I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 2/2: The Fatale, The Vitale and the Banale

 The Most Depressing Revelation I Ever Had

"D" is explaining to the table of gathered peers, that he suspects there's a taboo in our society about a very specific phenomena - that phenomena is the offence a guy feels, when it is revealed that someone is attracted to you who you feel should know that you are not in their league.

Now, there's probably a lot to unpack, including the privilege of physical safety that means you don't have to contend with the pros and cons of having someone you aren't attracted to, attracted to you.

But I could attest, then and now, that the phenomena is real as well as the obvious knowledge that when this happens to you it is a dick move to ever speak about it.

And while this was "D"s articulation of a taboo, and I was very young and a late starter to my love life, I had already experienced this phenomena a number of times when he said it.

I have also written about how "nice girls" are underdiscussed and as such will likely persist as a fact of life for many men and lesbians.

But I'm beating around the bush, time to unpunctually ejaculate the most depressing revelation - my experience of this phenomena was not one I could wash my hands of, I had in many ways brought it on myself by treating female peers with dignity and respect, almost like they were people, and this gave them the impression, that I *liked* them.

In the first episode of AMC Comedy-procedural 'Psych' I ever saw, season 2, episode 15: "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion" protagonist Sean Spencer tells his father the dating advice "treat a woman like a person, then a princess, then a goddess and then a person again." from which you can probably get a sense of Sean's character and maybe an idea for a video about how some old show is problematic.

It has echoes of the blatantly sociopathic 'D.E.N.N.I.S' system from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia practiced by Dennis Reynolds, and those were also likely the times with "How I Met Your Mother" somehow a more dated sitcom than Seinfeld, that took the 'Friends' formula and edge lorded it by inserting the character of Barney based on 'The Game' a book by Neil Strauss about pick-up artists.

But if we just throw away most of the advice and keep only "treat a woman like a person" is this good advice to give a guy nervous about a date and should it be?

I read maybe two of the many articles that arose explaining the "Nice guys of OKCupid" and have recently relitigated it on my blog. One of the most memorable bits of explanation was that women have a right to have friends. 

Now I infer the authorial intent being an admonishment for straight men, or any men or boys interested in women to approach sexual politics as transactional, a dance of quid-pro-quos. Btw I don't think we are there yet, as I do think, for example, that if a woman won't let a guy pay for anything on a date it is a good indicator that she is of two minds about you, it is a defence against a quid pro, even if there's no discussion of quo yet.

I'll 'yes-and' this right though and say another indicator that women are free to have male friends, is the disbanding of the 'friend-zone' and here I am drawing on the sentiment proffered by Miyuki Konno, aunt of Makoto Konno main character of 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' re:her best friend Chiaki's love confession which I'll paraphrase because I don't have time to find the exact quote: 'I think if you were to date and it didn't work out, you are both mature enough to go back to being friends'

More Depressing

Okay, say you like someone in that way, but you can't for whatever reason, just ask them out on a date. Maybe there's some risk involved like you are co-workers and there's policy that could get you in real career trouble if it didn't pan out. Maybe you have just spent so long enjoying imagining how great your relationship would be if it happened, that resolving it risks rejection and then you would lose the ability to enjoy imagining your relationship anymore and you just can't make that leap.

So you are going to opt for the age-old routine of flirting and hoping that something will happen.

What is the worst possible way to prosecute this strategy?

See I would have guessed, that the single worst way to go about it, would be to talk about being interested in someone else. 

Now, what I'd concede, is if you were playing a longer game in flirtation, say you were hopelessly crushing on someone who was already in a relationship, and maybe their partner was jealous and insecure, there may be some utility in trying to deliberately retard the tension and cool off the situation by throwing up a smokescreen as a security blanket.

I'm not saying, that jealousy makes no sense. I was a mid-90s kid, I remember George Costanza remarking that 'everbody knows you like the person you talk to about your dates more than the person you are dating.' I just see it as stupid on the risk front.

