Author: Lucía Guzman

  • Yihao Zhang: The Artist Is The Art

    Let me start here: I met Hao in the smoking area of Heaven when I was abandoned the people I was there with who were hooking up in some dark corner. Bam, immediately having a horrible time. So I turn around, 18 and lost ^._.^ฅ, and in a moment of benevolence (in a beacon of light like the angel Gabriel) Hao said,

    Alright, here’s a flavoured Marlboro.

    That was top 10 most swag things ever. And being a Libra and a Pisces combination made us such a sociable pair. Come to find out, he also makes sick art.

    So, look, I suppose at the beginning I didn’t understand art very well, I’d never really been into installations. At that point I was still a little hatchling and only had developed an appreciation for traditional media when it came to visual art (at this point, I was legging it to the National Gallery every day to stare at The Execution of Lady Jane Gray – clearly, I was unmedicated). The first time I truly understood installation art, or even modern art at all, was with Hao’s work.

    If we weren’t in the club, we were at his exhibitions. It is wild to think now his work is exhibited in galleries across the UK, in Berlin and in Paris, though in my head it always was going to work out this way.

    A piece I really like is Amor Fati. This is the artist statement for it:

    “[Amor Fati] explores the trajectory of people in the city and the arc-shaped repetition that comes with cyclical life, as people move from one starting point to another. The concept of human desire for purpose and the quest for satisfaction is gradually optimised into an endless arc of social compatibility. At the point of zero on a given stage, there is only a brief pause before the cycle begins anew.”

    I know when art is good or bad because I’ve never been wrong in my life. I think the ability to perceive the nuances of your surroundings with such a precise little scalpel and make something as comprehensive and defined as Hao does, is tremendous. When I see the movement of Amor Fati, I perceive my own stagnation in cycles of repetition within urban life, because theoretically it looks just like the arc the installation makes.

    There is a clear style in Hao’s body of work. Any creative knows that style takes a lifetime to develop, that it encompasses one’s lived experience. I believe Hao’s personal style directly mirrors his art. Or rather, that his installations are an extension of him. In a room full of strangers, I could match this artist to his art. It has always been this way; I have never known Hao to not be sure of his identity. And this is so powerful as an artist because art can never be devoid of the vessel that produces it. An unsure person will make unsure art.

    One of the first pieces I ever saw in person was The Oracle of Oppression. It addresses such a relevant topic – the connection between artefacts and humans – that when I saw Hao engage with it in his degree show, I felt that his artistic style had such clarity of meaning that I lowkenuinely felt enlightened. I have no artistic vein in my body for anything but writing, which I would argue is really easy to convey things through (a dying sentiment in the age of AI), so I take this ability for granted in other media. Hao is just crazy style locked in (professional art critic review language btw). Also, how many people do you know doing performances with their installations? I felt extremely cool just being there.

    I think when you are outside the art scene, you don’t realise how ground-breaking and novel some work is. It is astounding to witness interdisciplinary media we are so rarely exposed to, even in an age of overconsumption.

    The summer after we met Hao was the only person I saw. When I meet people, I grasp at reasons to dislike them, reasons to keep my precious untouchable little world secret and intact. I get reclusive and cagey like a scared cat. I find it hard to like people. Even with all my scrutinising I couldn’t find fault in Hao’s heart of gold – which is an extremely cheesy and weepy thing to say but it’s true. Drinking vodka (or maybe rum) mixed with milk in his old apartment, throwing up in his bed in his new apartment (I’m so sorry boss). The nature of our friendship is like that which I have with Hannah, a serendipitous strike of luck and fate.

    It’s said that you’re the average of the five people closest to you – I sometimes look around me, at the five people closest to me, and I am astounded and speechless at the brilliant minds I am surrounded by, the kindness. Sometimes I am silly, and sometimes I am too ill to even consider the possibility of existing successfully. In the end, there must be something good there, because the wonderful people that are close to my heart are creatures of infinite love and compassion.

  • Diary Excerpts From Louisiana

    “It’s so many miles and so long since I’ve met you / Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you.” Train Song, Vashti Bunyan

    In On The Road by Jack Kerouac, Sal Paradise follows a constant rhythm of movement in order to gather the life experience he believes Dean Moriarty has, and that he must acquire. Chasing something unnamed, and immaterial, a fulfilment of sorts.

