booty scrub
My co-worker, back when I was still at the gleaming office tower in the city, bought Booty Scrub after she saw an Instagram ad, maybe. Was it different from any other kind of exfoliating scrub? Did it work? In those days our corner, young-ish women, talked often about the products we’d bought or the ones that tempted us. Lip balm in a wide pinkish cylinder from Fresh Sugar, a clean white travel mug from Fellow that looked like an Apple product, plants from the Sill. Everything neat and tidy and expensive.
Recently I was staying with my friend and her partner. They live in a charming house filled with a grandfather’s knickknacks from another era: a taxidermied Galapagos iguana, looking sallow and emaciated, skin papery, clings to the wall. It used to hang in the kitchen, my friend said darkly, implying she was grateful it had been banished to the living room. In the iguana-free kitchen, I suddenly recognized the Fellow travel mug on the shelf, and the brand’s vacuum sealed canister for coffee beans.
Is that the Fellow travel mug, and the Atmos canister? I asked.
It’s like you’ve memorized the catalog, my friend ribbed me good-naturedly.
Another friend of theirs who was staying the night remarked, Wait, couldn’t you get this cheaper somewhere else? What makes this different from any other travel mug?
I thought about it, and then I said, a little petulantly for effect, It’s pretty.
Later that day I saw rows on rows of Fellow travel mugs in a third-wave coffee place at the Fourth Street shops. I recalled that the day before I’d seen their elegant gooseneck water kettle at a Sur la Table. The products had leapt off my phone screen and into the physical world. They were haunting me, or maybe it was the other way around.
Haunt isn’t the right word. These ghosts are invited guests. Sometimes at night I lie in bed and thumb through items for sale. I have read so many gift guides. Gift guides for the brothers I don’t have. 57 Best Gifts for Every Type of Wife. (An aside: there’s something so funny about that phrase, “Type of Wife.” I think of the Australian mother-daughter comedy show Kath and Kim, Kim musing, “It’s hard being a wife. There are so many choices: corporate, house, fish. Which one’s me?”) I read Outdoor Gear Lab, Wirecutter, and Strategist reviews about products I won’t buy: I have a perfectly serviceable down jacket, tent, mattress, bedframe, and duvet. I look at beautiful things I could never justify buying. A Kaikado copper tea caddy, almost $200. I see one for sale at the cafe where I sip on milk tea.
What is it I’m doing here, writing about it? I’ve read the critiques of fiction and creative nonfiction by a specific kind of woman — sometimes white, always educated, often young-ish, city-dwelling — writing that tries to buy moral absolution through confession, self-reflexivity. The critics hate this. They hate the author being “rewarded for the moral work of feeling bad” (that’s Katy Waldman’s “Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?” in The New Yorker), they want Jia to just not…eat her Sweetgreen (that’s Lauren Oyler — “Ha! Ha! Ha!” in the London Review of Books), they want her to dump him (Noor Qasim’s “Controlled - Annie Ernaux and the Millennial Sex Novel” in The Drift). They would probably hate the last line of my soccer piece, where I say I’m going to go watch soccer.
It’s just that I don’t think you can understand why the world is so fucked unless you also ask where the pleasure is.
In senior year of high school I had to take a health class, a graduation requirement. We picked topics to present on. One classmate, a wiry tenth-grader with dark hair, spoke about smoking.
I started smoking in eighth grade, he began.
He talked about how difficult it was to quit, but what I remember best was how he said he loved to smoke. Maybe that’s obvious, that if you start smoking it must have a draw, but I had been raised to have such a strong antipathy to cigarettes that their qualities aside from the carcinogenic were fairly obscure to me. I knew they would rot your lungs. I did not know they could be a profound comfort, a thing to take the edge off, a way to be with other people in silence, a way to leave a room. A warm thing on a cold day, the cherry glowing on a dark night.
You got so much messaging at school or at home about harms and costs: don’t fall in with the wrong crowd or do drugs or date the wrong people because it’ll be unsafe or make you unhappy. Politically and intellectually I do most of my thinking in terms of harms and costs, too. But I wonder sometimes if the constant postponement of revolution, or whatever social movement we need to build the shining city upon a hill, is not just because we’re dead-eyed to suffering but because we don’t know how to handle the reality of our own delight.
There’s the Sally Rooney bit from Beautiful World, Where Are You?:
Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead.