Like yeah, send someone you like the message that you don't like them and in fact like someone else.

Seemingly obvious enough, that this was my operational assumption basically until I saw an evolutionary psychologist talk about polyamory which is what? Like ten years ago now. 

I do not lament the relationships I didn't have because I didn't talk to them enough about other girls I liked, what I lament and find depressing is the hurt and rejection I caused, because I thought a girl and I were so obviously and thoroughly friends. 

I thought this because they were friends I confided in, appreciating the insight they could bring into female perspectives, about the women who were bending my mind like a pretzel. 

Vaguely aware that there are people who might try and drive a woman they don't respect into a fit of envy that has them throw themselves at them, I also put a lot of trust in the ability of my female friends to read in me, that the angst I was experiencing over someone else was real, or possibly idealized but still having a very real effect on me.

I was not half-arseing these conversations, I was whole-arseing them, and as such thinking that they were safe conversations that could not possibly be misconstrued as my interest in them as a romantic partner.

And on at least three occasions, I was wrong. That takes me beyond 'shame on me'.

The Even Worsening Depressiveness

One of the worst things to happen to me, was to fruitlessly court a woman from whom I was perceiving mixed messages, that bent my mind up into a full Nelson, but more damagingly lead me to lose confidence in my ability to read subtext.

Again, I'm sure I've written before, that my road to recovery was paved in a study of body language, that built my confidence up again, even if largely a placebo.

Now I conceited myself to be fairly direct and unmixed and undiluted in my own messaging all my life. So I had this consolation that I had never made anyone suffer like I had suffered.

Recently though, I was talking to one of my Sarah friends, about having to reconsider this source of consolation. See thrice in my life, in my direct way, I've told a woman that I would rather be alone than be with them. One was a breakup, the other two rejections.

I need to be extra clear, that I never communicated this in those exact words that can be read as adding insult to injury. The facts were there to be observed, when I declined the relationship or encounter on offer, these people were going to see that I had nothing going on in my love life anyway, so they were just going to learn that I would rather be with nobody than them.

Sarah felt safe to flag this for reconsideration, because Sarah had rejected me, albeit she said she'd rather be with someone else than me, not nobody, and not even grief. I wanted Sarah's opinion on whether my honesty was not the best policy.

I don't think anybody relishes rejection, not anyone with a functioning consciousness. 

But I also don't relish lying. There's this line in Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang":

[Verse 3]

Music played, and people sang
Just for me the church bells rang
Now he's gone, I don't know why
And 'til this day sometimes I cry
He didn't even say "Goodbye"
He didn't take the time to lie

 Like I think I've been through what that last line in verse 3 might be getting at, as a lamentation, when a girl rejects you and tells you 'sorry but there's somebody else' and in wanting to know what you lack, you look for that someone else, try to figure out that somebody else's identity, and then eventually realize that there wasn't somebody else, it was just a polite lie or maybe a functional lie from a fear of safety and maybe on some level you count the thought and not the lie.

In my early 20s though, I was fortunate to get trained out of excuses, when I realized that excuses often met with rebuttal requiring more excuses and it is simply more efficient, when you feel safe, to just say 'no' and no is what I have said, when I've been feeling it, and I've slept like a baby.

Not Worse, But Not Safe

So facebook had some lawsuit where in discovery memos turned up where medical professionals had warned them that giving users beauty filters for instagram could cause girls to develop dysmorphia and facebook just plowed ahead in the name of Mammon or whatever.

I'm aware of the effect 'beauty ideals' have on women and girls, and its probably never been worse than now. What was tricky for me, is that I'm into pinup art, and pinup art has never been real, particularly the more stylized cartoony art I prefer rather than your WWII oil painting pinups, that often merely infantalise women rather than promote literally impossible waist-to-hip ratios and what not.

