scenes from the swamp
smell bad guys earwax
SMELL
(for H.)
The DC house has a Smell, and the room has a different more troubling Smell, troubling because you have to spend at least eight hours there every twenty-four.
The room is dim and has two sash windows facing the street. One of the windows always falls shut so you use Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power to prop it open. A thick red-jacketed hardcover, it stands out starkly against the muted green of tree leaves in rain. Two office chairs, one desk, two dressers, a plain mirror on the floor wedged between one dresser and a wooden shelf. On the other side of the room, by your side of the bed, hangs your absent landlords’ marriage contract in a silver frame: white text on navy blue, English and Hebrew. You and I, in joy and happiness without end. There is something that seems incongruous about this expression of dyadic love hanging in the guest room. The only other framed item on the wall is an art print of an imposing gorilla among unoccupied beach chairs.
You can’t make the Smell go away just by keeping the windows open all the time and running the ceiling fan and a dehumidifier, this compact black box all new in its packaging. It’s musty, R. says. The Smell makes you think of doilies covered in a thin layer of dust and white grandmothers (but not yours, just the idea of one), potpourri, Febrezing without cleaning. But the whole house was professionally cleaned before your arrival.
You get low, on your knees, and put your nose to the carpet, declare the Smell stronger closer to the floor, buy an $8 jar of “carpet odor remover” that’s basically baking soda with lavender and limonene, sprinkle this liberally on the carpet, wait the requisite fifteen minutes, vacuum. The Smell abides.
You sprinkle more of the lavender-scented baking soda into the kitchen compost bin, which releases its putrescence in a confusing direction; you smell that vague rot most acutely when you’re standing on the stairs. This actually reminds you of your home in New Haven, where smells from the kitchen rise quickly to the top floor bedroom. Once G. — housemate, friend, tall sensible outdoorsy owner of Prius and cast-iron pan — comes home late, R. texts her whatcha cooking because some food scent has entered your room and filled it slyly in seconds. Woah, G. responds, the vertical draft in this house is unmatched. Later, in the kitchen, you stare at the wall and wonder if the smell (her scrambled eggs) rose up through the vents.
How do you describe a sense to someone who doesn’t have it? In the book The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, author Andrew Leland describes visiting the California office of TVEyes (they do audio captioning for television programs so that blind audiences can hear descriptions of visual information). One of the TVEyes interviewees said he could tell, based on a blind person’s preferences for audio description, when they had gone blind (from birth, or in childhood, or later in life). The later-in-life folks wanted vivid, florid, even subjective takes — a beautiful rose-colored sweater, say — while the congenitally blind wanted spare language, just the facts.
When I try to think about how to write about smell for someone who’s never smelled, I drift to the florid. Dust and doilies. Maybe that’s all wrong, the opposite of what I should say. The room in the DC house is clean, if dim. There’s a smell I’m not used to. Maybe it’s not bad, it just reminds me that the house, the room, isn’t mine.
related reading:
The Country of the Blind
Elena Knows (a short, haunting novel; in one scene, the titular mother burns her dead daughter’s clothes because they smell of her)
BAD GUYS
(for P.)
The med student is our friend from college. He makes Trader Joe’s pasta and plays records on a turntable. You sip non-alcoholic white wine and eat green grapes. A Mac Demarco song comes on and you say, Oh shit, didn’t he get canceled? but then you look it up and it was just someone who used to be in his band who was jailed for sexual assault, and then you start talking about Diddy and all the awful stuff he did to women, and the med student shakes his head and says there are terrible men out there.
Well, you say. The ‘those are bad guys’ thing kind of excuses masculinity and what gets normalized under it right?
Maybe that’s how sex work comes up. The future doc is categorically against it: says it’s bad for women, that transactional sex — not just intercourse for money, but pornography too — has bad impacts on society. These men just want to get their nut and then they go and injure women.
Is it just men who want to get their nut, you wonder? There’s a movie called Good Luck to You, Leo Grande featuring Emma Thompson as a woman who’s never had an orgasm during intercourse. She hires a sex worker (the titular Leo Grande); hotel room coitus ensues. It’s a touching, thought-provoking movie about pleasure, invisibility, aging, and the costs of respectability. Good girls really finish last. Leo Grande is a movie and it’s comparatively rare for straight women to pay for sexual services, but it’s not unheard of.
It’s important when trying to make a universal argument about something like transacting sexual services that you imagine other use cases besides the stereotypical — abusive man, battered woman. How do you feel about the argument when it’s a gay man getting a handjob from a hustler in a mall bathroom, or a retired European woman in a sort of sugarmama relationship with a younger Kenyan man, or two queer women in a relationship visiting a hands-on sex therapist who helps one of them have an orgasm (this is depicted in an episode of a Netflix show Sex, Love, & goop, yes, that goop, shoot me, but it’s very touching — and what is depicted is also illegal in most US states). Women are desiring beings, too. As the political theorist Wendy Brown reminds us to ask, where is the room for the female sexual outlaw?