In April of 2020 my anti-capitalist book club read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. The book introduces readers to two planets: the anarcho-syndicalist Anarres and Urras, which is ruled by two different states. (In what seems like a thinly veiled approximation of LeGuin’s Cold War world, Urras is split between capitalist and patriarchal A-Io and the authoritarian — allegedly rule-by-proletariat — Thu.) In our discussion one of the first questions that came up was whether we would rather live on Anarres or Urras in A-Io. There were long pauses.
Anarres is like, dusty as hell, someone said.
It’s true — LeGuin doesn’t make Anarres out to be an idyllic pasture of gamboling humanity. It’s a fair and equitable place, but it’s also defined by hardship and drought. The protagonist, a physicist, gives up his research for several years in order to do hard agricultural labor for the benefit of the collective. When he travels to Urras, he experiences hedonism and luxury. A-Io’s society is deeply unequal, but life is good at the top. No wonder later printings of The Dispossessed carry the subtitle An Ambiguous Utopia.
Some boxes arrived at my parents’ another holiday season, when I was staying here with my sister.
You say you’re anti-capitalists, my mother said derisively. Then how come you buy all this shit?
In college, I made a bet that I wouldn’t buy clothes until the new year. That summer I interned in New York City and walked past block after Soho block of mannequins making eyes at me. When I went to see a Taylor Swift concert in Santa Clara, a friend, taking pity on my situation, bought me a souvenir shirt.
There is hardly any innocent supply chain, but I’m sometimes astounded by how many of the externalities of clothing are hiding in plain sight. Sofi Thanhauser’s book Worn: A People’s History of Clothing taught me that conventional cotton harvesting in the U.S. relies on the massive application of the defoliant paraquat — close to Agent Orange — so that all the leaves are stripped and mechanical harvesters have easy access to the white bolls on the plant; that synthetics are made from petroleum (thank the oilfields for your polyester blend sports jerseys and ripstop backpacks); and that carbon disulfide, which is used in the more inexpensive production process for plant cellulose-based rayon (also called viscose), is a neurotoxin with severe effects on factory workers who are exposed, including psychosis and death. Physicians were already recognizing the effects of carbon disulfide in the 1850s. Factory workers were getting extremely sick, ending up in mental asylums or dead. Yet the U.S.’s woefully inadequate standards on carbon disulfide exposure were exported to the rest of the world. Workers have died in China and India because of carbon disulfide poisoning within the past ten years.
Knowing this, I could make another pledge not to buy clothing. And yet I find myself looking, and looking, and looking. I wonder what to do about pleasure. What to do about the love of boxes on a doorstep while the planet burns. Sometimes I think, At least I’m not my downstairs neighbor who has multiple a day. And that if it wasn’t an alpaca sweater or supposedly unbreakable tights it would be single-origin spices or bento boxes, that there is no future in which I deny myself every form of consumption, even if I eliminate one. Until Anarres comes and denying isn’t my choice to make. Then we’ll till the desert together.
Image credit: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We Don’t Need Another Hero), Whitney Museum of Art. Felt like Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) would’ve been a little too on the nose.
📣 are you a woman who 1) dates/has sex with men - does not need to be exclusively and 2) experiences occasional negative/ambivalent feelings about heterosexual relationships? (this is very broad!! e.g., have you ever commented “men are trash” or something similar regarding a relationship — could be yours or someone else’s? Liked the content of a social media account such as “hets_explain_yourself” or “beam_me_up_softboi”? Read a book like The Tragedy of Heterosexuality? Related to anything I write about frequently in this newsletter?)
Would you be down to talk to me — broadly, about the subject of desire — in a brief (15-25 minute) Zoom or phone conversation, probably after January 1st?
If so, reply to this email! Forward to your girlfriend! Anyone you know who might fit the criteria! Thank you!
Not making a cent but here are some items that genuinely bring me joy lately: Diaspora Co. chai masala (you could absolutely get this combo of spices cheaper elsewhere and I’m sure part of the cost is buzzy millennial branding, but hey it’s single-origin and very fresh) with Asha Tea’s Assam black tea; brewing hojicha in a Bodum tea kettle (it’s so pretty to watch the tea as it steeps); my friend Christine’s ceramics; this Daddy Marx sticker.
one of my favorite short stories ever, which is kind of about a woman going shopping: “A Pair of Silk Stockings” by Kate Chopin