A mitigating strategy I thought of, was to try and depict the women in my life, as to how I would interpret them into a pin-up. To understand before they make unrealistic comparisons of themselves to cartoon characters "this is how I see you." Please don't compare yourself to a cartoon, but compare you as a cartoon to my other cartoons and see that basically you are also idealized by my eyes. Like if Matt Greoning's partner got concerned that they didn't have an underbite, and had too many fingers, and Matt Greoning drew them and was like 'see I draw everybody with an underbite, it's how I do faces.' This is what attraction is.

Unfortunately, nothing can close the door on someone else's mind rejecting this proposition and replacing it with 'this is how tohm wished I looked, not how he sees me now with love and attraction vision' and like the beauty filters, my own art regardless of my intent, contributed to or in some way exacerbated dysmorphia and dysphoria.

I also can't close the door on someone taking how I see them in cartoon form, and comparing it to other drawings and deciding because they prefer a drawing I did of someone else, that I must prefer that someone else too.

I don't really have a segue, but the point being, just as I naively assumed it was safe to discuss women I like with female friends, without them reading into it some subtext that actually I don't like the woman I say I like, but in fact I like them; I also can no longer assume naively that it is obvious to the woman I am with, that I like the woman I am with on account of my being with them, being in a relationship with them, sharing intimacy with them.

I won't lie, I enjoyed discussing my sexuality with Ale, and everything I'd learned about it through my art and experiences. I felt safe doing so, because in terms of my preferences, Ale had won. She had me, I was there. We would talk about her sexuality, and Ale was safe to do so, because I experience, I feel, low levels of jealousy. 

What I don't want to literally talk about anymore

Is what I am attracted to, in women, to women. And this one burns me up in a totally different way of being unable to talk to my friends about their fragile egocentricity.

In this case, it is because given my understanding of the topic, I interpret my responsibility to discuss my own sexuality, my preferences, my visual nature and personality and attachment style, as pure text. No subtext.

But I cannot control for subtext. In western traditions, close-reading appears to have been created by Philo of Alexandria, who may have been the earliest example of somebody reinterpreting scripture to harmonize it with contemporary mores, in his case to reconcile the stone age barbarism of Mosaic texts with the works of Aristotle and Plato, sophisticated bronze age texts, maybe even iron age.

Close reading in contemporary times is now more akin to, what's the latest example I saw, making a video essay about how 'Harry Potter' is secretly about social class. 

If you haven't been following this post so far, here is a slight recap of the depressing revelations I have had - I can't talk to female friends as people without risking this being construed as romantic interest, and I can't talk to female friends about romantic interests without risking this being construed as subtext stating I am romantically interested in them, and I can't talk to female friends about my sexuality without risking this being construed as me being a sexual authority on the relationship they have with their own self-image.

I want to talk to you about something, not to you about you, and where it is about you it is not about you specifically but generally, like I value your insight into the general experience of being a woman.

Revisiting my social media dog-pile

I might be a bit vague here because I plan to write about this as an example in a post about what's wrong with me, suffice to say that what I experienced here is kind of the antithesis of this post, it's something I'm happy to literally talk about with women, but have learned not to shout it into the respective abysses of web 2.0, here's hoping web 1.0 is okay.

Basically, my problem is, my attachment style, it isn't a recipe for sustainable relationships and flourishing mental health. In my 20s I ran headlong into these dysfunctions, and the thing about an attachment style, is it kind of dictates who you are attracted to, arguably as powerfully as sexuality. 

In my late 20s/early 30s I had enough experience to start unpacking the problem, and understand the work for me was to imagine a counterfactual self and start empathising with him, and making choices like he does to find a partner that would feel healthy rather than familiar.

I wanted to begin recalibrating, and I began to suspect that there might be a sex difference I was projecting causing me to mistake someone for someone else.

In brief, I did an audit of all the women I had dated, was attracted to, became infatuated with. I recalled my earliest profound impressions of them, and started noticing a pattern. I noticed that they didn't just stand out figuratively, a face in the crowd that caught my eye, but literally: they were standing alone. 