    For myself, and for many of us, immaterial grief has guided me in the days of the abyss toward a shroud of warmth, as well as deep desolation. The body can take so much of it. New Orleans is, in every fashion, a city of loss and reconstruction. What is ours, and what is permanent? At the mouth of the bayou, a priest-chronicler in 1721 describes the land as a “place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarkey’s wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos infested by serpents and alligators;”. From 1721 to now, all has been stripped from the beginnings of New Orleans, and buried, and rebuilt – yet the willows and the serpents remain. It’s always worth noting the way the devastation of the slave trade has shaped the rural South, but as Hannah pointed out to me, Louisiana particularly still carries its past of slavery on its forehead. Hannah told me in Oak Alley Plantation, a gardener and an enslaved person named Antoine succeeded in grafting pecan trees.

    Many of my favourite shows, recommended by Hannah, take place in the rural South, namely Sharp Objects and True Detective. On our road trip from Georgia to Alabama to Louisiana through Mississippi, I am plagued with visions of Reese’s adaptation of Creature from the Black Lagoon, bodies in swamps, the green humid stickiness. There’s a lot of things I don’t know and a lot of things I do – like Jeff Buckley I know about what’s real and what’s not, and Louisiana is the dream humid parallel of Alabama, a fantastical mystical world, suffocating deaf heat.

    Whispers of a snake-handling church, a seance, visions of relinquishing suffering. Reese and I find ourselves on the side of the highway getting devoured by mosquitoes. We talk about the breadth of human experience. Reese suggests reading my tarot when we get home, I say I have no questions, no doubts. I feel PJ Harvey’s conviction: in the rain in the evening, I will come again. I am sort of inevitable which is fun, I’m in your walls. I wonder nothing, I am The Oracle, so I know everything.

    “The trees are broken because of tornadoes, or hurricanes.” Says Reese. I ask her: Lightning? She says no, when trees are struck by lighting they either split in half or catch fire and turn white. Driving into Mississippi we see white trees amongst other evergreen rich canopies. If the bayou is a wet thicket of willows, Alabama is Appalachian density and vastness. Chickens! Cows! And baby cows, and horses, of all beautiful colours. I dream of living on a farm, I dream of open fields that never end.

    Between Johnny Cash songs on the car stereo, and gas station tea, I tried to finish South of the Border, West of the Sun. I don’t know what I’m trying to tell you – I am trying to say I’m filled with fear and grief, that everything scares me. I am trying to say I have so much life sometimes I don’t know what to do with it. That my life is a fever dream and I am wading through it in the dark with eternal Lexapro joy.

    Who would’ve thought that one of the best trips of my life would be to Alabama? The friendships I have been allowed the sanctuary of in this timeline mark the unrelenting passing of time. In a world that pushes women to find meaning and worth in partnership, what is more healing than being able to reach your arms out and feel the tangible immensity of love in close friendship? What is more freeing than embracing the people which weave the fabric of our will to survive? I hadn’t seen Reese for nearly three years, which felt immeasurable to me as she is my star.

    I would have loved a rural life where all that surrounds is loving community and open plains. I have never lived in a house. I would like to give my cat space to run, and myself somewhere to read and write under the shade of the trees. I have seen my life on the road with Reese, I know what love looks like because I have friends that drive me through state after state so I can just see and observe. I saw my future while getting devoured by mosquitoes in the bayou. I hold my life tenderly in my hands. I want to live on top of a mountain in silence, but I do not want to eat American food.

    I am drinking an extreme amount of spearmint tea to see if it flushes out the Red40 before the microchip in my brain starts running ads.

  • The Oracle Wishes the Public a Happy New Year

    “Women resist this understanding [men’s commonplace sexual violence] because it directly threatens the commonly held goal of having a happy and healthy relationship. If you understand the extent to which men hate you, how will you ever find your dream guy?” Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse.

    I read 37 books this year. I went vegan, I’m sober, medicated, freshly 4B and have a one-way flight to Tokyo for June. Isn’t that crazy? tangtang Japan correspondent. I have taken on acupuncture and herbal remedies and have consumed perhaps six paracetamols just today. Damn you super-flu! My acupressure stickers can only do so much.

    My loyal readership, this was the year I cemented my life goals and the year I perfected peace (and got half my back tattooed, great heavens.) Most people do not wake up and decide to dedicate their lives to non-profit work for women in developing areas and war zones. Except I closed Intercourse by Dworkin and all my life’s gender studies consumed me in a big cocoon of rage and I emerged Winx-style Enchantix type shit with the fairy dust but for women’s rights. Quote for you: “It is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.” With Public Policy in my near future, I will be making it everyone’s problem to be fully conscious of the Horrors. Business as usual.

