Enjoying (Criticizing) Things
Demand Avoidance, Values, and Pleasure
Sometimes I have a hard time knowing whether I dislike something just because I genuinely don’t like it, or because I’m resisting the expectation that I should like it. I was a young adult when Harry Potter came out, and when I first heard of it, I was excited to read it because I had absolutely loved fantasy as a kid, I still read and loved speculative fiction, and I like feeling nostalgic for my inner world as a child. But the series became too popular too quickly and that fact immediately turned me off. I had lots of friends who were really into the series and I knew intellectually that it should be something I would like, so I read a couple books and saw a couple movies eventually, but I could not enjoy them.
Fast forward to now: I’ve come out as trans, J.K. Rowling is the loudest transphobe with the largest platform, and it feels SO GOOD to authentically say that I never liked her work. But I truly and honestly don’t know whether I genuinely disliked the work itself, or I just refused to like it because it was popular. It might just be an expression of what’s now termed “demand avoidance,” which has been strong for me my whole life and is much more easily identifiable now that I see it in my children. Honestly, I feel that demand avoidance was very protective for me in childhood and early adulthood, to resist peer pressure and automatically not want to go along with what others wanted for me. I never lost myself to becoming a ”people-pleaser,” but then again, preserving my autonomy at the expense of relationships had its own cost.
It’s one of those adaptive things that served me well in a lot of ways, but now in middle age it has started to grate on me. In the leadup to the Full Moon, I felt annoyed by my own social media presence, which really has mostly been sharing news and commentary in my Stories for the last several months. A one-note tone of criticism started to feel like a drone, not unlike the inescapable sound of helicopters overhead where I live in Baltimore City, and I felt like crawling out of my skin to escape it.
But the more I said to myself: “You should be more inviting, engaging, encouraging and reassuring, so that you can make people feel good and make them want to buy your book,” the more I felt every part of me resist. Fuck that. I’m not performing for “the algorithm.” I’m not going to inauthentically put on an uplifting mask when shit has gotten so bad. The more I thought about what others might want from me, the more I wanted to move in the other direction, and the darker and more despairing I felt. I realized there’s an ingrained pathway over the course of my whole life, created out of resistance to other’s expectations, and that pathway has made it so that darkness and depression, cynicism and jadedness, criticism and emotional distance, all feel more “authentic” to me than their opposites. What’s more, all of those things are inseparable from love for me. If I don’t care deeply about something, I’m not inclined to bother critiquing it.
Case in point – I have absolutely nothing to say about Taylor Swift. Long before I started seeing political criticisms of her, a handful of years ago, I listened to maybe two and a half songs of hers (that I’m aware of) and it was enough for me to know that I did not like her music. I wasn’t thinking about it politically then, I didn’t feel any pressure like I should like her, I just gave it a try and was like, “no, I don’t enjoy this.” And I still struggle over what is “taste” and what is related to my values. Did I dislike J.K. Rowling and Taylor Swift right away because somehow I intuited that later on, they would not align with my values? Or was it really a matter of taste, and where does taste come from anyway – my emotional history, my sense of my own authenticity, my values, or what?
The reason it matters to me to try to sort out what is demand avoidance, what is “taste,” and what is an intuitive sense of (mis)alignment with my deeply held values right now is because I’m having unexpected feelings about the student protest movement that began recently with the encampment at Columbia. I feel like I should be excited and happy that a student movement is taking off for Palestine, when I care so deeply about Palestinian liberation. I have been very confused about the fact that I don’t feel good about it at all, and I’ve been trying to sort out what’s going on there.