They didn't have friends clustered around them, when I met them, they sat in kitchens alone, stood alone, danced alone, arrived alone, left alone etc. even in crowds full of people. I did not regard them as sickly strays from a pack, but independent, strong.

But my experience of the subsequent relationships I had, were often not of someone confident and self-assured, but someone crippled by anxieties and riddled with self-doubt and insecurity.

So I was wondering maybe if there was a sex-difference between men and women, and if a solitary nature was indicative of dysfunction in women, more so than status.

I wrote up a scenario and asked for female insight, aware of groupthink, I requested female friends slide into my DMs. People were active on facebook back then, so within seconds a female friend commented publicly on my post something simultaneously righteous and vacuous, which I interpreted as basically saying it is not legitimate to draw inferences from behaviour when it comes to women, an absurd piece of special pleading.

Annoyed I bit back, in what I'd describe as a douchey way. That lead to a pile-on, that quickly grew out of specifically my control. On that front, I opted to do nothing, and I got answers from female friends in my DMs so it accomplished what I'd hoped, albeit with side effects.

That incident was pretty early in the timeline of the ongoing project to figure out how to navigate my own sexuality and sexual preferences. 

I would honestly do it again, except the world's moved on from facebook as a public square and you know the women that catch my eye historically haven't changed, so there's nothing more for me to explore, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, let alone most people as I think other people would care and as such may not survive such a dogpile. 

Modern Times

Something I literally can't talk about with women anymore, is the construct of 'femme fatale's which might be understood as women of a certain appeal that promise a low risk that they will ruin your life. And to be clear, low risk is bad, meaning it is a fairly safe bet that they will ruin your life. They are almost certain to ruin your life. 

Women who promise excitement, but that excitement is going to be in the form of drama rather than transcendent experiences. 

In the most pronounced cases, you may find yourself having to speak to an emergency operator about keeping them alive when they overdose, in less extreme cases, you may find yourself sharing a rather stable domesticated life with someone who is eternally restless, half-in-half-out slowly torturing you to death.

For me, I know I am drawn to the challenge, and as I've written recently, that is largely based in an unconscious desire to vicariously rescue my mother, and by doing so vicariously rescue myself.

Now the thing is, I would prefer not to work through this project in real life, skipping all the vicarious rescue and just rescuing myself through therapy, for which I've been largely successful. A therapuetic process though, is to work through these issues via creative fiction, to use the power of imagination to heal myself.

As such, decades ago I created a board on pinterest that I labelled 'people photo reference' and quickly I pinned so many images to the board it became functionally useless. I'd estimate that once a board hits 4,000 pins on pinterest, it can take a full hour to scroll through it looking for the reference image I want.

So at some point, I created a new board called 'femme fatale' and knowing me I probably mispelled it 'femme fatalle' because I don't speak Franch. And then set about reorganising it, pulling images off my generically named 'people photo reference' that to this day probably has 14 photos of like Indigenous peoples from National Geographic, Male Athletes and is mostly photos of beautiful women.

So here's the kind of thing I don't want to literally talk to women anymore (which isn't quite true, I'd be dying to discuss it if I felt it was safe to do so, I don't want to experience the fallout of discussing my sexual preferences with women and the close reading they might do so to feel worse about themselves...) I noticed quickly that an instant way for a woman to all-but-disqualify herself from being re-pinned to my 'femme fatale' board, was if she was holding her smart phone in the picture, taking a photo of her reflection.

Like the beginning of this process where I noticed I was interested in women who could attend a party without female friends to hold their hands, I noticed I wasn't interested or rather, captivated, by women who were photographed in the act of taking a selfie.

I wasn't filtering consciously at first, so here's the processing I did to try and make something conscious of my own filtering behaviour, and what I speculated up was this:

Women who are photographed have already convinced someone they are a worthy subject, women who photograph themselves are appealing to others for validation. One was contextually in-control, the other contextually out-of-control.

