feeling very mysteries of pittsburgh michael chabon quote again

Legal scholar Robin West calls consensual but unwanted sex a personal, social, and political problem for women everywhere, from college campuses to long-term marriages. The resulting condition—that is, what happens to a woman after repeated engagement in this kind of sex—she calls consensual sexual dysphoria. Dysphoria means a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life. In West’s analysis, unwanted, unpleasurable sex undermines a woman’s dignity, her sense of self-worth, her subjective happiness, and her ability to assert her equality. West’s work is relatively new. In her writing, she notes the limited empirical research available on the subject. She couches her conclusions in words like “it’s likely,” “it must be,” or “it’s hard to imagine.” For example: “It is simply hard to imagine a healthy sense of one’s own agency either developing or being sustained over the course of an adult life in which a woman as a matter of identity and habit bends her will regarding her own body for the sake of another’s physical pleasure.” I’ve discussed the issue with female friends—all of them fierce, funny, smart, independent women—and yet nearly without exception we’ve all done it. Once a year, once a month, or every goddamn night. We grin and bear sex that we do not want and do not enjoy. We follow a tradition laid down (literally) centuries ago by women without our legal rights, education, or consciousness. Why? We do it to keep the peace.

— "Allergic," Tara Conklin. In Wanting: Women Writing About Desire.

Literally what did olivia laing say about loneliness leading to more loneliness. Loneliness being so repulsive that people sense it from you and stay away. Crazy crazy

“Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. […] You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of levels, levels of perception, of false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, in an interview with Peter Duval Smith (1962)

“the possibility of rejection is essential to forming deep relationships with people” - chanté joseph for british vogue

ALT

this little passage from Mr. Rogers' book You Are Special made me tear up a little I can't lie

[“Limits mean what you are willing or not willing to do in any given interaction. They change, and this is a good thing. There are some things you will not do with anyone due to ethical, health, or safety reasons and many other things you do with people depending on who they are, what your relationship is, what sparks your fancy at the moment, or how tired you are. Having a limit says, I am not available for this. Having a limit is the difference between your Willing-to list and your Not-Willing-to list. Sometimes the limit is a “No.” Sometimes it’s “Not that but something different” or “Yes, up to here” or “Yes, for about ten minutes” or “Yes, next Friday.” So it’s limits first, then comes the generosity.

Taking responsibility for your limits means that you finally and blessedly admit that no one but you can know what they are. Sometimes even you don’t know what they are. It means you don’t expect others to guess correctly, and you stop blaming them for not being able to do that. There are situations in which it may be easy to speak a limit and other situations in which it’s harder. This is natural. The practice gradually enlarges the situations in which you can easily notice and communicate your limits. It teaches you how to do that, and you can then take that skill into the rest of your life.

A thought experiment. Imagine you are going to walk into a room of people, and you are not allowed to say no to anyone there. They can ask you to do things and can do things to you, but you can’t say no. Would you enter the room? Of course not. You can’t afford the risk of having anyone ask you for anything. Suppose you did enter—what are the options now? Constant tension and worry. You could try to suss out who is “safe.” You could hide in the corner and hope no one sees you. You could walk in with a bluster and roar, hoping everyone will be sufficiently intimated to not ask for anything. You could acquiesce to every request, hoping everyone will like you for it. You could look pitiful and hope that someone will rescue you or take you under their wing. You could do what is asked but with such a bad attitude that they regret it and don’t ask for more. You could get buffeted around and feel hopeless. You could even criticize yourself for not being okay with all of it. Any of those sound familiar?

(On the other side, imagine you are in the room and in come the people who aren’t allowed to say no. Now you have to figure out what they are okay with before you ask them. You could ask for nothing at all for fear of making a mistake. You could be hypervigilant for signs of discomfort. You could make a mistake and feel awful about it. Or you could take advantage of the situation and do whatever you want.)

This is why the ability to say no is required for intimacy. Without the ability to say no, you can’t afford to be in the same room with anyone. When you can say no, your yes can be trusted.”]

Betty Martin, The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent

Hannah Close in conversation with Andreas Weber (2022)

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”

— Alan Watts

“I didn’t read much — watched the sun go down — just a plain yellow sunset and one star came out — I wanted you when the yellow light came in and it was all so quiet — the day had been very windy — just to be quiet by you — while the sky turned from yellow to cold white moonlight —”

— Georgia O’Keeffe, from a letter to Alfred Stieglitz featured in My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 (Yale University Press, June 21, 2011) (via Alive On All Channels)

“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.”

— Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity

The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility of relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. There is nothing mysterious about the anxious state; it leaves one teetering in an untenable and all too familiar isolation. There is rarely desire without some associated anxiety: We seem to be wired to have apprehension about that which we cannot control, so in this way, the two are not really complete opposites. But desire gives one a reason to tolerate anxiety and a willingness to push through it.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein