Sad
Discussing Bad Bitch, Kate said, “lotta wisdom in this playlist about being absolutely fucking batshit.” I nodded. There really is. I sometimes don’t know if I’ve gotten as much out of Pema Chödrön books as I viscerally have by blasting ‘Feeling Myself’ by Nicki Minaj, proceeding ‘Castle’ by Halsey and following ‘Truth Hurts’ by Lizzo. Recently Kate asked me if I thought listening to Bad Bitch could make one too powerful. She’d been listening to it on the way to meet a person she was not crazy about, she was wearing all black, giant sunglasses obscured her face. When she got out of the car she said she felt “75 feet tall” and part way through meeting this person, they began to cry. I say maybe it’s a spell, this playlist, a way of conjuring up the 75ft tall part of yourself that makes people cry. She says her academic title for Bad Bitch would be: ‘The Locus of Rage and Liberation.’ A couple weeks later she updates me that the person she met with later apologised to her for crying.
Bad Bitch is a joint, ongoing, playlist curated by Kate and myself. It was created when bad things were happening first to me, then to her, then to us both, and now it just seems to be an important tool for coping with life. It is pure pop garbage and by pop garbage I mean important, nearly religious, relics of auditory force. Listening to it will instantly increase your mood/motivation/fury by at least 25%. I need Bad Bitch. I need it.
However, one thing the songs on this playlist are not particularly interested in is sisterhood. This is not women coming together to support each other through tough times, unless it’s to help run up some man’s stolen credit card. There is often a kind of antagonism/indifference toward other women (‘Break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored’). This is a playlist of alpha dominance and dark fantasy. For women, trans and non-binary people socialised as women, the world of anger, rage, violence and power is closed to them. We are told we love to cooperate, share, nurture, care. We are told that our goodness is our compliance. We are told to smile through it. That to drive a stake into the heart of your enemy would be ugly, ‘masculine’ and unappealing. We are supposed to prioritise our appealingness, and in the words of 1994 Bjork—
The women (and non-binary people) on Bad Bitch are openly aggressive— they want to fuck, they want to kill, they want others to submit to their will, to acknowledge their power. They are not afraid to show their want and for others to perceive it as unappealing— they laugh in the face of the very concept, often while flaunting traits so hyper feminine they dare you not to desire them. They own female stereotypes to a terrifying extent. They say, “ok so I’m a stupid, fat ass slut who only cares about shoes? Then I’ll be the stupidest, fat ass slut who only cares about shoes on this earth, fucking watch me.”
When I wrote about Margot Robbie’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street
I addressed the shadow side of the traditional male fantasy of the perfect wife. This fantasy depends in part on a belief that no matter how ideal your wife, she is still a whore. The desire and dismissal, the misogynistic sexual longing to see your object of feminine perfection diminished to the lowest possible sexual status, are part of the inherent fuckedness of default heterosexual sadomasochism. Which Bad Bitch embraces both sides of. To that, Bad Bitch, tips it’s drink and says 😉, I’ll take one of each, babe (there’s more to be said about wokeness and equality in the bedroom being antithetical to sexual desire, but I’m not addressing that today—though Natalie Wynn does get into it in the link above).
When you feel like hell, there is redemption to be found in this narrative. The redemption of nihilistic self satisfying power grabbing rage-based action that is completely against all your feminine social programming, but which simultaneously relishes all conventional feminine attributes. It’s contrarian and it doesn’t care. Bad Bitch doesn’t sympathise or wallow, it happily rolls around in the shit of the pig stye we were all born into. In that vein, I am sharing three memories of dark times Bad Bitch got me through.
I cannot stand you, right hand to Jesus
I might just cut all the tongues out your sneakers
Smash your TV from Best Buy
You gonna turn me into Left Eye
It is a four pm autumn twilight and I’m standing in the wind, sharp across my face, cut with sea spray, on the road along the little beach in downtown Oban— a scenic village on the west coast of Scotland. There’s a storm and the wind is powerful, it had prevented me earlier from taking a boat trip out to see birds and seals. In the indigo dark the waves and wind are menacing and I feel very profoundly that I am a stranger here, that this place does not belong to me and never will— but then again, as I have recently been made aware, nothing in this world does. I am a cavern the wind fills and empties. Cardi B is blasting ‘Thru Your Phone’ on max volume in my ears. I am looking at the Boots where I recently sat in a cramped beige room and had an explicit conversation with a pharmacist. In a mocking twist of fate, he is a traveling pharmacist who also works at my local Boots in the distant city where I live. I will see him again soon!—like a postcard of ignominy sent to myself in the future. I have just taken my recently obtained morning after pill with apple juice from the Costa Coffee next to where I am staying. It was almost empty in there, closing soon. I don’t know why I am outside, there is no one else out here, no one is foolish enough to be out here. It is raining hard now, the wind is worse—the waves smashing, furious. But I want to feel it.