The above is speculation, as such, it would be wonderful to discuss, the thing is, there probably is going to be subtext, like the degree of admiration I feel for the subjects of femme fatale imagery, someone might come to the preposterous conclusion that because I value something it is therefore of value. When I consciously feel, that admiration is a pathology on my part.

With a mature, secure woman we could discuss this, and we could discuss my base hypocrisy in observing that while unnamed and largely unfeatured in media, there is the masculine counterpart to the femme fatale in the homme fatale, and I would tell women and girls to avoid them like the plague. 

The value of such discussions, is immense to me. Life changing.

There are possible boundaries I can put on such discussions, the example I have picked, is one I feel particularly safe because I can describe it as pure behaviour, not image. Are you holding a phone in the shot that's camera lens is pointed at a mirror? If yes, in most cases I don't get a femme fatale vibe, just as if Humphrey 'Bogey' Bogart walked into his office and Mary Astor was picking her nose, might disqualify her as a femme fatale. 

What I don't feel safe to do, is show women images of women that I pinned to femme fatale because of all the aforementioned depressing revelations. In the Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come" he meets his own daughter in the afterlife and she has taken the form of like a Thai Airways Air Hostess based on a comment he made that impressed his daughter that some rando Air Hostess was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

That kind of unsafe that would arise from a fact that frustrates me - that images of women are disproportionately representative of models, as in the extreme rather than the average. I won't deny that I'm not some superficial pig but instead someone who finds the average woman attractive. But certainly I don't need anyone to be an extreme before I notice them, merely above average. Furthermore, models tend to be disproportionately young, and I am definitively not attracted to youth as in the common demographic definition of 'youth' being 18-25. I can find young people physically attractive, but generally can't stomach the idea of having to converse with them for any extended period of time, just because that age is predictive of regurgitating trite received wisdom.

So no, much as I'd love to compare images from my femme fatale board with the one I'll move to next, I don't think I can because I think the danger is too great that someone else will fixate on the prevalence of like waist to hip ratios, bust size etc. unconsciously internalizing this, when these features are merely predictive of somebody being a model or influencer, not a femme fatale.

Nathan Fielder and the Femme Vitale

A few years ago I reluctantly returned from Mexico to Australia, disoriented. Since then the project of my life has been imagining a future that I can work towards. I've explored a few dead ends, but things are coming together now.

Coming together such that I could dedicate time to imagining a future relationship. Reevaluating where I am at.

There is no specific love interest I have, and there has not been since my last relationship failed. My pervert eyes - the ability to notice women I am attracted to - have not come back fully, though there's glimpses of them here and there. 

There are complicating factors like where I want to live geographically. Long term, and it's a separate post, I see myself back in Mexico. There's an outside possibility that Australia could change structurally, and I might consider staying here, but hope is not a strategy, nor something to aim at.

In between here and Mexico though, I was feeling a desire to stop by Italy, to meet someone in Italy en route somehow to Mexico. Absurd and ridiculous, dating is hard enough, now it's like "okay I need to meet someone in Italy and persuade them to come with me to Mexico."

Why Italy? I think I was just looking at a lot of aquiline noses at the time. I learned about the existence of Eritrea and I feel that Eritrea might have the most beautiful women in the world, but, I have to be honest, Eritrea sounds like maybe one of the worst countries on earth.

What I found myself circling conceptually, beginning with aquiline noses, taking me to Italy, distracting me with neighbours like Eritrea, Ethiopia, Greece, Egypt, Isreal, Morocco, Lebanon...back to Italy, Italian, the language, the hand gestures, the longing I felt.

Vivacity. I was really craving vivacity. I was desiring to be around, in the privileged company of, somebody who felt alive. I felt guilty, confused, because I don't think many people would describe me as 'vivacious' though I did just win a laminated award having been voted 'Life of the Class: Contributes humour and positive energy' which I don't feel I deserve, because my recollection of my energy was that it was more often negative.