Is it because I see that supporting the students is so much more popular than supporting Palestinian resistance, and I have that deeply ingrained habit of disliking anything popular? Is it resentment about the fact that people are inexplicably speaking as though Columbia students invented this kind of protest? I’ve seen posts where a straight line is drawn from a protest at Columbia in the 70s to now, with commentary like “we haven’t seen anything like this since then,” and I’ve just been flabbergasted by the erasure of all but highly privileged white student protesters. I remember very clearly when occupations of universities specifically in response to attacks on Gaza spread all over the United States and Britain in 2009 – just fifteen years ago! And nobody seems to even remember that. Are my feelings really just bitterness about being part of a movement that was ignored and quickly forgotten? I don’t feel like I need “credit” for what I did fifteen years ago as part of a mass movement, and I don’t at all want to be the middle-aged activist who has this attitude like “oh, we already tried that and failed, don’t bother.” I really don’t feel that way; I certainly want everyone who can protest to do so in any and every way possible. I think it’s a frustration with not wanting to reinvent the wheel and see the same mistakes repeated just because people prefer their own sanitized versions of the past. I’m a Sagittarius and very comfortable with making mistakes, but my Capricorn rising is incredibly impatient with repeating the same mistakes, not taking lessons from the past.
I think what’s coming up for me is the memory of some of the same issues that came up in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. When the people with the most privilege become protest leaders, the movement tends to detour or disintegrate, because there just isn’t the same material investment in liberation. There isn’t the same sense of “nothing left to lose” as when poor and oppressed people take the lead, because they have more to gain from revolutionary social change. When middle class cis white men were the glorified dominant voice of Occupy, many of us tried to help them understand that “the working class” was not theirs to control or represent, and class unity depended on addressing the concerns of gender marginalized people and people of color who make up most of the workforce – but we were told that addressing sexism and racism was “divisive.”
I’m also reminded of how radical the occupation of the rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin was, fighting the attack on collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, and how career Democrats detoured all of that energy into a recall election that failed. In my mind, that is what strengthened the Tea Party movement which led to Trump. When the people who have largely been the beneficiaries of our legal and electoral systems take the reins of resistance, they steer things in a more liberal, less revolutionary direction and they tend to stay self-interested, stepping on whoever has criticisms. That’s been my experience, and that memory is very much triggered when I see people standing in solidarity “with Columbia” (as if the university itself can take some credit for producing progressive students, when the students are in fact protesting the complicity of the university itself). When everybody is talking about Columbia, Harvard and Yale students instead of Palestinians and Palestinian resistance, it reminds me of when marginalized people were silenced so that privileged protest leaders could direct everyone toward electioneering for Democrats. I hope this will play out differently, but it’s already striking to me how I’ve seen this narrative built around the encampment at Columbia, saying that it’s a “more effective form of protest” than anything we’ve seen so far.
Really? Having the school finish the last month of the year virtually is a bigger deal than stopping arms shipments and shutting down weapons manufacturers with direct action? And those actions were only made possible because people marched by the hundreds of thousands, but now we’re hearing that those protests were ineffective and just performative (as we always do). There’s a narrative being constructed that actually we just need the right poster children for protest to draw the most media attention. I’ve read posts saying that the Columbia demonstrations show once and for all that it’s better to disrupt from inside the system than outside it. The unstated part of that conclusion is that it was always better to work your way up from within, to buy into the system, to become upper middle class in order to “really” make a difference. And I just do not agree with that framing at all.
In my experience, upper middle class white people will be the first to sell out, to return back to what’s comfortable and beneficial to them. They have consistently over decades shown themselves to be the least committed. It raises alarm bells for me that student sit-ins on Ivy League university campuses are being praised as the ultimate form of resistance, when to me the A15 direct actions exemplified genuine disruption and escalation beyond the merely symbolic (as necessary as symbolic protest is for creating the cultural context for direct action to happen in). I’m happy for the students to do what they can to change the public conversation and media representation: that’s what symbolic protest does. But if it means holding them up as the pinnacle of all resistance and detouring away from more direct action, detouring away from direct support of Palestinians themselves, detouring away from defending Palestinian resistance and their right to fight to keep their homes, then it will feel like a loss to me. It will feel like the same kind of loss as when the Madison occupation dissipated into electoral strategies to try to vote in Democrats. I’d like to think we can learn from our mistakes in the past, but so much of the narrative I’ve seen on social media, at least, creates a whitewashed, bright and shiny picture of the past (when it’s not erased altogether) – one that is beyond criticism and therefore not able to be learned from in any way except as a model and paragon, which feels to me like the same lessons are doomed to be repeated.
