I❤️ME

power and danger

Seydou Keïta’s show at the Brooklyn Museum of portraits he took in Bamako in the 1950s has been extended to May 17th. Above is Untitled, 1957.

Last month in a rage-induced fugue state I wrote an essay about the importance of women loving themselves in a world that will persistently communicate that they shouldn’t, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of people, because there are now an additional 200 of you here versus last month. That one simple Patrick-Bateman style self-optimization list from that one popular shopping newsletter - to women such as myself who can be carbon-dated by the particular kinds of of internalized misogyny they’ve had to contend with over the past few decades - sparked a bonfire of vanities amongst many of us, those vanities being expensive, gendered, cyclical purchases and procedures aimed at looking permanently like a sexy teenage girl under the vernacular disguise of “longevity and health”.

Almost four years ago I started growing out my natural hair, something I had not seen since I was in the fifth grade. I was in the latter half of my 30s and I wanted to see what it would feel like to release myself from the prison of straightening its natural curls and coils, and finally, a month or two ago, I chopped off the final dead straightened end, and now my entire head of hair looks like whatever it actually was the entire time I was flattening it into oblivion.

I get a really wide array of responses to my hair depending on the interlocutor’s relationship with me, but the most common one I get is from women who also have curly or textured hair and felt an extra nudge of empowerment to wear theirs naturally based on what I have shared about the process of growing mine out. For this I am grateful, for I am cursed with the modern American obsession with my lasting impact on the world, and it really does mean a lot to me that anyone would feel better about being their Whole Self because of something I said.

But a dear friend of mine the other day said do I remember properly that you just cut off the last bit of old hair?, which I confirmed, and she followed by asking how did that feel?, to which I responded, honestly, “each and every day has been a fresh new landscape of discomfort”.

It can be easy to fall under the spell that radical change is going to be a beautiful adventure lived in constant awe and eye-watering joy, because this is how it’s sold to us in cultural narrative, alongside the concept that Anything That Doesn’t Feel Good is Wrong (ergo, if something feels uncomfortable it’s because you made an incorrect personal choice). The rabbit hole of living in this realization for these past few years has been its own kind of solitary confinement and my attitude toward and understanding of it changes every day. Radical change is uncomfortable, and change itself is a dynamic state - the change each day is different. My feelings each day have changed as much as my hair, which itself underwent a 180 radical transformation. I have smiled through the discomfort because I understand impermanence, and because I still do believe in the Adlerian concept of “act as if”.

The other day, Starface sent my daughter a package of products from their Ashley Williams collaboration, AW’s signature I❤️ME emblazoned on Starface’s signature pimple patch. For no living human has this phrase ever been more true - the standard internal buffer zone of self doubt does not exist in M’s little body, she is what I would describe as free. This can reeeaaallly rankle people, especially the most deeply insecure kids of her own age cohort, and despite having gone toe-to-toe with some of the more violent kids of that ilk, she remains resolutely, delusionaly confident. The pimple patches will last maybe another week at best as she has been using them in groups, covering her face with multiple I❤️ME stickers before school each day.

Her freedom is a constant salve to me simply because to truly love yourself and to be a girl is, at this point, a revolutionary act. For all of our social progress, the pressure we face to conform to a mold that is digestible to patriarchal standards feels suffocating, such that diverging from that mold, even marginally, reads to many people like a loud rebellion. Regardless of your sexual orientation, women are up against a macrosystem out in the world that is dictated by the value assigned by standards long set by men, and we are encouraged to remain in constant service to those standards.

As a woman, and then more loudly as a mother, I am expected to constantly contort myself into shapes and beings that will accommodate and support others, that will ensure their comfort, that will act as a safe receptacle for all of the scrutiny, bad behavior and abuse in the world. Neighbor in trouble? Women are fundraising (4 out of 5 GoFundMe campaigns benefitting someone else are started by women). Yet another preventable school shooting? Women are the ones advocating for common sense gun safety laws (in the faces of armed lunatics). Raising kids? Women are the ones bearing the financial burden (only 23% of single American single moms receive any child support from their children’s father).

(While I was writing this, my friend Cynthia sent me a timely screenshot of Naomi Elias’s recent feature on Sacha Bonét, author of The Waterbearers, with one phrase highlighted: “the interlinked concepts of sacrifice and womanhood”.)

The thesis of this letter is not Men Suck, though if it was, it wouldn’t be my fault because all I did was list some facts. The point is that people freak out when women opt out of the hamster wheel of conforming to a Male Gaze-centric standard of beauty, because non-conformity is a bellwether for their appetite to topple the rest of the system. If your time and finances are not consumed by trying to freeze your looks at one specific age and shrink yourself into something pleasing, you suddenly have a loooooot of free time to think about the other ways you are contributing to a system that considers you as nothing but disposable labor.

It is just one short leap to examining the misogyny in your own family and the ways it has developed the destiny of each of its members. It is a nearby doorway to step through before you stop tolerating your male colleague’s abuse (or the abuse of other women in the workplace who think their only path to success is to emulate male power tropes). It is mere steps to the eventual conclusion that you no longer want to be the receptacle that catches all of the bad behavior and criticism and responsibility for everything around you, and realizing that your continued scaffolding of this system is what keeps angry, insecure, violent little men in power. For me, it is looking at my young daughter whose views of herself are being shaped in no small part by what kind of bullshit I am willing to uphold, and deciding to disinherit her from that burden.

How else could I expect her to trust me?

Each day of change is deeply uncomfortable, but we are not always owed comfort. The point of my essay from last month, the one which clearly resonated with so many of you, is that radical love is not the same as lust, as in sometimes it’s not immediate, sometimes the love itself comes from a building over time. You could love yourself very, very deeply dressed in your best most powerful outfit, or you could not look in the mirror for some days and love yourself just as well, if you’re doing it right.

But what better place to live than in a state of change? Everything here on earth with you is changing. Even rocks don’t stay the same forever. What are you going to be, a sexy rock?

Actually, this essay does have a thesis, and it is this: I am very, very beautiful and very dangerous, and I am deciding what to do with all that that power.

x Anja