    As well as that, I’ve been further enlightened this year on dating, as half of the Brighton population under 25 may know I have never interested in dating per se, but I had even more enlightenment. As tangtang readers may be aware, the sex and relationships aspect of this zine has taken hold very strongly. This year, Hannah got into a loving committed relationship (with a man who I am fond of in a distant uncle in Tudor times whose wealth and status allows me to live as a Bride Of Christ sort of way. The sort of fondness one has for a family relative you saw once when you were 8 but sends you a birthday message every year), and I continued my exploits which I embark on to entertain my friends with like a court jester. My enlightenment was that I need to stop having sex because I’m bored and pick up a fourth language or something. I find relationships an astounding waste of time and should I ever hope for one (Lord please exempt me from this horror), I would like it to be a twice-a-week encounter for Tuesday lunch and Friday dinner. The only relationship I support involving a man is that of Hannah and my uncle-in-spirit Ed.

    In my prophetic dreams, I divine a quiet start to 2026, a time for personal learning (please allow me one month without material for the memoir). But upon my departure to another continent and inherent permanently offline pursuits, I will have much to speak on, I’m sure. In my crystal orb I see you all devoting yourselves to art and music and friendship (drop that evil man.)

    My 2026 will be filled with Patti Smith on vinyl, loose leaf tea from Hannah (thank you Hannah), and unshakeable peace. Soon to come: unreachability. If God permits it, I’ll be setting up a landline and living in a Tokyo love hotel from summer on. Stay tuned for my travel diaries from Alabama and Louisiana in March, further notes on sex, love, and grief also coming soon.

    My new year’s resolutions below:

    • beat my goodreads goal
    • sternum tattoo
    • join heavy metal band
    • more sobriety
    • publish more work

    There will be much discourse particularly in the new year about allowing yourself to take a step back from news cycles and the horrors happening around the world. Rape, child soldiers, decapitations, immolation. There will be a call to allow yourself to choose peace and calm, to prioritise your wellbeing. Don’t do that shit. In the best of cases, find it in your heart to advocate for yourself as a woman (and for the love of God, drop that evil man, I will not say it a third time). A tangtang reader’s greatest act of rebellion is finally relinquishing that horrid deep-rooted self-despising. It’s cold outside. Stay in touch with the horrors, plee.

    This festive season, educate the men you love, if they don’t already come pre-educated (and consider why you love the men who do not come pre-educated in the age of free internet access). Gift them the work of Andrea Dworkin, gift The Second Sex. Grow closer to the women in your lives, begin holding hands and filling the need for closeness with your sisters and your close friends. Wear red on New Year’s Eve.

  • My Year of Distress and Agitation: Desire and Prophecies

    Ahhh… as the year comes to an end, I have gathered a couple more chapters for my memoir, a Lexapro prescription, and a promising esoteric plan for my effervescent future. As tangtang’s niche becomes deeply intertwined with modern relationships commentary (humiliationships are included), I, The Oracle, bring to you my wrap-up of the year. Prophecies on creation and desire, visions on the nature of wanting, and the suffering of living deliciously. My loyal, loyal readership… there’s an epidemic in the air… I worry about the public’s absence of self-respect, or worse, the public’s critical-thinking ability of a fucking tablecloth. As your scheming eunuch, let me do what I do best: advise. Here’s the first concern that truly, truly bugs me.

    I’m going to call this the Unbearable Milan Kundera Effect (UMKÉ for short). I don’t love speaking badly about the dead, but here goes. Some of you hoes are tragically engaging in the thing Milan Kundera does in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where he thinly veils his own rhetoric in a poorly-developed relative metaphor. Satirising your feelings does not save you from vulnerability… I have this immense qualm with boring stories that lead to one monologue about the writer’s rhetoric on something. Be like the rest of us, write a think piece. See I’ve gotten started and now I can’t stop. There’s a plague of creating for the sake of creating. Miserable fragmented poems in your Notes app about your situationship with the aleatory ‘you’ as a way to distance yourself from the speaker, questionable slanderous songs in order to avoid actually calling your ex a cunt (like God intended), and theatre that suffers the UMKÉ phenomenon. Perhaps the outlet that allowed me to never fall into this horror is being an avid diarist. See, it is fine to make it in private as an outlet, but to attempt to commercialise it… I am not reading that essay.

