My pet theories
Re sharing an interview where I talk about some of my favourite current pet theories
Hello again,
I did a really lovely interview with one of the girls behind franknews.
They mostly interview academics so it was a really nice, nebulous discussion. There was one bit particularly I wanted to share. It’s a pet theory of mine I’ll probably write about at some point.
Q: I feel like as a result of all the layers of difficulty in making and maintaining intimate relationships naturally, people have somehow become more guarded, even with themselves. What people are willing to admit they want or like or are curious about. The culture seems so square.
A: This is a bit of a madcap theory, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Over the past particularly 10 years we've really seen an explosion of text-based communication and text-based media. It was emails, and then it was texts, and then there was Twitter and Instagram. It's so normal to send so many written messages during the day at the minute, and it was not normal 10 years ago, and definitely not normal 20 years ago.
When you write something down, as opposed to speaking, it's such an unarguable record. A written message seems like it has a currency that something spoken does not. I do think it's created this sense of like, we can have definitiveness in our interactions and we can have a sense of sureness and a sense of objectivity almost because I wrote this. So, that means that, and I definitely said it, and I sent it to you and you read it. But it can of course still be the case that what I meant by that tonally and what you read from it tonally are two totally different things.
There's still a huge level of subjectivity there. Everything is subjective. This explosion of text-based media has really fostered this culture of thinking you can have definitiveness in interactions and you really, really can't.
And there are also bits on one of my other pet topics: what’s going on with masculinity at the minute.
Q: Do you have a theory that’s working?
A: What's up with men? I've been conservatively trying to find out, to be honest. I've just started messaging men who I used to hang out with in a party sense, when I was at uni, just asking to chat. Half of them think you're chatting them up, which is really funny. Half of them send me a weird HR response. Once you start that conversation, and this is an example, they'll say something like, ‘I know stuff's really bad for women. I don't think it's not, but stuff's also bad for men.’ I totally agree with that and I think that's a reasonable thing to say. But, the next time I saw that person, he was like, “Oh God, I hope you don't think I'm one of those people.”
And I was like, what people? A man who cares about men? Why is that such a bad thing?
But I think you should read the whole thing, it was a great chat.
That’s all from me this week. I hope you had a great bank holiday xxxx
Some Things I Enjoyed Recently:
I read a short story by Lucie Elven recently which was so great and then I went back to read this one, which is also so great. I loved this line:
At eight, all the soft things about her were already missing.
Someone shared an old Baffler essay of mine recently that I got a lot of work opportunities out of. I re read it for the first time in a while and I still think it’s good and relevant so why not share :). I wrote it when I was 26 and I hadn’t been writing very long, and I’m pretty happy with the level of nuance and thoughtfulness in the writing. I’m also happy that I’m not (yet) embarrassed about work I was doing at that time.
It is easy to complain about our collective helplessness, and convenient to flatten all experiences of the capitalist demand for productivity, as if an honest parallel can be made between the self-imposed short lunch breaks of an upwardly mobile urban millennial with two degrees and the timed bathroom breaks of an Amazon factory worker.
Alicia Kennedy’s substack (always). But this week it was a list of personal information which I just thought was such a wry and smart way of interacting with the slightly para-social demands for access some readers can have of writers.
Rachel, I enjoyed that franknews interview so much. I had a thought when you were talking about misinterpreting that initial friction with someone as meaning you don't like them only to realise it's just that actually they got under your skin or saw you in some way that made you feel uncomfortable, and that that's actually a good thing! I thought that these days maybe people are also misinterpreting that frisson as "red flags" and a sign that my "nervous system" is "rejecting" this person because discomfort apparently now always means some sort of trauma is being triggered and this person is bad for you. This isn't really a well expressed thought, but it's one I had in the context of it being a shame the important connections one might miss out on from misinterpreting that initial "dislike"
I have been thinking the same thing re: text-based communication for a while! You should read 'Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism' by Eva Illouz - it's quite old (2007) but has a whole section on how technology has resulted in the 'textualization of subjectivity' which is v interesting!