Cosmic Censorship Hypotheses
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Content warning: This letter contains strong language, discussion of sex and discussion of implied misogyny. Please feel free to skip it, or come back to it later, if this sort of content puts you in a bad mental health place. Also: spoilers for the Amazon show “I love Dick”
COSMIC CENSORSHIP HYPOTHESES*
There is a type of rivet that is called ‘muško-žensko’ in Croatian. Male-female. You can easily imagine what it looks like – a protrusion and a cavity that connect in a complementary fashion. You always find a couple in jars of random buttons everyone’s grandma seems to keep. You see them on jeans sometimes, right by the front pockets. The naming is clear. The implication of it is clear. Clearly, it is either a joke or an obscenity.
Growing up female is complicated and different women have different origin stories. Not all of us have had to fight and reconcile with our bodies, not all of us have doubted our self-worth every step of the way, not all of us have discovered that we can be strong only when that strength became a matter of survival. However, for most, the threat of that mechanical action, the clicking together of the rivet, has loomed large ever since some sort of chemical trigger set into action a cascade of changes that forced us to stop being girls (problematic) and deal with womanhood (even more problematic).
Penetration.
It sounds terrible. It sounds like an invasion; an over-taking.
Once we learn that it is supposed to change us, take something away from us, break us in a way that leaves a trace (the physical kind that has to be washed away), it is hard to understand how we can still want something so obviously perceived as ruinous. Something that reminds us that no matter how strong we have been raised to be, so many will still identify an a priori point of fragility inside of us.
(Last winter, an acquaintance told me that when teaching they like to blow their students minds by reminding them that all we ever do is driven by our genes wanting to propagate. It is hardcoded in us to want to have babies. It is hardcoded in us to want to fuck. This is a bleak take on it, one that regardless of how much it has to do with facts, leaves very little room for genuine desire, especially not for a woman. I wanted to point this out, but we were at a party and debating the politics of sex typically does not uphold a chill vibe.)
When you learn about sex by watching TV as a kid, you learn little about what women want or how they want it. Maybe you learn that no one has an answer to that first question. You probably learn about perseverance of men that pursue women, about the gestures that as a woman you are supposed to recognize as universal signs of affection (love? Lust?). You probably learn that if a man kisses you mid-sentence it is romantic and not rude. You learn how to respond to and process advances, but very rarely do you learn how to pursue. When people had sex in movies when I was growing up they always did so lying down, half-covered, with the man on top. It all just fit together, like the rivet.
(What would sex be like if the first time you saw it the woman was on top? If the man had asked her whether something felt good or what she wanted to do? What if it did not have to be a man at all?)
In reality, having sex under the covers is very warm and the covers get in the way. In reality, not everything always fits, and you have to negotiate what do with your knees, where to put your hands, whether to make eye contact. Sometimes it’s just heavy, and repetitive and a little boring, and you can’t believe this is worth grappling with the fact that the first time you give into it people will think something in you got irreparably broken.
Watching sex scenes in movies as an adult is different because you can scoff at how unrealistic they are while still making mental notes about how, for instance, a slight parting of a woman’s lips universally conveys enjoyment. (The man could just ask whether she is enjoying herself but since they barely ever do, a dictionary of physical cues is useful.) It is also different because the movies have become different. At some point this summer, I was watching two middle-aged people go at it on a couch, shirts still on, on the big flat screen TV in my boyfriend’s parents living room. The scene took me by surprise because it was not beautified nor sanitized and there was, frankly, nothing particularly arousing or attractive about it. The realism made me uncomfortable and I worried that if someone walked into the living room at that moment they would think we were watching strangely unappealing pornography and not a presumably comedic piece of television produced by a powerful corporation. Maybe I should have adjusted my expectation a little more given that the show was called “I love Dick”.
“I love Dick” is based on a novel that has, according to the Internet, made a splash in feminist circles in the last twenty years, and it was made by a largely female team of writers, producers and directors. Presumably it is a show about the female gaze, the female desire, and one particular woman embracing a severe need to fuck some schmuck in a cowboy hat and dealing (or simply rolling) with the consequences. Her name is Chris and she is a failing aspiring artists and a New Yorker transplanted to a small, rural, Texan community. Her hair is too fluffy and she wears the wrong shoes and grimaces and stumbles a lot. She could be a character on Saturday Night Live, or maybe a relative of Amy Schummer, or that one college friend who somehow only ever attracted bad things and bad men. She references female filmmakers and Patty Smith and if you squint you can see a bit of Kim Gordon in her as well; the genre of cool she is chasing is quite obvious. She is seemingly always on the edge of a crisis and were the show not about sex, she could probably be a soccer mom panicking about a swim team bake sale and keep all of the same ticks. It is probably not much of a spoiler to note that her conquest does not go over well.