I don't feel I've earned a vivacious partner, I'd be afraid of becoming some kind of energy vampire. My creative process I fear, looks a lot like, to the casual observer, clinical depression. Time in my imaginarium creates an outward appearance of low cognitive function, I grind to a standstill when my mind is most active, which is when I feel most alive.

I should explore this, I thought, and created a board titalled 'Femme vitale' still not understanding Franch, I guessed it would just be 'vital' but turned out my stereotyping was grammatically accurate. 

I started filtering images in, of women who seemed vivacious, and noticed this had little overlap with how I filter for femme fatales. That was interesting in itself. I also noticed, that when it came to femme vitale's a selfie was not as reliable a disqualifier - it is if the camera is positioned over the woman's face. That woman is dead to me, by my grasp of french, but not deadly.

I began to notice that I was perhaps being too simplistic, many of my early pics were merely ones in which women were smiling. I thought of Mx columnist Clemintine Ford, author of 'Fight Like A Girl' and how in one of her Mx columns, she'd recounted a friend telling her that feminism was a process by which to 'figure out a way of being a girl that doesn't hurt' and maybe I was just picking genuine smiles from fake ones.

So for a while I looked through my pins trying to find images of women who felt vivrant, vivacious, alive while not necessarily smiling. I found some.

I was likely doing this variation of doomscrolling while watching the second season of Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' on HBO which my sister had recommended to me. In the second season, Nathan discovers that the first season of HBO had unintentionally resonated with an Autistic fandom. People who claimed that his absurd infinitely nesting rehearsal projects were just what they needed, that they were desirable.

I'm sure Fielder's the kind of genius that tightly planned every single moment and beat of his second season, while still using non-actors and putting them in his surreal situations. But the plot of the second season involves him going to an Autism support centre, where an employee assumes and/or heavily implies that Nathan Fielder is autistic. There is then a scene where she explains the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' diagnostic tool, and the show demonstrates fielder struggling with two multiple choice questions. 

I found this curious, guessed that the test would probably be freely available on the internet, and took it. I am going to Fielder my results, following his lead, because that seems more amusing to me just as it was in the show. But it occurred to me that I was likely in distinguishing between images that were of 'femme fatalles' and 'femme vitales' or neither, that I was doing the same exercise, or employing the same mechanism.

Now, like most humans, I wouldn't rate myself as like a human lie detector. I certainly couldn't distinguish between a serious picture and a rhetorical one, which is to say, an image that captures a real moment, and an image that captures a performance. 

In some cases I can be confident, like a sprinter crossing a finish line and having a sudden change of emotional state, is too method for most actors. I think Flo Jo is having a genuine response to winning a gold medal in the 80s.

But in other cases, you know, particularly since Pinterest became compatible with TikTok content, you can get a still image taken from a TikTok video, and in the still image feel like you are seeing one thing like a moment in a story, and then the TikTok video it is taken from, reveals it is a frame from a completely vapid and shitty Macarena style dance while a woman lip syncs along to some song they think is really cool, but is in fact, quite lame.

It's not that, but it's cueing in to things like confidence, self assurance, and even the non-verbal cues as to whether this person taking a selfie is documenting a moment in which they are happy with themselves, or appealing to 'the internet' for validation from women and girls that share their insecurities and dysmorphia.

Just to be clear, the latter inference does not get pinned to my femme vitale board.

But again, I don't want to literally talk about it with women anymore, and particularly not show any images, because I can't control the subtext, and in this case, it becomes even worse than having inferences drawn about female value generally from how I am unconsciously categorizing femme fatales, because the femme vitale adds the pressure of needing to be happy, whereas a femme fatale can wallow in being a hot mess.

Kate the Femme Banale

Lastly, my friend lent me this book, and based on the tital alone 'Wellness' I was like 'sure!' and even 'great!' and grabbed it without even judging its cover. I expected a non-fiction popular science book investigating the wellness space, Gwyneth Paltrow and all that crap.

I got home and as I went to open the cover discovered in a quote, that I was opening up a work of fiction. A novel.

