As I walked down Madison Ave with the sole agenda of my annual pap smear, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Is a blog the only correct response to the erosion of alternative journalism, or is the blog keeping alternative journalism from prospering once again?!” 1
While Billie Eilish played in the gyno’s speakers and I waited patiently in my pink paper gown, the ink residue from yesterday’s tattoo staining the trash garment, I thought of girlblogging. Propelled by the recent reading of Joanna Walshs “Girl Online: A User’s Manual,” in addition to an independent rewatch of Sex and the City, SATC’s emergence as a primary text in the latter half of Walsh’s user manifesto, and this Post45 series by Ari Brostoff on Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and queer theory, I am trapped in Carrie Bradshaw land once again!
I have already come to realize at 22 (10 years younger than Carrie is in Season One), the SATC lifestyle is not one I aspire to, no matter how much I thought I did at 15, which I’m thankful for because neither my bank account nor my personality could pull it off. Still I find myself an active observer of their conversations over silly lunches, always a full plate of food in front of them and no acknowledgment of their functional alcoholism. In “Girl Online” Walsh perfectly superimposes SATC with Plato’s Symposium: two works of booze, gossip, friendship, and long explorations of amorous desire. I find myself, year after year, leaning against the tree of this subject, hoping to one day make my own little notch in its surface. In the meantime I fall in love and learn new things.
I originally showed my boyfriend an episode of the show because I see him as Aidan-like, and then he wanted to start the series from the beginning because he has good taste and is well-suited for me. He cannot understand the allure of Mr. Big, and sometimes gags at his evasive one-liners. I try to tell him Big is the ultimate “want what you cannot have” trope, pointing to how Carrie’s judgment and poise go out the window in the face of his “perfection” Her insecurities try to swim to the surface and choke in the process, so that every time she thinks she has caught her breath, she realizes she is actually on a ventilator. I’ve never found Big very sexy which is good news for my ability to be in love. My boyfriend doesn’t think Big is sexy either, which makes sense because our love is easy & open & sexy and not regressive. (I write those lines with 22-year-old fingers and know I may not know as much as I think I know.)
One thing I do know is that the new Waxahatchee x MJ Lenderman ode-to-monogamy song is so awesome. It's a collaboration that knew just what it was doing- nostalgic Americana for everyone that gets horny at the thought of a Lucinda Williams and Neil Young duet (which kinda exists). This is a love song in a gray area: admitting devotion is not a fixed state but a form that changes properties. The voyeur in me cannot ignore that both of these artists are in long term relationships with other musicians, Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) with Kevin Morby, and Jake (MJ) Lenderman with fellow Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman. I am no different than every other child of divorce who wonders how a relationship can really last, in sickness and in health, in children and in affairs, however, I am not one of them who says marriage (or life partnership) is “impossible so what’s the point.” Get a divorce, who cares. Divorce is not cancer. It is expensive and painful, but so are many things that are worthwhile. But because I feel this way, I am in awe of those that make long-term partnership work, and how even though it is miraculous to find a person to love that loves you back, it doesn’t mean you get to opt out of working to make love work. The chorus of the song goes, “I’ve been yours for so long/ We come right back to it/ I let my mind run wild/ Don’t know why I do it,” and then the chord progression seamlessly returns back to that of the verses as Crutchfield and Lenderman keep singing: “You just settle in/ Like a song with no end.” A cycle is performed, showing, like a song that keeps on going, keeps improvising, love is always new. In the Symposium, Agathon says, “I do not agree with this: that Love is more ancient than Kronos and Iapetus. No, I say he is the youngest of the gods and stays young forever.” Agathon was definitely not talking about monogamy, and more likely was referring to dating younger and younger men, so while this is a shallow misquoting for my own agenda I’ll add one more to the mix: Eryximachus, the doctor’s son, saying, “harmony, after all, is consonance, and consonance is a species of agreement.” For him, love, like medicine, is about balance.
Can one be harmonious? By the word’s definition it should be possible, though the instinct is to find harmony through another. That is what Eryximachus- and the world- implies after all. This makes me uneasy as a feminist but reassured as someone who doubts their own internal rhythm and feels steadied by another, like my body digs one side of the scale into the floor and only through love can it sometimes be lifted.
While reading another text this week- Emily Nagoski’s “Come As You Are” (a book my therapist described as the unofficial textbook for sex therapy)- the Symposium returned, this time in the form of Artistophanes’s creation myth. He says humans were cut in half by Zeus in order for the gods to have more control over us, and from that point we each suffered, looking for our lost half. The central idea is: “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.” Nagoski ties this parable into the attachment mechanism: the shift from the baby/caregiver dynamic to two adults falling in love seeking comfort and safety. I think it is interesting that the thesis of Nagoski’s book, however, could be the normalcy of discordance [in sex]. The “dual control model” of sexual response that contains sexual “brakes” and a sexual “accelerator” that are rarely synced; genital non-concordance, in which the brain and body’s expression of arousal is mismatched contrary to popular thought; the ways context tampers with desire; and even one’s initial instinct to love oneself/ one’s body vs. the cultural opinion.
Harmony sounds like the goal, but what if it is not an option? Like Carrie’s cheesy send-off to Season Two (after an awesome “The Way We Were” tribute), maybe we cannot change, and rather we have to accept. Not across the board (like her attempt to change her smoking habit half a season later), but there is truth that is “ugly” and I don’t think that should be met with denial, for then there is no hope in it becoming less “ugly.” If there cannot be harmony- in its fullest sense- at least there can be consonance with dissonance, or, acknowledgement and acceptance. “If I can keep up/ We’ll get right back to it.”
That’s the closest I can get to wrapping this sticky thing up. I’m just a girlblogger after all.
I clearly do not answer this, nor do I really reference it again because I can do whatever I want, which is the freedom of said blog. However, it is something I am thinking about and should return to.