The show is beautifully shot, the cast is somewhat diverse (mostly young, mostly beautiful), excerpts from classic feminist films are cut into the episodes, and the occasional narration is full of sentences that have clearly been chosen because they will sound profound, or maybe rebellious, if just said with a forceful enough intonation. Quite transparently, the whole thing is packaged in a way that suggests it should be received as a bold, transgressive, feminist piece. When I was younger I once peaked into my mother’s copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and although it was in a foreign language I hadn’t fully mastered, I could quickly tell I shouldn’t be reading it but should definitely also find an excuse to eventually do so. “I love Dick” is trying to sell that feeling packed into an Amazon Prime box.
It is unclear whether Chris’s plight is supposed to be funny or relatable. Is she a hero because she pursues what she wants (sex with Dick) and does not care that she has become a train-wreck in the process, or is she an antihero because she is a train-wreck distracted from getting it together by some sort of a sexual frenzy? Vibrators were invented because doctors wanted to treat women for hysteria by giving them orgasms. In the 16th century anemia was considered to be a ‘disease of virgins’ that could be cured by sex with a man. The desire for sex has been seen as making women sick, making them crazy even when that was just a code word for defiance. Can the hysteric woman, the woman sick with celibacy, sick with desire, be reclaimed?
If “I love Dick” is trying to do so with a comedic twist, it doesn’t quite hit the spot. Chris defies her husband and she embarrasses Dick by exposing her fantasies in the form of erotic letters she pastes all over the small town he is a big deal in. Slowly she goes from being oblivious of social norms to breaking them because she wants to. Yet, when given a chance to live out her fantasy, when Dick offers himself (still with a smirk, as if the authors don’t actually want us to root for Chris) she defers to him and tries to get directions instead of just taking. At some point she declares herself a female monster, but she is unable to devour. She gets flustered, like she is a teenager, like she is under pressure to perform, like it wasn’t her that objectified this mostly uninteresting man but the other way around.
The scene in which Chris cannot decide whether to present herself to Dick in her underwear, naked or in an oversized t-shirt is cringe-worthy because it speaks to the inner dialogue that accompanies any conscious attempt at female sexiness. In movies, the morning after the woman always wears a giant shirt belonging to her partner. It is common wisdom that, when polled, men admit to liking women the most when their faces look natural and in a good pair of jeans and a t-shirt. It is confusing then to note just how giant the lingerie industry is, and what women look like on websites and in magazines you find your fathers or brothers trying to hide. Should a woman try and be ostentatiously seductive? Should she try to be casual yet seductive? Should she just hope that whatever she is naturally like will read as playful but sexy but also not too slutty but also not too sloppy… Dick is confused by Chris’s inability to decide and instead of showing enthusiasm about one of her suggestions, he lets her simmer in her confusion and eggs her on by asking clarifying questions every time she puts something on or takes it off. The woman ready to share her fantasies with the whole town, the woman ready to leave her husband for one good fuck, loses all of her confidence, all of her drive when faced with a moment in which she has to make a move. She should have just jumped him, kissed him mid-sentence, thrown him on the bed. Instead, the scene is cringeworthy, played up for laughs.
There is a part in Hannah Gadsby’s incredible performance piece Nanette where she discusses the role of self-deprecating humor in comedy. It is couched in between genuinely funny jokes, so her anger comes as a surprise and underscores her point powerfully. Gadsby says:
“…I built a career out of self-deprecating humor. That’s what I’ve built my career on. And… I don’t want to do that anymore. Because, do you understand…do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission… to speak”
Most of “I love Dick” feels like a plea for a woman’s desire to be seen masquerading as something funny and progressive. Depictions of sex in the show are realistic as is the message it is conveying – if you’re a woman on a crusade to get laid, making advances on an uninterested man, defying expectations to get the pleasure you want, people will laugh at you and you probably won’t get anything other than flustered, disappointed and embarrassed. The female gaze will always be shattered by the fact that men know they don’t have to play into it. They didn’t have to figure this out - being objectified is not their status quo and that makes it easy to liberally say no.
Surely, there are other shows and movies that are better at depicting the woman as the initiator and as the seductress. However, a misguided piece coming from a team of famous producers, based on material with name recognition, starring Kevin Bacon and backed by a corporation with a scary amount of subscribers, makes an impact large enough to worry about. There is value to centering content on female anti-heroes and giving women the space to be messy and messed up. In part, raunchy female humor has had a moment in the past (remember Bridesmaids?) in order to fill up this space and chip away at the lean-in-style perfection often sold to us as heroic. The anxious girl with bad eyebrows and an inability to undo belt buckles needs to know she can be an idol as well. At the same time, if all of our antiheros are laughably messy, if they only reflect our anxieties back at us without any hint of getting a break from conflicting feelings and fears, it is hard to believe that we can transcend the hysteric woman, the anemic woman or the woman that just needs to have a baby. The value in presenting women’s struggles with their sexuality, with wanting sex being a point of conflict from the very first time a girl becomes aware of it, in a raw and vulnerable fashion after a while reads less as transgressive and disruptive of norms and more as exhibitionism. It is not new or powerful to use female pain and female shame and female hunger as the driving conflict when not only have we seen that a million times already but have also often lived it.