The implicit assumption behind much feminist social opprobrium to sex work is that only men — and not decent men, but bad guys — seek to have transactional sex. Isn’t the desire to have sex with someone who would not consent to have sex with you if money weren’t involved inherently pathological? And aren’t we teaching men that it’s OK to objectify women if we let them pick women like so many dolls off a shelf?
I’m not much moved by these arguments. I think that money is inextricably linked to all kinds of sex and romance (what the fuck are dating apps like the League or Raya doing, if not normalizing the idea that you should only seek out partners who have a certain amount of money/social capital? or your average elite university, for that matter — read the infamous Princeton mom) and that people in the status quo do all kinds of horrible, backbreaking work they would not consent to do if money weren’t involved. Saying that sex work is uniquely bad evinces sex exceptionalism. I think that’s bad because of how it stigmatizes sex itself. We can march and wear pussy hats all we want but no woman is free to be sexually shameless while the whore is a legally distinct category. What other intimate act is criminalized when you have to pay for it? You can spend hours and days together for money, you can take care of their kid for money, you can wipe shit off their ass and gently soap their entire body and hoist them into a sitz bath, but you can’t fuck? What does that say about what we as a society think about what that act is? That it’s demeaning, or that it’s unnecessary? And if you think that money changing hands for sex desacralizes the act for other people, I would remind you that even church sends a collection plate around.
If you care about sex workers’ safety, you can still think that transactional sex seems uniquely bad compared to other kinds of work and advocate for decriminalization because the empirical evidence shows that there are all kinds of harms when it’s criminalized. Police harassment can displace workers; law prof I. India Thusi writes about how even under the “Nordic” model of criminalizing buyers rather than sellers of sex, sex workers had to leave a relatively safe area when high police presence began because they couldn’t make money if potential clients feared arrest. Censorship on online platforms fearing liability — as well as bans from payment processors — can keep sex workers from being able to organize together, share safety tips and practices, and collect funds.
I said much of this that night, and perhaps we were both surprised by how intractable we felt in our respective positions. There was something I almost envied about the world in his head, one where women are hurt by bad men, a group that could be improved or cleaved away to leave us cleaner. I wondered where the boundaries of his moral sanctions on transactional services lay. Have you ever gone to a strip club? I asked.
No, said our friend, adding cheekily, but there’s one right near the Whole Foods, if you guys end up grocery shopping. It’s called the Good Guys Club.
related reading:
Radical Feminist Harms on Sex Workers by I. India Thusi
Sticking with the Sex by Joe Fischel
We all deserve to heal by Yin Q
The pleasures and freedoms of silence by Wendy Brown
introduction of Panics Without Borders by Gregory Mitchell: “The Myth of the 40,000 Missing Girls”
George Meiu’s Ethno-Erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya
EARWAX
(for K.)
There is one friend who has received two photographs of my earwax over iMessages. Both times the earwax demanded documentation because of the sheer monstrosity of its size, and this friend has proved a receptive audience despite my inability to communicate any other important updates besides these, Reformation sales, or imminent trips to the Bay Area. Needless to say, I’m grateful.
Am I the giver or receiver here? There’s a whole gift economy of minor body horror: I was excited to look at the X-ray photos of a pinky fracture of someone I didn’t even know, showed to me on a cell phone by my partner’s classmate, and when I stepped on a nail in Brooklyn last summer, I immediately posted (content warning-prefaced) pictures on my Instagram story. My favorite scene of any comedy movie ever is the food poisoning in Bridesmaids. Over 8 million people follow the YouTube account of a dermatologist’s graphic show, Dr. Pimple Popper.
The most recent photo I sent to my earwax friend was of a hard dark-brown pebble of wax half the width of my fingertip. It fell out of my ear in the middle of a yoga class, landing like a bug alighting on my finger when I reached down absentmindedly to scratch the outside of my itchy ear in the middle of a Reverse Triangle. I hoped everyone else was so focused on their breath that they didn’t see me try to hide the evidence, realize it was stuck on my finger, pinch it off, place it delicately next to my water bottle so I wouldn’t forget to grab it on my way out, and carry it out of the studio. Worst-case scenarios (shock and horror from my classmates, a lifetime ban from the yoga studio) were circulating through my head as we progressed through the last vinyasa flow of the class, but I was already imagining sending my friend this image, drawing some comfort from the validation of having a witness, by the time I lay down for shavasana.
related reading:
literally nothing but if you have any recommendations please let me know