    How does this relate to desire? My one true passion… drawing everything back to personal relationships… the Horror of desiring in order to desire. We’ve talked about this before. Hannah has correctly identified that the desire to ‘have a crush’, to want in order to dissociate accordingly, is a widespread phenomenon (read The Year of the Situationship). Now, I do think that the feminine persuasion to do this is borne of the systemic pressure to desire a partner and to seek validation and affection. If you have ever read tangtang before, we know I’m not reserved about my opinions on women’s absence of enjoyment in singleness. No man will fulfil you. Let me not get side-tracked.

    The Second-Order desire, to want to desire, is the idea that every accomplished wish is a simulacrum of the original desire. The dopamine horror of blindly wanting more and more. New clothes, new trinkets, new people, leads to the Buddhist idea that desire and attachment are the roots of all suffering. Listen, I understand better than anyone the desire to place down your devotion somewhere where it’s felt. I know this, in my heart I have devotion the likes of which could rupture the earth if it was ever unleashed. My prophecy: desire with purpose and take action in this desire. Channel this immensity into something worthwhile (not a man, I beg). Yes, desire is the root of all suffering but why should one avoid and deprive oneself of all desire, when suffering is so delicious? What is human life without loss? Possession, and grief, are not cruel ways to love. To avoid suffering is to avoid the very essence of the human condition.

    Here’s the fun. crux though. You bitches like suffering. I said to NOT AVOID IT I didn’t say SEEK IT. Perhaps it is a religious thing, the Catholic penance, suffering as a means of purification… the feminine beauty of the damsel in distress. We are not gathering spiritual merit, and dare I say, in the least condescending of ways… suffering is most often not especially beautiful… nor artistic: (the Hannah commentary: see Rayne Fisher-Quann’s ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’). There is nothing tragic and divine about moping around heartbroken about your situationship who isn’t in love with you, or your asshole boyfriend who makes you cry… it is self-sabotage. You, yes, you, I’m talking to you.

    My year of distress and agitation has been full of brilliant anecdotes, as every year in my life always is. All caused by my hubris and inability to say no to a good story. To make you all feel better about the questionable nature of relationships in the modern world, I will share some with you. Highlights that will make the memoir include: the fully tattooed vegan who tried to convince me to bring communism back to Spain as aftercare, the Jim Morrison lookalike who almost killed me recklessly driving his huge motorcycle, and most stellar of all, Mr. “I’m falling in love with you so I can never see you again”. Best part? All guitarists. And so, I leave you here, with my beautiful fountain of endless unmedicated lore. Never stop desiring (with purpose), take the suffering as it comes, use protection. Swag city.

  • Lucía’s Guide To Surviving A Berlin Escapade

    I get into Emil’s shower and feel my mascara uncrusting under the hot water. Last night we got home at 6am from Lokschuppen (which on a bad night is just Chantal). After 4 hours of house music (God forbid), we called it quits. I am ever grateful for Emil’s filtered shower-head and lily-scented shower gel, I only had 3 drinks and still I feel like I’ve been shot 16 times.

    Oracle Revelation #1: A hangover is only cured with carbs, shopping, and another drink. Kreuzberg offers up a Cavalli F/W 2004 jacket and wine bar happy hour, who am I to say no?

    As we wait for happy hour to start at L’apero, Emil reads excerpts of the BUTT Magazine interview between Gaultier and Margiela to me. I’m trying to read Tristessa by Kerouac, but the intense discussion about Gaultier’s denim kink is so entertaining. We dive into an extensive discussion on it (impermissible on Tangtang, sorry, inquire further). After happy hour and dinner (charcuterie at the wine bar, the last apricots of the season), we have three drinks in the dark red of Mano. The heavily tattooed bartender at Mano says he understands I’m thirsty, but if I ever take my drink again without letting him put a garnish on it he’ll bite my hand off… heavily tattooed bartender at Mano, I have a crush on you.

    When I wake up Saturday morning, I still feel the bass in my chest from the absolute baby rave at Club OST, and all I care about is that they had Fountain of Youth coconut water at the club bar. The rookie 7 hours I slept Friday night are amended by the cup of tea Emil hands to me in a blue Le Creuset mug. I smudge the remnants of my eyeliner and head out haphazardly. As I’m browsing around vintage stores, I reflect on how my rhythm of life is incessant and I’ve had to defend it plenty of times. Yet beyond this, my bandwidth for patheticism, and inconsistency is shortening rapidly. I hardly drink, I yearn for about Hope Sandoval on vinyl, slow nights with my cat, and a glass of orange wine. My life is so romantic, I purge it of everything that isn’t.

    Oracle Revelation #2: There’s very little romanticism in industrial techno, you don’t have to force it.