Wrist full of rocks and I hope I float
Big up yourself 'cause you know they don't
I chew, chew, chew 'cause they hope I choke
I am staying in a hotel in the city where I live because a very kind friend has whisked me there, giving me instructions on what to do, where to go, informing me kindly, but firmly, that I can no longer be inside my own home. I nod dumbly and do as I am told. In this hotel I watch Scenes from a Marriage on my laptop and order room service—a giant bowl of olives arrives clearly intended to be shared among at least six people. I take a bath every day in a tub that holds me weightlessly, gently, deeply, like it loves me, water all the way up to my chin, covering my obliterated body in full. Walking to get my nails done or get food, I listen to Doja Cat’s staccato snapping, like teeth chattering. I’m clumsy/ made friends with the floor she says, proudly. Have I made friends with the floor? I feel at one with the floor, that’s for sure—perhaps mitosis first and friendship later? There’s joy in this track, the joy that comes from spitting in someone’s eye, and for two minutes and fourteen seconds it animates me with the impression of itself, like a hand in a glove. When it ends, I deflate, hungry for another hit and press repeat. These are the little hollows I skip out before me like a stone over water. They are the increments of time I can bear, headed out into the black wash of my future.
I ain't tripping, I ain't twisted
I ain't demented, ha, well, just a lil' bit
You can’t live through it, but you live through it. And you can’t live through it, but you live through it. You have nothing left in the tank, there aren’t even fumes to go on, but here you are, wearing your shivering adrenaline like a suit of armour, a hole blown clean through you. I’m standing in the kitchen, weeping. If the walls of my flat could talk they’d say, get this bitch a box of tissues and take her on a holiday, we can’t watch this shit any longer. Everything is going and I can’t stop it from going. There will be no sanctuary. There is only the ongoingness of the thing itself, the thing I was pulled from the firmament to ride, face first, sparks from bone grinding against the rollercoaster frame of it. What I picture most often is violent confrontation with my organic matter. The gardener stands on my chest in his dirty boots pulling up the root of my love—forcibly ripping it out through my mouth. He puts his back into it. Every now and again I choke and gasp out another few inches, spasming in pain and he pulls harder, and again, until the final tip of the root is coughed out, earth and blood smeared across my mouth. Thus it ever was, thus it ever will be. I get out the packing tape. I put on Rihanna.
Here is a link to Bad Bitch on YouTube for those who don’t use Spotify because Bad Bitch should be universally accessible.
I am including a list I made as research for this newsletter of general subject matter which Bad Bitch addresses, it is in the comment section below
Famous
Jane Fonda in Five Acts is a 2018 HBO documentary on Jane Fonda, breaking her life up into five distinct acts. Acts 1-4 are named after the men in her life. First her father, the actor Henry Fonda, then her husbands— French filmmaker Roger Vadim, activist and author Tom Hayden, and billionaire Ted Turner. “My whole life I defined myself by men,” Jane says. “I didn’t know who I was without a man to mould me.” Act 5, appropriately titled ‘Jane’, begins when she divorces Ted Turner, not because she didn’t love him, she says, but for “an idea” about who she was. I didn’t know much about Fonda going into this, except the things everyone does—she was the vapid space sex kitten of Barbarella (1968), she did something to piss everyone the fuck off in regards to the Vietnam war, she became the queen of the home workout video.
I was sort of amazed, as I often am about celebs, at how complex her life was. Endless confirmation that people are people, I guess! She was essentially orphaned, her mother killed herself at a mental institution by slitting her own throat (something Fonda would not find out about until reading it later in a movie magazine). Her father was an abusive bully, serial philanderer, who drove all his wives into eating disorders. He shipped his kids off to boarding school the second their mother died and rarely saw them again. “That was Dad!” Jane summarises. She also developed a severe eating disorder, wound up working on a film in France and became the muse of erotic auteur Roger Vadim, previously married to Brigette Bardot, who directed Fonda in Barbarella. Post-Barbarella she found herself searching for more meaning both in her personal life and in her career, which is how she got involved in activism and went on to make many films with a political bent. I’m not going to get into all her Vietnam war stuff except that she did some important things and she did some stupid privileged clueless white girl things. I had no idea how deeply committed she was to activism beyond that time, essentially turning her home into a commune for activists at the height of her career. Her Jane Fonda Workout home video—the best selling home video of all time—and The Jane Fonda Workout Book, a #1 best seller, were conceived of as a way to fund her and her second husband’s campaign for economic democracy. All the money from her workout empire went to this foundation!
