Aubergine Dreams
determination by way of self-mutilation; why are my fantasies about fucking up?
The relief of giving in to destruction.
- Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka
As every young adult who has been mentally ill from a young age knows, nothing ever hits quite the same as your internet-fueled obsessions from when you were 13. Whether it was bandom, Superwholock, YouTubers that have since been exposed as comically terrible people, or any equally humiliating interest that somehow kept you alive at that age, regressing to that space is comforting, even when you’re old enough and mature enough that the thought of admitting to ever liking these things sends you into a cringe-induced panic. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of a time when things seemed to come alive for the first time, more painful and real than life had ever been before. Maybe it’s the comfort of knowing that, at one point in your relatively short life, you experienced genuine joy.
All this is to say, I recently started listening to Panic! at the Disco1 again. One of the songs off of their first (and best) album is about a book called Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahnuik (the author of every 20-something bro’s favorite book, Fight Club). The book essentially follows the tale of two young adults who, in their separate ways, physically mutilate their bodies with the intention of self-determination. The main character, a beautiful, conventionally attractive model, does so by shooting herself in the face, severing her jaw and leaving the bottom half of her face completely mutilated2. This is still, like, not even in the top five most jaw-dropping (lol) moments in the story. Seriously, read it.
But while the book was great, I found myself in total disbelief - not because of the unrealistic plot or characterizations, but because I just couldn’t believe that a woman would voluntarily do that to herself. It wasn’t like she was suicidal, or had the goal of inflicting pain upon herself; she did it because she was tired of being seen as beautiful, of using her looks as a crutch. She did it because she wanted to be ugly.
I don’t know about you, but I have never, ever heard a woman express a desire to be less attractive. That people would stop sexually harassing her, obviously, or that she be taken seriously despite her looks - but never that she wanted the looks themselves to diminish. Being pretty, I think, is the central goal of a startling portion of many women’s lives. I’m thinking of my mother, barely conscious and refusing to go to the Emergency Room until she put on makeup and jewelry. I’m thinking of myself, being unable to leave my room to eat or go to class because I don’t look fuckable enough that day. Of looking in the mirror and thinking, well, if this is what I look like - I might as well die. As the beloved Mitski sings,
“If I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn't know how to be alive.”
Mitski, Brand New City
This isn’t to say that men or genderqueer or non-binary people don’t experience appearance-based insecurity or self-esteem issues. Of course they do! But I do think that the equation of one’s entire self-worth and humanity with how attractive they are perceived to be is an experience deeply tied to womanhood, to what it means to move through this world as a woman. When your perceived value to others is so intricately and totally linked to your body such that all other aspects of your self seem irrelevant, that does something to you. It deeply damages your psyche, often to the point of hyper-fixation on physical appearance - attaching your entire self-worth to how you look. Feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky calls this feminine narcissism. Drawing on the works of Freud and Marx, she posits that being too closely identified with one’s physical being constitutes a form of alienation in which the psyche objectifies itself to the point of obsession. The idea resembles but expands upon the theory of the internalized male gaze:
“Knowing that she is to be subjected to the cold appraisal of the male connoisseur and that her life prospects may depend on how she is seen, a woman learns to appraise herself first. The sexual objectification of women produces a duality in feminine consciousness. The gaze of the Other is internalized so that I myself become at once seer and seen, appraiser and the thing appraised.”
- Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 38
And, as is exemplified by our beauty queen protagonist:
“The fashion-beauty complex produces in woman an estrangement from her bodily being: On the one hand, she is it and is scarcely allowed to be anything else; on the other hand, she must exist perpetually at a distance from her physical self, fixed at this distance in a permanent posture of disapproval.”
- Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 40
Put simply, feminine narcissism can be defined as “infatuation with an inferiorized body.”3
At first, the idea of pretty-girl-blows-her-face-off-for-funsies didn’t really land for me. It seemed in utter contradiction to the existence of my own experience as a woman and that of every woman I’ve ever known. But the point of the book, of course, is not the girl or the gun or even the bits of her bone and flesh the birds ate for dinner. The point (to me, at least) is the idea of self-determination. How can you control how you are perceived? How do you exercise autonomy in a world where the major trajectory of your existence is determined the moment you pop out of the womb? Girl-with-half-a-face says:
“What I need is a new story about who I am. What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself.”
- Chuck Palahnuik, Invisible Monsters
It started making more sense when I began thinking about my own fantasies, the things I daydream about when I imagine my life as it could be if I only had the courage to determine it myself. And I found that this imagined life that I stumble through in my guilty pleasures was not one of luxury or success or even happiness. Consistently, my fantasies were about, for lack of a better word, rock-bottom. About ruining everything, in a permanent and purposeful way. I dream of being a wreck. Of fucking up with finality. The freedom of ruin. The glory of sin. Exactly that: self-mutilation. Rejecting what I am ‘supposed’ to want and creating something that might be worse, but hey - at least it’s real.
I recognize, of course, that I am in a place of remarkable privilege for this to be the content of my fantasies. Like the model, I’m dreaming of rejecting unearned privileges that people literally die for. It’s selfish, and inappropriate, and just fucking weird.
But I don’t think I’m the only one. Even the following line in that Mitski song is “I should move to a brand new city and teach myself how to die”. There’s something really, really attractive about self-sabotage. If you know you will never be as beautiful as you want to be, or as successful, or as happy - isn’t there some freedom in making it impossible to try?
Maybe. At best, it might be a grass-is-greener type situation. More likely, self-sabotage - an attempt at becoming your own God - is a form of hubris. You’re looking for control, or lack thereof. You’re looking for respect by refusing to earn it. You’re searching for meaning in self-inflicted pain. And you won’t find it.
“If you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”
- Chuck Palahnuik, Ivisible Monsters
The model, for example, wanted to prove that her appearance wasn’t the most important thing about her, but instead of, I don’t know, trying to be a better person, she just made her appearance more noticeable in a different way. Maybe a part of her feared that she had nothing else to offer; perhaps she subconsciously wanted to replace the admiration and attraction with pity and fascination - equally self-serving - or she was afraid that if she actually tried to be more, she’d fall short.
So! What’s the lesson? I don’t fucking know. Maybe we should keep trying, but be more discerning about what ambitions we put our efforts towards. Maybe we should find a happy medium between doing what will benefit us materially and sticking it to the man. Maybe we should become unrecognizable and travel the country stealing drugs from the medicine cabinets of the bourgeoisie. Maybe we should just acknowledge how shallow and egocentric most of our lives are. Maybe instead of trying to find a way out of culture, we should try to change it. Devalue the concepts of beauty and success. Dismantle the patriarchy. Tear the trap to pieces.
In the meantime, I will hold metaphorical hands with my thirteen-year-old self as we listen to her favorite music and thank the universe (and George Ryan Ross III) that I’m here to wonder.
To be very clear: fuck Br*ndon Urie. I do believe Ryan Ross is a genius though - he wrote AFYCSO in high school. High school!!!
I’m not even counting this as a spoiler alert, because with the number of plot twists in that book I guarantee even with this information you’ll be literally gasping out loud at like ten different points. That book is like when drag queens do a wig reveal but they have like sixteen layers of wigs on and every single time you’re like, there can’t possibly be another wig under there. But there is. There’s more wigs.
"Inferiorized” referring to the reality that women's bodies are utterly incapable of achieving the levels of perfection demanded of them; we spend our lives in constant pursuit of a standard none of us will ever truly reach.
really beautiful, stumbled on your work from a comment on rfq's page. just wanted to say that i've felt similarly and to keep writing
Hi omg!!! I don't know if you'll read this but I really wanted to leave a comment and let you know how much I admire ur writing style ( i literally take notes lmao) I really love your takes and ideas and I love how you eloquently put how damaging sociocultural conventions can be and how it tears our insides at the seams. pls keep up the good work!!!