Fuck that. Give Chris a happy ending. I hope that in the book she does get some dick.
Best,
Karmela
* There are two cosmic censorship hypotheses and they both refer to Einstein’s theory of gravity and the existence of singularities in spacetime. A singularity is mathematically a point at which a function breaks down an acquires a value that is infinite or cannot, in some other sense, be determined. A physical interpretation of such a point is a challenge and, typically, singularities cannot be experimented upon or even directly observed. A good example is a black hole – we cannot observe the singularity at the center of it as it is hidden by the event horizon i.e. light cannot bounce off of it and escape back to our measurement apparatus. Singularities present in solutions of Einstein’s equations are generally of this type. Since they are ‘hidden’ in this way, the notion of a ‘naked’ singularity is formulated as a contrast. Cosmic censorship hypotheses propose that naked singularities are not possible in our universe, with an exception sometimes being made for the Big Bang.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: This past week was my second week back in the regular, eight-hours-in-the-office, routine and it has been mostly quiet and slow with plenty of opportunity to read papers or crunch equations by myself. Compared to the rest of my summer this has been somewhat lonely but also somewhat peaceful. I had some good conversations with a local collaborator and caught a mistake in a calculation another one had run by me over email. Both exchanges felt productive. While everything is moving slowly, there is a slight hint of progress in these interactions and I am ready to cling onto that.
As a testament to how long I have been in graduate school, I was also recently asked to referee a paper for a journal that has published some of my work in the past few years. Partly, I was honored and excited, and partly I was anxious and intimidated. I blocked off a Sunday to read the work carefully and skim through multiple papers it had referenced, then gave myself three days to make sure that I actually stood by the opinion I ended up expressing. Having been on the other side of both favorable and unfavorable reviews, often confusing regardless of which category they fell into, I am familiar with the anxiety that comes with having to read and confront them, so it felt odd to have the smidgeon of power associated with being the reviewer. They say that power corrupts but, as it turns out, mostly it is nerve-wracking and only slightly flattering.
LISTENING: Ironically, after non-trivially many trips to New York City this summer it still took a festival in my small Illinois town for me to see some live music. As a warm up for a big happening in September, a local venue hosted Speedy Ortiz and despite their music not being quite as heavy as most of my preferred genres it was fun to see them play live, especially in a small place where most spots count as ‘very close to the stage’. Their type of indie punk rock is the sort that can be summarized by imagining an artsy blonde girl yelling, yet it is catchy and fun and, despite Sadie Dupuis’ background as a poet, does not come off as too performative or trying too hard. Quite honestly, it was also just nice to see two people most prominently featured on the (very small) stage be two colorfully dressed women. (On that note, this Bruce Springsteen cover by the Downtown Boys is the loud queer female version of the Dancing in the Dark that I didn't even know I needed but I definitely do).
On the podcast front, Radiolab recently finished up a series of episodes about sex and gender called Gonads and all of the installments of it, discussing everything from how gonads develop in an embryo to X and Y chromosomes to sex education an getting a passport as an intersex person, are really great. The production value is as good as on anything Radiolab has put out, including original music, the range of scientists that are interviewed is impressive and Molly Webster’s narration is fun, informative and compassionate. Listening to this series actually reminded me just how great Radiolab is and how important it is that we support public radio. On another note related to this letter, this episode of Slate’s Waves features a discussion of Sex and the City which is another show I always thought was mildly disappointing from any sort of a modern feminist perspective (but the hosts seem to disagree with me). The hosts take up Nanette in another episode. Finally, for something more uplifting and less heavy, the producers of Radiotopia’s Criminal have been putting out a show called This Is Love which seems to be steering clear of too much sappiness fairly successfully. It delivers some fairly feel-good stories, and sometimes a feel-good story is necessary.