There’s so much gristle in Fonda’s life and this doc missed out on the opportunity to take itself to another level by asking more in depth questions. One major one I had was how does one go from twenty years of boots on the ground far left political activism to being married to a billionaire less than a year after leaving that life and becoming his housewife for the next ten years? I would have loved to know way more about her relationship with her father, Fonda having bought and produced On Golden Pond for them to star in, essentially as a way for them to finally connect—in perhaps the only way she could conceive of—by portraying on screen a father and daughter who struggle to connect. I mean, that’s a documentary all on its own. I would also have appreciated more reflection on her anorexia and bulimia, especially as tied to her image as “healthy and fit”, and her relationship to her body and beauty over time. Even a further exploration of her career—seven best actresses nominations and two wins—and artistic methods, would have allowed this documentary to dip below gloss level. However, I did still enjoy it and have been seeking out more of Fonda’s work, as I had only ever seen Barbarella. She’s great! I liked Klute (1971). They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) rules, one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen— fun times.
What I Have to Offer
I’ve been thinking lately, for various reasons, about what my skills are. I think my main skill is that I have great taste—no way to cash in on that of course—but it is maybe something I can gift to those around me. I also am a bit of a magpie for anything I think the people I love might be into. So out of curiosity, I asked my friends what things I have recommended to them that they ended up enjoying. In hopes it may help you find something you like too, I am sharing some of the cultural stuff they mentioned.
Media: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Midsommar, Catastrophe, Watership Down by Richard Adams, Warsan Shire, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears, Melissa Broder on wellness, Sarah Klang, The Book of Love by Kelly Link, this essay about the human body in literature, Ready or Not, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, Ariana Grande, No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Gavin & Stacey (this show is too ancient to have a good trailer— but it is the coziest show of all time), Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, White Magic by Elissa Washuta, Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin, Yellowjackets, Otherworld, Everything Mike White, The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber, Sex Education (I only saw the first two seasons), Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, Mary Lattimore
Fashion/makeup: Hoka, “buying nice pajamas to make life a little less chaotic and shitty during periods of exceptional illness and difficulty”, Medieval hair jewellery, Big Bud Press, Jones Road, NARS lip pencils (this is the greatest of all lipstick btw), Anna Cascarina, “knowing and understanding my Kibbe type”, Jessica DeFino, this Rasario dress, this Ovate dress, this sexy necklace, Alémais, baker boy caps, HausWitch, gel manicures
I am going to see Chris Flemming next week! 🙌🏻
SEX:
say goodbye to this good pussy
only top shelf dick for me
it was a one time thing (so sorry for your loss)
subservient men to the front
my booty
you will never fuck me
you’ll do anything to fuck me
shell out for sex with me
I'm an absolute freak
I have specific tastes
I’m deeply thirsty
I am immune to thirst
worship me
don’t bother with attempts at romance
I am not interested in love
I’m an extraordinary, if not legendary, lay
CRIME:
murder (of boyfriend)
property destruction
credit card fraud
watch your back, I’m coming for you
experimental surgery/Frankenstein-ing
CHEATERS WILL BE...
financially punished
physically harmed
stripped of meaningful belongings (to the left, to the left)
I AM TERRIFYING:
I am a god
I am a monster
I am the devil
I am the chosen one
I am capricious and my demands must be met
SHOPPING:
you want to buy me things
I don’t need you to buy me things
“Spend his income on my outfit”
I have a shopping addiction and it’s not a problem, it’s actually a solution
DON'T COME FOR MY MAN:
lol that you think you could
what happens if you do, after this warning, is not my responsibility
OTHER:
drugs and alcohol
I look hot
I do whatever I want
you’ll be sorry
I’m profoundly over you
you are my bitch
I only need myself
money is all that matters to me
you should leave him
I’m gonna shake my ass
everyone wants to be me
I party harder than you can comprehend