Now I was confused, and as I wrote to my friend, my favorite thing about having a friend lend me a book, is when they've underlined and annotated it. My Sarah friend who rejected me, lent me a book, a seriously heavy economics text, and I delighted in these underlined passages explaining how we are all fucked with little pencil notes like 'why?' written next to them.

My second favourite thing, is trying to reverse engineer why a friend told me to read a book. Because it is not uncommon for this to be completely obscure.

Having these thoughts, and hitting patches where I was sufficiently alienated from the characters, I began to make notes to amuse myself, reading the narrative as a writer rather than a reader. Trying to predict where the story would go, which I was accurate at, suggesting that I might be best off abandoning the book.

Then I hit this chapter that introduced a new character. Set in 2014, the character Kate, was in the eyes of narrator Elizabeth, a patch of seemingly greener grass and a possible source of antidote for Elizabeth's malaise. 

Now there's a mechanical influence of an author having to thread a needle with characters like Kate, because obviously Kate serves a function in the plot, she is obviously bad news but the author needs to write from Elizabeth's perspective such that she is impressed, and if you want the most dramatic tension to build toward some payoff, you need to somewhat obfuscate that a character is bad news. James Steerforth comes to mind as having this challenge, David Copperfield needs to plausibly view James as a friend, but his later betrayals need to be plausible as well, Dickens threaded that needle by having James spend all David's money as though it were a favour to David and in some ways it is, David bribes his way into good standing at Salem House, but we as the reader can see James profiting. 

Kate engages in graphic public displays of affection in inappropriate places obliviously sexualising children, she passively aggressively refers to the older parents in their circle by 'your generation' wears upcycled clothing, dies her hair grey and is at the forefront wave of stretching-the-plausibility-of-anachronistic adoption of polyamory with her husband.

The author goes on to depict a scene where Elizabeth asks Kate about open relationships, and Kate boldly declares that she loves to convert people, then I as reader, experience this character of Kate as regurgitating a bunch of received wisdom, canned apologia for polyamory while, like a Christian apologetic movie, Elizabeth simply says her lines in the play that enable Kate to work through the scripted argument.

I scribbled in the margin 'an interestingly uninteresting character.' Here, was a kind of terrarium way of observing a character that in real life, I avoid like the plague, fearing death by boredom. A human that fails the Turing test. A zombie.

My mid-90s sensitivities were tingling - Kate was what we called between '94-'97 'a try hard' she is trying to affect the aesthetic of an interesting person, without doing the thing, she is impressing Elizabeth and I as reader have too much insight into Elizabeth's internal monologue to credit her as a reliable identifier of impressive people.

So I find myself writing 'femme banal' which google tells me the french would actually be 'femme banale' and this is so recent I haven't created a pinterest board for it, nor am convinced the exercise is worth my time, because it would involve me having to save images that by definition, are of uninteresting subject matter - overwhelmingly wannabe influencers, LinkedIn posters, successologists, conspicuous consumers, Chinese youths. 

There's a meta-interest in the workings of my own subconscious, but I actually have this really interesting example in the few pages of this novel that features Kate. Enough to work off of.

The concept of the femme banale is so fraught, I'm not sure I'd talk about it even if I wanted to with a human woman. On top of everything I already regret and make me now feel unsafe to pursue insight from actual human woman friends, and I need to articulate a quick recap - women I feel safe to discuss my sexuality with are overwhelmingly 1) women who are not sexual entities to me, and 2) women with whom our sexual tension is resolved either through dating or rejection.

Now to fall in the first category, the vast majority of my ample friendzone, I would say that being a femme banale is a significant factor. Many women I feel neither sexual intimidation nor sexual attraction with, are because I've done the requisite conversating to know I could never spend a whole Saturday of leisure time with them.