READING: I returned from New York to a pile of food magazines and the latest issue of Heavy Metal which has definitely given me something to thumb through at the end of the day. However, my big reading success for the summer is that I have finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy on my last bus ride from the airport. The last book in the series, Acceptance, is likely the best of the three and I very much enjoyed it. Annihilation seemed very fresh and new and I liked its slow pace and refusal to provide the reader with any sort of an action-packed plot. Authority was probably the weakest in the trilogy but it still built a very compelling tension, it set up a number of tropes about government agencies and spies as a playground for interesting commentary on people in extreme situations and people perpetually feeling out of place, and ultimately its last few chapters were not only very compelling but also made it impossible not to pick up the next novel in the series. However, it is in Authority that VanderMeer seems to get as close as he will to delivering some sort of a punchline, excelling in giving the reader even more to think about in addition to showcasing some genuinely great writing. In a way, the punchline seems to be a mix of old pulpy taglines like “life finds a way” and a genuine wonder, always bordering on genuine terror, at what nature can do and how complex and vast it can be. In Authority, VanderMeer doesn’t really solve any previously presented mysteries, and possibly reinforces some, but he makes it clear that even under the most extraordinary circumstances the biological world we live in is so much greater than us that it is almost beyond comprehension, that it cannot be replicated or imitated without something radically shifting, that we have made ourselves alien to it and will probably regret our hubris of thinking we can not even conquer it but just assign meaning to its patterns. I am still digesting some of what has been woven into these books, but I would definitely recommend them.
WATCHING: Given that this letter is centered on a TV show I have recently binged, it seems silly to talk about any other television content I have consumed recently. However, the Hannah Gadsby special I have mentioned above is such a powerful performance that I feel compelled to recommend it quite enthusiastically. It is not an easy special to watch, although it starts with some really funny and endearing jokes, but it seems like an essential viewing for anyone trying to process the world we live in today with some sense of equality, justice, compassion and kindness. Brace yourself for very heavy and raw moments, but definitely do watch it if you can (and it is so much better than the trailer, I promise).
Additionally, I saw the Boots Riley film Sorry to Bother You with some physics friends during the weekend. While I knew it was made by a communist activist and contained pro-union content, I was still surprised as to how much of a caricature of late-capitalist future it offered. A few ham-fisted moments aside, the movie was genuinely funny and offered a couple of moments of very poignant satire with very good timing. I often have the same complaint with movies trying to convey a strong message – they all seem in need of just a little more editing and a little more subtlety so that the viewer is compelled to truly examine what is being hinted at on screen rather than just reacting to it. Sorry to Bother You is not an exception to this criticism, but it is a good film and it is at least somewhat reassuring that it could not only be made but also employ a pretty star-studded cast in Hollywood today.
EATING: My boyfriend and I are both not the kind of people that like to pick fights nor are we really invested in forceful disagreements. Sometimes I even think that we defer to each other’s judgements slightly too much. Except when it comes to food. We’ve had heated debates about whether gnocchi are pasta, whether any sandwich is better with mayonnaise added to it, whether hot dogs are sandwiches, about what counts as a pizza, and whether it is okay to put fruits into savory salads. For the sake of peace, I have not kept track of who has been winning these arguments but this weekend I made a panzanella salad that compelled me to admit defeat on that very last point. Panzanella is a type of salad that typically contains fresh tomatoes and cubed, toasted bread in a vinaigrette. It is great way to use the heel of a loaf of sourdough and with the farmer’s market in full swing I felt additionally compelled to include as much fresh, local produce (sweet corn, peaches) in my version as I could. I was questioning what I was doing as I was throwing peaches and blueberries into the salad bowl but the result was so good that I am sharing it below. The recipe I have jotted down is for a single salad but can be easily scaled up with the help of this Love and Lemons recipe I based it on.
For one salad you will need:
Kernels from ½ an ear of sweet corn
½ peach, diced
¼ cup blueberries
1 heirloom tomato (or two smaller tomatoes)
1 cup of sourdough (or other crusty bread), cut into bite-sized cubes
½ cup of chickpeas
¼ cup cilantro, or basil, roughly chopped
1 small shallot or ¼ red onion, finely diced (more or less to taste)
1-2 cloves garlic, very finely minced
¼ teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon of olive oil + more for toasting the bread and chickpeas
Juice of 1/3 - 1/2 of a lemon
Salt, pepper and red pepper flakes to taste
Toast the bread and chickpeas: preheat the oven to 400F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread the chickpeas and the cubed bread into an even layer, leaving as much space between individual pieces as possible. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil (optional) and sprinkle with salt then bake for 20-30 minutes, checking every ten minutes until they are as crispy and as charred as you’d like.
The bottom of the salad: while your bread and chickpeas are crisping up, in the bottom of a salad bowl combine the corn, red onion or shallot, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and mustard. Mix well and let sit about 10 minutes
Assembly: Add the rest of the ingredients (including the bread and chickpeas) and mix well so that the bread starts to soak in some of the dressing. Taste to adjust salt, pepper and acidity (add more lemon juice to make it brighter), then let sit in the fridge for 10 more minutes. Top with more olive oil or fresh herbs if desired.
Tips: Leave out one or both of the fruits and add cucumbers if the idea bothers you like it used to bother me. Add cherry tomatoes for a more savory taste and swap cilantro for basil for a more Mediterranean flavor profile. Use cooked cannellini, navy or butter beans instead of chickpeas (do not roast these beans though). If you eat dairy, consider adding some mozzarella pearls.