This newsletter is rapidly becoming a portfolio of invitations declined. I would like to change this eventually, but here for now is one more hard-no that I sent to a journal which invited me to be a voice of the freaky deaky, and a song that’s slightly relevant. I wonder if a few of you will see where I’m coming from.

Happily I am writing a few short pieces with nothing to do with sex and I hope several of them will be out this year. Still writing music, now almost every day. I wonder if I could write some for a film. Call me about that. Not so much about what follows.

Hi [EDITOR],

I truly appreciate the invitation, but must once again decline. I seem to have become, whether through my book or my trans body, a natural target for projections of libertine naughtiness, which such an event and its inevitable promotion would only increase, and with it my distress. This projection is something which I understand that many straight or straight-ish people would love to have. They seem to want to get into a box that I can't get out of.

Picture a world in which no matter how down you dress, and no matter that you seem to be the one person in Berlin who doesn't have freaky sex or go to clubs, the world sees you as Wicked Wanda. Some want to fuck you (it would be an adventure), others want to uplift you (as a drag queen and high priestess of the postmodern fuck circus), some want to get rid of you (perhaps enough has been said about this), and on some level it's all the same. I tried a bit to capture this feeling in a recent story, "Eugene," see below.

For what it's worth, I don't believe whatsoever in the "emancipatory potential of domination and submission," even as I think that these practices were demonized in extremely unfair ways during the feminist sex wars as well as by an ambiently homophobic culture and perhaps also as collateral damage in certain psychoanalytic feminisms. However, I don't think that anything has to be "emancipatory" to be good for some, and some find it so. I'm happy to trust their judgment, and to join them in opposing the catastrophizing stigma which often attends this topic.

I go somewhat with Thomas Nagel, whose short article on sexual perversion ends with the small but actually transformative observation, that even if some sex were a little bit worse, it might be better than none at all. This seems to me to be a very plausible de-dramatization of the issue of whether a certain kind of sex really is a little bit worse or missing the point somehow, or the issue of what kind of sex people ought to be having before, during, and after the revolution.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of good reasons why you will not get a sensible public conversation about BDSM, including the absolutely unhinged tactics of the anti-porn feminists (Gayle Rubin has written about this with some clarity, mixed in with some very disagreeable takes), the point-missing willful naughtiness of the Rocky Horror Picture Show set (the Reichians, the wannabes), and the fact that many if not most people actually involved in alternative sex lifestyles have a legitimate need for privacy and compartmentality. Sex work can be one reason for this compartmentality, but there are many others, including the very ordinary desire to have blinds on your bedroom window.

I think we ought to regard the ability to speak credibly to such matters in public to be something so rare, and moving so upstream, that anyone who does so is definitionally non-representative. This doesn't necessarily mean that they shouldn't speak, but ought to temper our understanding of what they say and of who they speak for.

One might wonder if something similar were not also true of trans identities, that there might be a curiously distorting selection and self-selection of those who are willing to enter public discourse on the lives and bodies that we have, and especially to remain in these interminable cycles of aesthetic and academic fashion, queer and would-be-queer transgression, etc.

I am actually not a total pessimist about this logic of representation, but it's something which I think your journal is going to find very difficult to work through as you chase fashionable spicy topics from heels to hormones to browser histories.

I wonder what rights I will have in ten years.

I would be happy to be a public person in Germany, but not a public pervert. I am not even a private one. If neither is an option, as appears to be the case, I would rather accept that and stay home and play the piano.

Welcome to sir's dungeon,

Jackie


PS Here's a relevant scene from Eugene, which I've attached a pdf of just in case you want to read it, though this is the only relevant section.

Penny wasn’t at Metro, and she wasn’t replying to Lisa’s texts. She was careful not to send too many. At worst it’s an adventure. She ordered a shot of whisky and a Shirley Temple. That sense of possibility came back. A sloppy drunk woman who seemed like a tourist leaned on Lisa’s shoulder and slurred “YAS QUEEN!” Sometimes being trans is a fucking hassle. Why do people like that want your attention?

[...]

It seemed like Breck wasn’t having a great night. That’s probably fine. Lisa looked around one more time, and the same drunk woman accosted her again.

“YOU’RE LOOKING FIERCE, FEMME! SLAYING REALNESS! FAB AS FUCK SERVING CUNT!”

She held a silencing finger to her mouth and whispered the word “diva,” and no sooner than saying it, stomped off. There was no tone of mockery or irony in her voice, although it was hard to tell what, if anything, she’d intended to communicate or to perform. Just some of the forced fun that anxious people have. So we have to have it too. But why did so many people have the same anxiety? And why do they put it on us?