And imagine, imagine for a moment that you were somebody who consciously tried to be interesting who asks banal questions like 'what's good?' 'what's everyone reading?' 'what's everyone doing?' 'what's everyone talking about?' and then you had a conversation with me, about how such questions lead to being very basic, very banal, very obvious...to getting out of a car with 10 pre-whacked snakes on snake whacking day, so confident in your abilities to read the room that you were oblivious that an outlier just caused a paradigm shift by pointing out that whacking day was originally invented as an excuse to beat up the Irish, and that Barry White is disgusted by it, and loves the slither of a smooth sexy lady snake.

There will always be demand for some snake-oil that promises an easy answer to social desirability, furthermore that demand is so sufficient that it is possible to buy that snake oil, rub it on your skin and have other members from the same consumer demand group desperately validate that it is working.

Though on some level I believe disillusionment is good, I generally don't go into conversations with the aim of inducing an existential crisis, complete depersonalisation. It is why for all the Kate's I've met in my life, I generally prefer to smile and nod politely and take my first opportunity to never speak to them again, but of course there's levels to this shit. 

Kate may embody the vanguard iteration of the archetypal "Champagne socialist" that Rob K Henderson rebranded "Luxury Beliefs" that likely are just the symptomatic memes that become associated with the group dynamics of status seeking individuals. Wellness also has an obvious train-wreck character in Brandie, who comes from a more conservative political pole but no less banal, a kind of trad-wife influencer who instead of reciting pseudo-scientific notions of polyamory and communal child rearing, recites pseudo-scientific notions of the power of positive thinking.

All of which, I think boil down to banality being a triumph of desire over the discipline of thought. Exemplars of Plato's hypothesis that "the unobserved life is not worth living."

Now, if femme banale's were absolutely of no value, I'd have no problem discussing the concept with real live actual people and gaining tremendous benefit from dredging up what I unconsciously notice into my conscious and get clues as to how to actually navigate my life in the great project of not mistaking anxiety for strength. 

As Gordon Livingston points out in one of my favorite passages of prose - "[fools] are often capable of useful work." People desperately engaged in the project of controlling what others think of them, are often occupied, quite occupied and that can often function as a sense of stability, which allows others around them like partners and children to live stable lives, they might employ people too. I don't want to go around recklessly blowing up hedonic treadmills so that others are caught in the shockwaves.

Many people's lives are tiger-by-the-tail scenarios and I cannot take responsibility for what I might break. Now maybe under deontology ethical systems I have an obligation to blow up what conceits I might stumble into, maybe even consequentially.

But I literally don't want to talk about these things because, ironic given my first post, for me they are egocentric matters. These are only give-and-take conversation subjects because I am seeking information to help with my life to inform my own autonomy, I'm not trying to give anything back, it is not an indirect way of saying 'I have unmet needs, can you fill them?' or even 'you should fill them' and certainly not 'I am representative of my whole sex and sexual orientation, so I speak with authority about general preferences.'

Conclusion

I don't want to literally talk about my sexuality with my female friends no more, because of the human propensity to strawman, because of the human phenomena of Goodhart's law, because of human difficulties with communication in general.

It's a rather bleak notion to be entertaining, but it is based on a loss of confidence in the modal person's ability to identify authority, and to distinguish it from non-authority.

I am the world's leading expert in what I am attracted to, that doesn't necessarily mean I possess the expertise to articulate what is unintelligible and communicate it with a shared understanding of meaning. I am not an authority at all on what is generally attractive, I have no idea. 

Something I know very well about myself, is that while attraction is in some ways necessary, it is attachment that accomplishes both necessity and sufficiency. 

I simply don't like feeling depressed, so let me conclude with a concrete example: not me, certainly not me, but some guy tells a female friend he is 'sapiosexual' a term used by morons who think they mean they are 'attracted to intelligence' while clearly not understanding what 'eschew obscurantism' means, the female friend starts reading books, and not just any books but 'Infinite Jest' and 'Blood Meridian' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses'.

What a bleak fucking scene, two ships, piloted by morons failing to collide with each other in the night. Just a complete failure of subtext.