    Now, I must brag that I did really strike luck with the thrift on Saturday (the highlight is a little D&G denim skirt I wear to Borchardt that night). That night, we’re circling back to Lokschuppen for actual good music (unlike Thursday) after a very languid bottle of Rioja over dinner. I feel so lazy post-risotto that when we’re getting drinks at the Späti (Fritz-limo Apple-Cherry-Elderflower with rum, trust me) I call off our Sunday morning Berghain plans completely.

    Oracle Revelation #3: Being a 365 party girl is an extremely short-term commitment, choose beauty sleep sometimes. Go home.

    I walked out of the 3-4.30 set in the boiler room at Lokschuppen with my right meniscus more fucked up than ever, and it was the best night out of the three. Sunday morning Emil and I go over to Mano for a fresh tea (and a margarita). I’m waving around a cigarette as we debrief, we’re really too old for this shit (the meaning of “this shit” is up for interpretation). Emil demolishes me at chess, and the evening fades into dinner at Amrit. We’re not going out tonight, I finish Tristessa and go to sleep early. Back in London, I put on Sigur Rós on vinyl and reflect with a mint tea…

    Oracle Revelation #4: The key to surviving Berlin is not reading Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, and therefore not giving a fuck. Everyone cares so much about their image in Berlin, people are so bad at committing to the grime. See the city, maybe. Fake piercings, bad cheap tattoos, idolatry of clubs, disrespect of the scene, constant desperation for taking photos. Everyone knows someone, the commitment to being fucking grimy and edgy has to be absolute. Commit or don’t attempt it at all. The ‘vibes’ that will get you in are authenticity. Put down that MAC Carbon!

  • Tang in Tangier

    I throw my bag under the very window Matisse once looked out of to paint Window At Tangier in 1912. So absent from Western metropolises, the ultramarine blue that he uses so consistently in his paintings of Tangier is apparent everywhere I look. I see, very clearly, what he meant by calling Tangier a “paradise of light”. In the interludes between rain, the blue tinge of the light seems to stick to clothes and skin and when, in the evening, I go to wash my face, I find myself radiating a sort of blue halo. Perhaps the shrieks of a bird I have never heard before, and the muezzin who features faintly in my dreams through other visions are also what guided Matisse to the Otherness of the colour blue, so as to indicate distance and departure from his normality.

    Here’s what I do know for sure: there is a fundamental human necessity to lounge by the pool half-naked and read. Solitude, leaving the phone in the hotel room, eating shellfish and drinking mint tea. All of that time to think is sanctified and pure from the ritualistic overpacked headspace of everyday life in London. I love my rituals and routines, but the oppression of memory doesn’t exist in a pool lounge chair shielded from the sun. In retrospect, I spent all my week-and-a-half-long holiday by the pool. So much so, I ran out of reading material and had to venture out into the Mexique Bookshop to find more (insane stock of Haruki Murakami and (weirdly) Tolstoy).

    Around day 4, I find it in me to get up early and be driven to Chefchaouen by my friend Yahya who the entire time is blasting revolutionary songs. My favourite one is a 1997 about Che Guevara that he plays about 3 or 4 times each way. Driving through Tetouan, the grassy mountains obscure most of the sky, Moroccan flags appear roadside every few minutes, so you won’t forget that the immensity and beauty of the landscape has a name. On the side of the road, there are sometimes ornate top-heavy homes in vibrant colours. Then, similar structures ten minutes down the road—broken down, unfinished. The wonderful thing that follows from Tangier to Chefchaouen is that there are infinite cats. Was I very sad because they don’t get the daily love and pets that my cat Kush gets? Yes, I cried. Do the locals feed them and make them little cardboard houses? Yes! I cried. Chefchaouen is painted all blue, every city in Morocco has a symbol, and the symbol of the blue door is nothing but fitting for this city. Yahya and I talk about the state of the world over a meal of falafel and hummus and a restaurant in the city square called Twins. “You have to have really banal concerns in your life to have time for fascism.” He says, waving his fork around. I tell him that I have all the time in the world and still I can’t imagine such extremism. After I force him to spend 20 minutes reviving an overheating orange kitten and asking the restaurant owners to care for it (they oblige excitedly), we wander the Kasbah and I refuse to climb the steps to the tower in 2pm sun smack in the middle of the sky heat. Unfortunately, my SPF100 and I are not made for hot beach holidays, but I insist on them regardless.

