by
n+1
meh/style
Adelle Waldman,
Sarah Rose Etter,
Lydia Kiesling,
Tahmima Anam,
Ellen Pao,
Jenny Zhang,
Carrie Sun,
Claire Stanford,
Gabriela Garcia
Julie could endure being treated like a stupid child, but what she couldn’t tolerate was when these men got it into their heads that they were actually lovable. If she couldn’t bring herself to love extraordinary men who actually contributed to cultural history, who turned their creepy sexual obsessions with women into art, then what made these losers think she could love them? They who contributed nothing and were part of a power structure that benefited the rich and stole from the people—the goddamn people!—by which she meant her parents and the families she grew up with, not these men who paid for every aspect of their personality, who couldn’t get off unless there was an element of coercion. Julie loathed the class of rich, untalented men who felt entitled to purchase anything at all, including human connection, but what could she do? She couldn’t open jars on her own. She looked like someone who made a certain kind of man feel strong and capable, which wasn’t much of a feat: you just had to be skinny in that way that didn’t look like it came from deprivation or too much time at the gym and have big doe eyes and long lashes, a tiny but full rosebud mouth, rosy cheeks, and soft skin—that was it! It was nothing that couldn’t be bought or passed down genetically (and all things passed down “genetically” had to do with intergenerational consolidation and hoarding of power, money, and resources anyway). The more difficult thing was when a woman successfully adjusted her personality over time to remain interesting and intriguing and nonthreatening without ever revealing needs of her own.
why is this so annoying???
The third time they met, she let him fuck her without a condom. Just pull out and don’t come inside me, okay? He came on her stomach and then told her all the things he couldn’t express the year before at a two-day ayahuasca ceremony in a hippie port town in the Olympic Peninsula. There had been so many middle-aged white people there, sobbing and speaking earnestly to an oily, lizardlike creature they had seen emerging out of their outstretched arms, but Merv couldn’t conjure up any kind of creature and could only sit there in an unnaturally stiff position, frozen with paranoia that maybe someone in the group recognized him and pitied him, for he was alone and hadn’t come with a partner or even a friend. Afterward, he decided to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife. They never got formally remarried, but they had a non-legally-binding commitment ceremony off the Amalfi Coast, and one month into being a changed man, he went back to his old standby, the online marketplace for “high-end escorts and modern-day courtesans.” He instantly went into a euphoric high followed by a flattening numbness—how many juicy tits and round bums could a guy see in a row? It all became as tasteless to him as caviar, literal caviar, he revealed to Julie. He yearned to taste something for the first time, to return to that childlike state of being guilelessly open to the world, before we armored ourselves against disappointment and danger. He wanted, essentially, to feel again.
it's all theoretically up my alley and yet just feels so tedious. it drags
Merv wasn’t afraid of Julie ruining him. He had gotten to his current level of notoriety without ever being stalked, without being dragged into any kind of public dispute. The worst thing that had ever been written about him, as far as Julie could tell, was a blog post on his love life: “Hopelessly Romantic or Hopelessly Grim?” It was badly written and crammed full of clickbaity sentences about Merv’s divorce and the steady stream of beautiful but unusual women he dated since her. It made him seem boyish and harmless, and the comments underneath the story were filled with young women thirsting not just after him but after what he represented—a kind of elusive cool that was easy to worship and project onto. Julie thought of herself as different from those women, but at her core she believed what they believed. If she could only walk into a place with Merv, be known as his, all her problems would go away. Other people’s envy was the only salve against inner turmoil. It was. It had to be.
ANNOYING