All that hate for nothing

Normally I put a time sensitive exhibit here, but today I’m linking the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, which is an apartment and studio tour of the work of Chaim Gross on LaGuardia that is open year round and makes a great lunch break activity or pre-coffee coffee date activity.

ICYMI, I tried a subversive format for my last letter where I tried to highlight some of my friends’ and even some clients’ work by sharing about what I attended and where I saw people, and wow I got so many messages in response! Messages such as “are you insane” and “why are you at so many events” and “do you just leave your child at home all the time”. I am so glad everyone enjoyed! I might do it again.

Yesterday I had a long overdue phone catch up with one of my favorite conversational adventurists, who abandoned me in New York to go start a family in a place with universal healthcare and social welfare, and we spoke at length about perception. The catalyst was that I was complaining about the book recommendation social pipeline drying up over the past few months as everyone’s attention has shifted to Strangers, Famesick, and Yesteryear. That is not a dig at ANY of those books, I have them all on my NYPL App requests and as I’m writing this I checked my waitlist position for Yesteryear and I am #2,081. I just need some other stuff to read (suggestions welcome in the comments!) other than those three books.

My friend had just read Famesick and thought it was great, and we started talking about our related degrees of exposure to Lena Dunham and the public perception of her when Girls aired in the early 2010s. I’ve got to be honest with you, I had absolutely no interest in that show when it aired. I have rarely owned a TV in my life, and so from the years 2002 to roughly 2020, I missed almost all of pop culture–I am the impossibly gorgeous, sparklingly brilliant Encino Man of New York. But I remember the press, and the commentary, and I especially remember how much everyone hated Lena Dunham. I mean not everyone, clearly. But even as an outsider, I caught wind of how incensed everyone was that she exists.

But last month I had a terrible migraine and the only thing I can do when that happens is watch TV in bed, so in the midst of the press blitz for her book release, I thought why the hell not, and queued it up on HBO.

I absolutely understand why people had such a strong reaction to that show. It is a collection of four of the worst brats you could ever hope to meet, on their absolute worst, most destructive and self-centered behavior, unrelentingly, for years. Do you know what a cortical homunculus is? It’s a little figure of the human body where all of the areas that dominate your brain’s sensory input are hyper-exaggerated, it shows you where your brain is getting its strongest sensory info from. Episode after episode, this group of four very privileged young cortical homunculus friends are thrashing about creating the worst possible drama for themselves, and it features some of the most intense oversensitive navel-gazing I have ever borne witness to in my life. I’m not saying any of this is necessarily bad–it makes for very entertaining TV–but it also is written to evoke some of the most violent repulsion I have felt while watching non-horror non-murder mystery content.

But what I remember the most wasn’t everyone’s reaction to the character’s repulsive behavior or the sometimes heartbreaking storylines, I remember people primarily hating Lena Dunham. And it is easy to hate a very privileged young woman with socially advantaged, financially secure parents and a career that seems to have come to her easily. But what I gathered most from watching this show is that what made people the most uncomfortable about her was that she has a pretty regular body and didn’t find that body extraordinarily shameful the way we’ve been taught to find non-VS supermodel bodies shameful.

That’s an oversimplification, and I’m not trying to skirt over the other issues people have with her, because I’m clearly just catching up on two decades of conversation. But it does feel pretty easy and intuitive to see that in a culture that hates women and teaches them to shrink and prune themselves into ever youthful bone-thin donut-glazed pleasure dolls, a woman with a regular body feeling ok being naked on television rankles a lot of people.

I would say actually, beyond the culture we live in that undeniably hates women, it more broadly teaches us to hate ourselves, no matter what identity, and that’s where sooooo much of the hate we see and experience comes from every day. Last summer, I wrote about my Madonna-inspired sojourn into kabbalah studies in high school, and how it led me to understand that the things we feel most negatively activated by in other people are often pinging points of insecurity within ourselves.

How dare she be kind of fat (ed note: that is her personal descriptor, not my assessment) and be fine with people seeing that on TV, when I have been told all my life that my value is tied to my body’s ability to defy age and biology generally? How dare she be suboptimal (according to the laws of optimization that I have been preached since girlhood) and not be ashamed of it? How dare she be fat and also extremely annoying, something else I have been told is unacceptable to be as a woman?

There is a performer and writer named Alok Vaid-Menon who I mention a lot in these conversations, their focus is gender identity and self-expression, and as a transfeminine gender-nonconforming person that emanates confidence in their expression and presentation, they are naturally met daily with trolling by some of the saddest, loneliest people in the world. Below, one of my favorite responses to this hatred:

I have shared this with so many people, so many times, but the person I have reminded the most about this sentiment is me. When I feel affronted by something, it is an amazing opportunity to confront why I feel so activated by it, and many times when I feel the most upset or angered, I can trace it back to jealousy that someone has access to an ease that I don’t feel naturally myself. That ease can be self-confidence, or access, or even just more financial security to explore and experiment and maybe even fail. The jealousy and the anger is tapping into something I feel wounded in myself, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than projecting it onto another human being.

Over the past few years I’ve been experimenting with what happens when I don’t let those feelings resonate–don’t decorate the ditch when I fall in–and instead ask myself why the feelings are popping up at all. Maybe the reaction is a help signal from within to tend to the engine that I actually have sovereignty over (me!).

What is the point in policing people’s bodies and self expression? Who does it hurt for someone else to exist as they are? And if it’s somehow hurting you, have you stopped to consider asking yourself why? I wonder how many of us grew up being told that we need to be one way or another in order to be loved, or behave one way or another in order to be loved, or perform one way or another in order to be loved. I certainly did, I don’t think it’s uncommon. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.

Can you believe how much of the current energy in the world is dedicated to people trying to control and dictate how other people live? It’s an incredible amount of effort, money, time, heart. It causes so many people to live in fear, or in grief. No amount of controlling others will make you feel better about your own self. Don’t go to a well that’s not got any water.

Speaking of which, are you all treating yourselves well on these platforms right now, Substack included? Increasingly, I open these apps and it feels like the desperate sweaty energy of the Self Help section of the USQ Barnes and Noble around the turn of the century. Are we at all worried about the amount of information we are ingesting every day that tells us we are not enough, and that the only path to being *enough* is to buy something–information delivered to us in more and more insidious ways and packages?

Those are not rhetorical questions, because I really do not have an answer for them! Maybe it’s fine? It doesn’t really feel fine though haha. I think it’s causing a lot of people to live in a space of suspicion and jealousy and feelings of deep inadequacy, which does not sound like a place with affordable groceries or universal healthcare. I don’t want to live there at all.

yours, however you are,

x Anja

p.s. here is my Book Club in Rec League! For everyone who keeps asking me for summer reading recommendations, and if you are also #2,081 on the library wait list.