    Between glasses of (ice-cold) Merlot at the hotel piano bar and pages of Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz, I moved through days lethargically, writing in my journal, thinking about the turbulent months of summer (entertaining, but wild). Eve says on page 4, “The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.” On the afternoons I’d venture down to the beach, as late as possible as to avoid the sun, I swam as far as I could into the water and floated with my eyes closed, rising up and down with the waves. Sometimes adulthood is doing really fun things your mother would’ve never let you do because they’re kind of dangerous. I did not drown. In the mornings I went on walks to the Medina, Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kasbah Museum. Another morning, Yahya called me to ask when I was going to Cap Spartel, the northwesternmost point of Africa. I said I didn’t plan to; he was parked outside within the hour. My favourite part of the trip was the Maritime Museum and so I am glad I decided to abandon the pool that day (I love a lighthouse, Robert Eggers you have influenced me greatly). I opted out of the Hercules Caves; I know an American tourist hotspot when I see one… it’ll have to be for the next trip.

    The reflections one is capable of in the immense silence of a beach holiday are so unexpected, but it is a speedrun to peace. Every morning, looking over Tangier and its coast, drinking the mint tea and eating flat peaches, I felt that there was nothing bad that could ever happen in my life. That, always, I could return to Tangier and turn my phone off, live through the radio music channels, the strange stock of the bookstore, and the lobster risotto at the hotel restaurant.

  • The Year Of The Situationship

    “What’s He to Hecuba,

    Or Hecuba to Him?”

    – Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

    HT: In a linguistic sense, the invented word ‘situationship’ does not have a stable meaning in the same way that ‘relationship’ does. It is deliberately ambiguous. What situation, you may ask? We have no idea. It could range from we have made eye contact once at school (The Eyecontactship) to I am having his child, he has met my entire family, but we aren’t putting a label on it. The moment you give it the label of ‘situationship’ you instil within this dynamic the same instability that exists within the meaning of the word.

    LG: I have a very personal qualm with people that use the label situationship for a situation in which they are not actually involved with each other, or are just friends. Lowkey… I Be In Situations.

    HT/LG: A Humiliationship!

    LG: I don’t relate to this but I find that for a lot of people, there has to be an inherent suffering, and I do believe it is an inherently feminine thing to pine and yearn. It is a way to keep yourself occupied. It is a real phenomenon… people seek having crushes to have someone to think about, to fantasise about, to kill time.

    HT: We have to consider the commodification – I sound like FKA Twigs – of love as an object which you can purchase. You see it in Hollywood, you buy it on Valentine’s Day. It is marketed to you.

    LG: More now than ever with our very short attention spans, we wish to dissociate and fabricate a world. I suppose doing this is easier when it is someone that to some degree you cannot have…

    HT: It doesn’t require any sort of action from yourself. You have two passive participants, you are not required to act on anything. This is not a condemnation of being casual! Many people are in casual relationships with people, and it works, but there is a passiveness to the situationship where you remain in limbo.

    LG: Do you think there is a difference between a situationship and a casual relationship?

    HT: Yes, and I think all of it has to do with whether you call it a situationship or not. What’s a situationship to one person is nothing to another.

    LG: Well, this is what I don’t understand, maybe you can clarify this for me. I’ve never liked the term situationship, because to me… we are friends that fuck, right? If we’re not friends, what are we doing? Is situationship a term we’ve created to avoid being friends with benefits… because that requires friendship? I would like to argue a lot of situationships don’t require that.

    HT: It also sets no standards in specifically cishet relationship power dynamics where there are no expectations, even if you would like to set certain expectations.

    LG: It’s embarrassing to ask for that.

    HT: Exactly, like as if you don’t deserve this. Having those expectations is shameful, it is shameful to have agency and want to be treated like a human being. It’s not friends with benefits because they’re not even providing that friendship to you. They just text you at 3am like “wyd”.

    LG: Who is this man in your house? You don’t know his last name!

    HT: Show me his STI results babe.

    LG: Do you know his LinkedIn? 

    HT: Where is his birth certificate?

    LG: Do you know his birthday, does he know yours? No! The situationship is filling a gap in an increased avoidance of connection with each other, but my question is why?

    HT: I also think in the age of dating apps – which I have no issue with – we are trying to keep on mediocre options and seeing how many more mediocre options we can get.

    LG: The whole concept of the roster.

    HT: Exactly, I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing if every person on your roster is emotionally intelligent—

    LG: Valuable to you. A good person to begin with.

    HT: Kind, listens to you, which is not exclusive to romantic connections.