The only reason I have criticisms at all is because I care a lot and see myself as being on the same side as these student protesters. Love and criticism are so intertwined for me, and I feel strongly that critical engagement where there is love is so deeply needed, so that we don’t make the same mistakes every decade. Critical engagement from a place of deep love is the most authentic that I know how to be; it is untouched by any feelings of “should” or “shouldn’t,” it happens regardless of what I intend. It makes sense for me, as someone with a Scorpio Venus. My Venus is in the 11th house, right on top of my Midheaven, so all of that love and criticism tends to be engaged with the big picture, with community and social issues, and carries with it a sense of life purpose for me.
Nonetheless, I have concerns about the fact that joy, pleasure, play, celebration, and uncritical enthusiasm feel so inauthentic to me that I can barely access them. That fifth house place of pleasure, joy and creativity is in Taurus for me, opposite my deep, dark, critical, destructive Scorpio 11th house. This Full Moon in Scorpio I’ve come to see that I have real fears of how it might change me if I succumbed to pleasure, play, and joy. It’s been so protective for me to resist, to investigate and know a lot and have an analysis and intuit the darker side of things. But lately I’ve come to wonder what else there is that I’ve overprotected myself from, and what it would take for joyful, creative expression to be as authentic to me as deep, critical engagement. Taurus is where Chiron is for me, and so there’s real pain points and obstacles to me digging into Taurus energy in Leo’s pleasure house. I know intuitively that the only way there is through my body, not just because Taurus is an Earth sign, but also because my mind itself is such an obstacle to joyful and pleasurable experiences. I’ll have to experience sensory things that disrupt and short circuit the defenses my brain has in place.
The idea of finding authenticity in the opposite place from where I’ve found it all my life is so scary to me, and it feels silly to be scared of joy and pleasure and creativity, but I think I’m not alone in feeling that way. So many of us, I think, are questioning whether we deserve any comfort or pleasure at all when it’s become so clear that as Americans our comforts and pleasures are directly derived from genocides in Sudan and Congo where children suffer forced labor to provide our electronic devices. Our safety and standard of living are directly related to wealth built on slave labor, from the ongoing exploitation of prison labor and immigrant labor, from underpaid service workers, from free domestic labor provided by many childbearers and caregivers, from environmental destruction, and from the exploitation of the Global South as a whole, with military outposts all over the world and proxy wars paid for with our tax dollars.
It feels like the choice is to turn off our compassion for the world at large or turn off our compassion for ourselves, but I know binary choices like that never lead us to where we want to go. The pleasures I’ve been enjoying most lately are in community: a queer hiking group, the Solidarity Tarot group that I belong to. Doing things that feel good with people who care about me and about the world at large, with no need to choose one over the other. Leaning into those kinds of pleasures is a new pathway for me, where I’ve mostly in the past sought pleasure very privately, and mostly solo or in romantic partnership exclusively. I’m curious about what more is possible when we love and play and create together as well as resist and speak out critically and protest together. I’m curious about who I’ll be and what I’ll like and what I’ll be like when joy and pleasure feel as authentic to me as skepticism and warning signs, without it coming at the expense of social consciousness. I feel like I’m changing, and I don’t know what to tell you to expect, because I don’t know myself.
I know most of you are here because you appreciate that I’m not a brand, I don’t try to project a curated, careful image, and I always just say what I really think and feel. No matter how small my “audience” remains because of that, I’m committed to that authenticity – but I do hope to expand the horizon of possibility of what is authentic to me. I don’t know what will change, if anything, about my public presence but I still wanted to share with you what I’m exploring right now, in case that tension between staying critically vigilant and actually enjoying things resonates for you too.