw at you save fatal violence. It can certainly withstand getting a bit glutted on consensual 69s.

You’re screaming, really screaming. Uvula vibrating and cheeks burning red. You writhe in my arms, inconsolable. The visions start rushing. Babies screaming, parents snapping. Babies screaming, parents snapping. Limbs snapping. Don’t snap, don’t snap, don’t snap. But I’m so brittle.

Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, Christmas, Matariki—lighting fires, feasting and gathering— decorating with the foliage of evergreen trees—singing, revelling and swapping gifts—looking ahead to the spring harvest: they’re different traditions, but they’re found all across the world, and they point in the same direction: to the universal human yearning, in the dead of winter, to huddle with other people and celebrate light, food and life. In other words, I found out to my delight that Matariki is in my bones.

Reviewing the complete list of books I’ve read this year feels a bit like taking a photo of my undie drawer and putting it on the internet. Not very sophisticated. Not enough pairs. God, what’s that crap in the corner? Still, I love reading books and chatting about them but hardly anyone in my personal life reads the same books I do (sad face), so here we are.

On a bad day you might waste 21 minutes of your allegedly wild and precious life trudging through online interfaces in pursuit of an image of your daughter. You could have driven down the road and clapped eyes on her actual, snot-nosed face, then driven all the way home again, feeling two-fifths as fucked off as you are now.

As a kid growing up in West Auckland in the 1990s, I never encountered left-wing reverence for the working class, so it made no sense to fake a lower station. If you were going to tell fisherman’s tales about your dad back then, you’d try to make him sound richer. Twenty-five years later, working in digital media offices in the US, Berlin and Auckland, aglow with MacBook Airs, I noticed something strange. People were falling over themselves to stress not only that they understood the working class, but that they were part of it—including straightforwardly bourgeois people. Trust-fund babies, private school kids, people with cut-glass accents: all would speak with straight faces about their “working-class” backgrounds.

It’s tempting to frame this as an old/young or Millennial/Gen Z divide, and that’s part of it, but it’s really a question of temperament: Can you tell when someone’s trying to get a rise out of you? Can you tolerate or even enjoy the sloppified internet, or does it make you lose your mind? Does the breakdown of truth and meaning have you rocking in a corner or hollering out the sunroof? Who do you think needs to get a grip: shitposters and engagement farmers, or the people who take them seriously?

‘I don’t wanna get too graphic; it’s like vigorous face-fucking. He’s showing everyone’

Do you ever read a bunch of seemingly disparate books then notice they’re all eerily converged on the same theme? Like your subconscious is sniffing out a message? At the moment, mine seems to be a heat-seeker for historical accounts of extremely lax parenting—especially when it comes to the drugs parents were willing to ply their kids with.

I started this Substack after I was laid off from my editing job at an online magazine, and I did so knowing I was constitutionally ill-suited to the marketing side. I really mean that: I mulled for weeks whether I wanted to join the ~creator economy~, and eventually took the leap after writing myself a list of fixed commitments, including “Don’t be lame or do lame shit”. I see now that I was trying to articulate to myself the Chapman creed. Laying engagement bait all day long on Notes? Calling my readership “guys”? Telling subscribers I love them? I just don’t do things like that.