The Sapiosexual Love Letter Podcast

Dear Reader,

I really wanted to send you another letter before the month was out, and now it’s the last day of August, and my thoughts are still pretty scattered. Oh well!

I’ve been working on a cheeky and ambitious thesis that I like to call “Who Fucks Who In the Patriarchy.” I may return to this another day because I feel like I haven’t quite strung it all together yet. But at a start, a little terminology-setting: I’m using “the patriarchy” in the sense of the culturally entrenched dynamic of cis, straight men disproportionately holding a greater share of political and economic power.

And just to get this out of the way: sure, it’s not true that any given individual man has more power than any given individual woman, or that any straight cis man has more power than any specific queer person. Obviously that’s not universally the case, and no one is saying that it is. So we’re not going to play straw man games arguing about whether the patriarchy is “real” because sometimes men have women bosses or whatever.

Like, if I were going to launch into a discussion of fried food and health, I could pretty much trust that no one is going to question whether “fried food” is real. I mean, that could mean such a variety of things, and some things are made in a frying pan that aren’t actually fried, and it’s not the fried food that’s even the problem since everything’s fine in moderation, and anyway some people have Air Fryers now so really fried food is an outdated notion that we’ve basically moved on from as a society, right? That kind of quibbling is just silly and tedious. “Fried food” exists and is sufficiently widely understood for the purpose of discussion. So too with cultural patriarchy.

One of the things that contributes to the persistence of patriarchal structures is a cultural tendency toward binary thinking. Either this or that. If not A, then B. And then map that onto questions of who has power in a given situation; who is in charge and who is subordinate; who demands and who yields. So over time we’ve developed this unwritten script of countless attributes, and which attribute dominates which, mapped to the cultural construction of the gender binary but encompassing all sorts of things that we know—we know—have nothing to do with gender. Yet they get gender-mapped anyway.

Quick thought experiment. I’m going to list a bunch of random terms, and you’re going to assign them a label of “masculine” or “feminine” based on how you think they commonly show up in culture:

* Pretty

* Gruff

* Beer

* Booty shorts

* Sparkles

* Manual labor

I think we all agree that literally none of the above are inherently masculine or feminine, but if pressed to put them in a culturally-assigned category, we’d probably all come up with mostly the same labels.

Now imagine a pretty, gruff, beer-drinking, booty-shorts-wearing landscaper who enjoys sparkles. Would you guess (here’s another fake binary) that this character is straight or queer? Again, there’s nothing here that inherently speaks to sexuality or gender. These are just memes.

The trouble comes when you hit things like the conservative nonsense about feminists or queer people being “dangerous,” or that redefining or relaxing or decoupling from our conception of gender is “dangerous.”

There are people who sincerely believe this. I recognize their sincerity. You can be sincere and also wrong.

People who are worried about dangerous feminism and dangerous LGBTQIA+ activism are deeply caught up in the framework of cultural patriarchy. For them, it’s a key cornerstone of what brings order to the world and keeps society functioning, and if you do away with that framework, then you’re inviting total chaos. I can feel a sliver of compassion here, because you have to be living under such a constrained and tiny worldview if you feel that civilization could crumble under the weight of men wearing booty shorts or sparkly nail polish, or women running companies. If you’re so desperately worried about who fucks who, it has to be because at heart you fear that any departure from established norms might lead to a sudden unwelcome dick in your ass. Which is purely ridiculous. The notion that adherence to the conventions of the patriarchal order somehow protects people is laughable. See: literally everything.

It’s absolutely true that we could break down the very idea of gender as we know it by continually pushing boundaries on what work or dress or hobbies are allowable for whom. Is that actually “dangerous”? Why shouldn’t we? The constructs that are normalized today are contemporary artifacts that exist in time and place, not enduring universal truths. It wasn’t long ago that pink was a color for boys, and small children used to wear dress-like smocks regardless of sex. In some contemporary cultures, it remains the norm for men to have very long, carefully coiffed hair, or for women to wear highly structured straight-brimmed hats. Gender norms are contextual. I very regularly wear pants in settings where a hundred years ago (or not even that long) it would have been shocking to see a woman in trousers. Now they’re boring.

People should have the freedom to express themselves and hold out their identity to the world as they choose. And really, nobody’s gender is anybody else’s business except for the purpose of politely signaling recognition of a fellow human being through use of language, or as may be relevant to one’s own intimate personal relationships. But nobody owes the world information on what they’ve got in their pants.

Ok, that’s probably enough of a ramble in the direction of the patriarchy for one missive. Probably I’m going to come back and read this later and think, “Oh god, was that what I wrote?” — but I’m ok with that. Years and years ago, I read an interview with a yoga instructor who was releasing a book, and I don’t remember her name or the book’s title, but I will forever remember the comment she made that we should keep in mind, “our thoughts are something that pass through us, but they are not who we are.” Ideas are things to hold lightly and let go. They’re worth musing on and sharing and evolving, but they are not who we are.

Enough philosophy. Let’s do books. The theme is big nerd love.

Recently I read K.M. Neuhold’s Love Logic trilogy, which was very cute. The first book, Rocket Science, introduces PhD student Elijah who’s had a longtime crush on his best friend’s brother Pax. The second, Four Letter Word, is a poly romance among four men, three childhood friends (who of whom have been locked in a bitter feud since their senior year of high school) and one sexy bartender who helps them see each other, and themselves, differently. The third book, By the Numbers, pairs up the remaining two friends of the group, Elijah’s childhood best friend Theo and his best bud in the PhD program, the cavalier genius Alex. These were fun, low angst books with likeable characters. I did have a few “huh?” moments in how some of the PhD program stuff is discussed, having picked up a few things by osmosis from doctoral candidates that I’ve known. Also, these are very much on the sexy end of the street, and by the third book I was a little bit starting to glaze over at just how, um, damp every interaction had to be. A quick word search for “precum” shows that the term occurs 15 times in the first book, 23 times in the second, and 19 in the third. Which, bonus points for lots of sexy arousal, but maybe could have varied some of the word choice.

