Pleasure-y Guilts:
The True Meaning of Christmas Movies
These bad Christmas movies have always offered a special pleasure for me because I am also a career-minded woman who hasn’t learned the true meaning of Christmas. So I find Holly or Carol or Eve “relatable,” except for the key point that Santa will probably never send me a boyfriend for Christmas because I’m Jewish.
On the Mat We’re Briefly Perfect: On Netflix’s “Cheer”
There is a moment after a cheer team floats into their pyramid when they hang still in mid-air, creating the impression that time has stopped. Then the pyramid disassembles in much the same way it was built; the tape could be running forwards or back.
Dancing at Lizzo’s Wedding
I recently, unexpectedly, almost died. And then after that, I had to sit around in some of the worst pain I’ve known, thinking, as one does. A lot of what I was thinking about was the video for the Lizzo song “Truth Hurts,” which I’d been watching over and over prior to the almost-death incident.
Sexy Beasts
The ubiquitous trope of hidden identity within the context of romantic encounters is a G-rated rape fantasy wherein what matters is the passion of the pursuer and what is erased is the subjectivity of the pursued. (You can’t consent to an encounter when you’ve been misled about who you’re encountering.) Even when the gender roles are reversed, the position on consent remains the same. It’s easier, when you’re a teenager especially, to exercise sexual desire when the recipient remains anonymous, hence the teenage sexual obsession with unknowable celebrities. There are fewer feelings to deal with when all of the feelings are yours. But when we transpose these benign tendencies into actual sexual encounters, the results are disturbing.
On Amish Time
Awhile ago, having just moved to Ohio from the east coast, I decided to spend New Year’s Eve with the Amish. Well, not really with the Amish but in the place where the Amish live: Amish country, the second largest tourist attraction in Ohio according to the brochures (1). The Amish don’t celebrate the new year however, nor do they celebrate Christmas on December twenty fifth. They celebrate “Old Christmas,” which is later, in January, and this seems to characterize a lot of what the Amish do: it’s not what the English do. (“English” is the adjective for the non-Amish. “Englisher” is the noun.) They’re on a different schedule. It’s hard not to romanticize the Amish. Their food is delicious. They wear charming outfits (The bonnets! The beards! The wide-placket shirts!) and they ride around in black, horse-drawn buggies with big wagon wheels that harken back to a simpler time. That’s another thing the tourism brochures say again and again and it’s sort of true.