    LG: Sex requires trust. Do you trust these men?… No. Your roster cannot be full of men who realistically who you would not ask to watch your dog. It is relatively inevitable that if you are sleeping with someone for a prolonged amount of time, one of you will want something more. Further wanting to know each other, being closer friends, or a committed relationship. I do not think anyone can pretend that two people can have an intimate relationship without at the very least wanting to be friends, you have to somewhat hate that person to not want that.

    HT: I think the stasis of the situationship is very interesting, one person always wants more. There is always a stagnation.

    LG: Is it delusional to pretend otherwise?

    HT: I do think it is. It’s perceived to be kind of ridiculous to want or expect anything more because you’ve already put that label of situationship on which does not imply anything else.

    LG: But how shameful is it to call each other a situationship, have you ever heard of anyone agreeing to call each other… a situationship?

    HT: Is it a one way street? You use the term of situationship to explain it to your friends. People are uncomfortable with communication as much as we champion it, I see this in friendships as well. Sometimes you have to be really fucking honest, and it’s shitty, but it has to be done. A lot of this could be solved with people just talking to each other.

    LG: The mistake people make is that they think that by having one conversation about it, you’re done

    HT: It’s a dialogue.

    LG: How have my feelings evolved as this has progressed? I think it is a matter of pride, it is so shameful for people to admit that they are vulnerable. Mind you! We are so vulnerable with someone in relation to our bodies and still, we are extremely ashamed of saying, “Actually, this is how my feelings have evolved over time.” This is a poison… that could be so simply solved by offering yourself some respite from pining and suffering alone in your bed at night.

    HT: A very specific image of vulnerability has been sold to us, especially as women. This idea of this beautiful woman with a full face of makeup crying, naked under her sheets, smoking a cigarette. There’s only a few ways women are allowed to be vulnerable, especially in romantic or sexual connections. When it’s not, we see it shamed in media, in our personal lives.

    LG: And I do think it’s extremely silly that in your early 20s you would be expected to be thoroughly emotionally coherent with your vulnerability. I think having a mental breakdown—

    HT: Or three.

    LG: Or three! Very realistic, relatively healthy. Listen, better doing this with your situationship than your boyfriend of two years. Explore yourself through these men… if you’re not gonna keep each other around…

    HT: I am tired of seeing women losing their teens and 20s to seeking male validation and constantly searching for connection in men who aren’t going to give it to you.

    LG: It’s the chasing of grief, wanting pain.

    HT: Which we are sold as women, and let’s not forget that suffering sells. Suffering sells like hotcakes.

    LG: For some reason we think that we are our most organic and pure when we are suffering.

    HT: Situationships (humiliationships) are a sado-masochistic pressing of a bruise.

    LG: At the end of the day, constant suffering makes people cold. Not me! Becoming cold and uncaring is championed… convenience and circumstance are immensely significant factors in our connections with other people, but that’s not all we are looking for.

  • He is the Subject, He is the Absolute. She is the Other.

    Everyone has read the quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” from The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir. It is not especially difficult to determine that this means that women’s condition is not influenced or caused by biological sex, but by the formation of gender structure. Today we gather to agree that leaving it at that is uncritical and banal.

    The Second Sex reigns as The Bible of phenomenological analysis of the negative consequences of gender socialisation on the feminine. In nature, and because of the time it was written, it is extremely thorough. Feminism in 1949, I suspect, had to leave nothing to speculation, and so I forgive Simone for 700+ pages of tiny print. Due to this, I find that the fundamental crux (stealing this from Hannah) of the text is unfortunately lost upon unfocused reading. This is it: there is a reciprocal Otherness to being a woman that is created by a fabricated gravity between sex and gender, the body’s acculturation of this Otherness is the process of ‘becoming’. Simone will use the words ‘Destiny’ and ‘Situation’, because she had to debunk that women were physically predestined to being The Rib of Adam (the Other), in this century I don’t have to convince you of that. So we will ignore the biological aspect of ‘Destiny’ as a concept for the moment.

    I have brought you all here today to consider the most relevant aspect of the body’s ‘Situation’ in our present lives, which is that Objectification (‘becoming’) is not a choice, nor is it a selective occurrence, it is a fundamental happening across culture and time, it happens to all of us (all of us, Women).

    The earliest stages of childhood development are wrought with enforcement of the Otherness of female gender through pre-reflective choice. By this, I don’t mean girl toys are pink, boy toys are blue. Simone says that ‘The Child’ sees a vision of the world physically through themselves first, uses the body as an instrument for subjective pursuit of the child’s whim, and so cultivates separate pursuits to the parent. This is all great. Then, The Concern manifests when childhood spills into adolescence, here is where the consciousness of being perceived affects the woman disproportionately. Yes, it’s time for the Margaret Atwood quote,

    “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” (The Robber Bride, 1993).

