Self-embarrassment as a form of feminist liberation

Samuel refuses to die. He only has three leaves left on top, exposing his uncomfortably naked stem. They feel soft and fragile like an apathetic penis. Samuel is my trauma plant. I bought him two years ago as a compulsive response to being ghosted by my crush after I invited him to hang out. I thought that having Samuel in my bedroom would allow me to micro-dose ego-death by constantly reminding me of the rejection I'd experienced. I don’t know if it was a good idea. 

This whole episode of being madly in love with someone I barely knew, who lived far away and protagonized my dreams for several months, had faded to just an embarrassing memory. But since I started reading I Love Dick, I began to find a different meaning in this clumsy romantic encounter. Like Chris Kraus, I hadn’t stopped when I felt unwelcome: I decided to go all the way, taking every opportunity to talk to my crush and masterfully fucking it up with an awkwardness that only emerges when I actually care about something. In my case, it wasn’t love letters; I communicated my obsession through memes, my true love language. Maybe he liked them or maybe he was just being polite, but our communication lasted months and inspired some of the most confusing dreams I’ve ever had, very Freudian and surreal, intriguing. I would wake up horny and sad, wondering if he had ever had a dream about me. Was it a mutual oneiric connection? Was there a connection at all? 

When you’re living so intensely in your head there isn’t any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you’re both omnipotent and powerless. 

I guess what matters here is the mythology that is built around the story: fantasies are as important as reality because the feelings they cause are real. As Chris Kraus said in a 2017 interview: “You don’t want to just write a story. You have to act it out. Or you act it out in order to write it. Conquering your fear is like a performance.”

Now that it’s been two years since we last talked, I can’t say if I was genuinely attracted to this person or just wanted to tell him about those insane, sepia-toned dreams of mine. I mentioned it in a conversation that S. and I had during the march on March 8th about the importance of being delusional when you project your fantasy on someone. S. was ghosted by a gender-fluid boy-queen with hypnotic transparent eyes, half pop-star, half sect-leader. I advised S. to make the whole thing really uncomfortable for both of them, precipitating the drama in order to embrace rejection and turn her life into a case study. But S. didn’t seem convinced. 

Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?

I’m still defining feminism for myself. On a personal level, it’s the permission I give myself to fail at projecting a “clean”, perfect self-image; the courage to build the world according to me; the pleasure of being wrong, ridiculous and delusional if it suits how I feel about things. On a collective level, it’s about solidarity, cooperation, and compassion over competition. I remember watching a repugnant interview in which Camile Paglia disparaged Lena Dunham for showing her body, and thinking that there was no way Paglia was a feminist no matter how many books on feminism she wrote. You can’t build a community by letting down other women. On the other hand, I could totally relate to the idea Chris Kraus expressed in her interview: that by building sustainable communities of support, we enter into relationships of interdependence, partially  becoming the people who surround us and understanding their aspirations and struggles. 

The march ended in Zocalo. By the time we got there, it was around 5pm and the soft light of golden hour illuminated the yellow haze of tear gas, lending a shoegaze touch to the purple-green scenery of the square. Teenagers were selling brochures on Marxism and anarchism designed so badly they looked more like religious booklets. A barefoot woman performed a shamanic ritual in a circle made of herbs and flowers. Girls were burning their protest signs on a fire that blazed in the middle of the square. It was a perfect Wednesday evening.