    Instinctively, the meaning we discern from this is that we ‘become’ the Object being perceived by the Subject. Simone will tell us that ‘The Girl’ conceives that she “will gain value in the eyes of males not by increasing her human worth but by modeling herself on their dreams.” (347). Simone’s deeply thorough analysis leaves until the end, that there is, in essence, no conscious drive towards this, nor a choice to opt out. The tension here is that the self-concern and self-centred thought from childhood experienced by both boys and girls is still persistent for boys into adolescence. Yet, The Girl begins to experience her body as a conduit for desire and not as the autonomous instrument as through which to experience the world. The effect this creates is that of the fated Objectification, which sounds great and simple as a buzz word.

    To attempt to choose to not sustain your Human Worth via adherence to Objectification in the countless aspects of socialised Womanhood, raises the prospect of losing Human Worth inherently and factually. This is not my opinion! Refer to the text… In the attempted rejection of Objectification, women are still a male fantasy, everything is a male fantasy… conversation for another day.

    What can I say to you here? That this is a horrific and torturous process, that the entire time, we are tormented with this Terror of Objectification? No, there are Horrors and Gratification. The Terror comes when women divert completely from the prescribed behaviour of Object, because it narrows the gap between Subject and Object. Simone’s theory of the patriarchal society works great in 1949 but in present time, women are getting rebellious… seize them! What happens when Woman achieves face-value ‘equality’ virtually and logistically just like Man in society, but is still the Other, is still Object, just… less? The Horror of Abjection.

    The loss of distinction between Subject and Object makes space for the Abject, In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva proposes that outside of Lacan’s Symbolic Order (basically, Subject/Object, the Consciousness observing the Desired) exists Abjection. Abjection “preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body” (10) into consciousness of the will of said body. If we recall what Simone said before, the separation of the self from personal will into being the Other (the Object) is immensely violent. However, Kristeva argues that the alternative, the lack of distinction is more terrifying (for Man in this situation, she doesn’t think this specifically, but I do).

    Woman and Man as gender constructs are opposite, but the (lazy) attempt at (on paper) equality that we’ve seen in the past 20 years for women has narrowed the gap between Subject and Object (This is a good thing!). The complex labyrinths of gender oppression remain in our minds regardless of policy (… ever failing). Men must evaluate the Fundamental Terror of Abjection in the absence of distinction between Subject and Object, there is Abjection, and so assess where it comes from. Kristeva will argue that there is a perverted jouissance in this, “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.” (9) While I find this freaky and frankly, kind of Lacanian jargon, here is the point I am going to emphasise, Abjection terrifies and captivates, and Otherness in its progressed obscurity, terrifies the most.

    I don’t feel the need to explain that men are terrified of women… because it’s true. There is a mystique and an enigmatic nature to the feminine, (from this are born monstrosities, such as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl). The socialised woman has come to be so far removed from Man, that he is subconsciously disturbed by her unknown, the Otherness is unsettling, because Man consciously (hopefully) now considers Woman equal to a major extent. This new similarity begs the question, why are They (Women) still mysteries, still undecipherable? Here is why Otherness frightens, beyond Objectification: because it is ever-changing. The ‘becoming’ doesn’t end, the absence of an opaque end-success of ideal womanhood, the amorphous illusion of having ‘become’ is incomprehensible to someone who is completely external to lifelong socialisation towards such Otherness. Perhaps it is near inexplicable, too. I don’t find it unreasonable to compare terror for the feminine mystique to a fear of darkness (what capacity for evil lies in the unknown…?).

    So, having ‘become’ a Woman, there is no complete ‘unbecoming’… though it may seem simple to a man to fathom a fictional rejection of this Destiny (Situation) through acquisition of perceived freedom… our lives are built in tandem with the Otherness of the female gender, the notion of the existence of a Second Sex. There is always an Object because there is a Subject, even when women are relatively considered equal. Everything in society is sustained by structures of patriarchy (there it is!), which not only are a woman-man disadvantage but do very strongly disadvantage men who do not meet the imagined requirement of Masculine Subject. This is not a workplace matter, this is not a marriage matter, this affects absolutely everything we do.

    I wish to leave you with the final thought that I am the last to think Womanhood is eternal damnation. The intimate journey of emancipation from internalised Objectification is nothing short of Sisyphean (AT BEST!), but it comes with the loving embrace of the innumerable benefits of femininity which I think are self-explanatory and boundless.