Also in nerd territory, I finally read Charlie Novak’s Roll for Love trilogy and really enjoyed it. It starts with Natural Twenty featuring a tattooed and physically imposing but very sweet florist and a lively pierced-and-tattooed bookstore owner who is just getting his business off the ground. Charisma Check is an enemies-to-lovers romance between cosplayers. And Proficiency Bonus is a meet-cute story of a pink-haired personal assistant with ADHD and an actor on a popular fantasy TV series whose life turns deeply stressful when his network unexpectedly declares the show to be in its final season and proposes a homophobic ending that would break the hearts of its queer fandom. The characters appear across all three books as their lives intertwine, but the three stories are really quite distinct and could really be read in any order.

That’s it from me. Goodbye, August. Hello, autumn.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I was having a conversation with my mom the other day about how a cute house I’ve long admired just went up for sale, and she very sweetly said, “Ooh, do you want to buy it? Maybe it’s meant to be.” And I said, “I don’t believe in meant to be.” And then I flipped her the bird and drove away on my motorcycle. Ok, not that last part, but there’s no way to say, “I don’t believe in meant to be” and not feel like it’s coming across a bit harsh.

Here’s the thing: I believe in mystery. I believe in a sort of karma, which (to paraphrase James Baldwin) is that people pay for what they do and what they allow themselves to become, and they do so by the lives that they lead. After a fashion, I believe in magic, if not so much the spellbook sort. But I don’t believe that the universe has a plan for us all, or that no one is given more than what they can bear, or that people get what they deserve, or that things work out as they’re meant to. Because if that were anything like true, what kind of asshole is running this whole outfit?

Ten years ago, a friend of mine died of cancer. In an email to family and friends a month before he passed away, he included this comment, which has stayed with me like it’s tattooed on my heart:

[R]ecall that my belief system is such that I do not think this is part of some divine plan or that somehow this must all be a good thing. I completely respect if you feel that way or if feeling that way helps you to cope. I really do. Please just respect that I do not. I’m comfortable with randomness in the world.

He was an amazing person whose work made the world a materially and measurably better place. He had a family that loved him and kids that needed him, and if there was any divine plan behind him getting cancer and dying young, then the inescapable conclusion is that God must be a dickhead. I’m not buying it. I’d rather accept that some things are just bad luck. Sometimes you’re dealt a bad hand. And then sometimes it works out anyway, but that’s not because the universe has a plan. That’s just how luck works.

I’m comfortable with randomness in the world.

When I was a kid, one year there was a huge snowstorm that came unusually early in the year. A week later, when my mom was out for a walk on her lunch break, she was clobbered by a fist-sized chunk of ice that fell from the 13th-floor ledge of an office building. It hit her square on the top of the head, a direct smite from on high, and she dropped like she’d been shot, face-first onto the sidewalk.

She could have died, but she didn’t.

If she’d been a half-step ahead or behind, it might have missed her entirely, but it didn’t.

She could have suffered a life-altering traumatic brain injury. But nope, she didn’t. It sucked for a while, and then she recovered.

So, is that bad luck, or good luck?

On a much smaller scale, while recently vacationing with my family, we spent some time hanging out by a bonfire on the rocky lakeshore, and I had the bad luck / good luck to almost crush my foot under a rock. It was bad luck that I got a little bruised and scuffed up, but it was very good luck that the rock didn’t decide to roll a quarter inch farther and really smash me. I had the good luck to only need a little bandage and not a trip to the emergency room.

I don’t believe in meant to be. Yet I do believe in gratitude, in giving thanks, even when I’m not quite sure who I’m thanking. I said several thank-yous to the crisp clear air for my mostly-unhurt foot. And who knows, maybe the air listens. I do think (or hope?) that there’s more to the world around us than what we readily perceive. To me, that’s mystery.

Here’s the thing: we have this problem where our ability to communicate what we understand about life, the universe, and everything is mediated through the electrically charged meat of our brains and a veil of language, which is a great tool but also very slippery and tricksy. Sometimes we exercise caution with using language. For instance, in science and in the law, “terms of art” are a big deal because words need to mean very precise things. Or from another direction, we might be careful of the intention vested in speech. In Buddhism, “right speech” is one of the fundamental practices of the Noble Eightfold Path. “Be impeccable with your word” is one of the Toltec beliefs laid out by Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements.

As much as I love language, the lesson that I have been chasing my whole life is the one about forgetting the words and listening to the world. The words are the raft, or the finger pointing at the moon. Language is the framework that’s meant to hold meaning. The frame is not what’s important.

Thirty spokes join together in the hub,It is because of what is not there that the cart is useful.Clay is formed into a vessel.It is because of its emptiness that the vessel is useful.Cut doors and windows to make a room.It is because of its emptiness that the room is useful.Therefore, what is present is used for profit.But it is in absence that there is usefulness.

Sometimes a part of what we’re doing when we use language is casting a spell, to try to name the world and thereby shape it, whether or not that’s what we consciously intend. And that’s a real sort of magic. It is not trivial. We can use it to shape the shared reality we live in, to identify a problem that can then be solved, to create pain or healing, even to call something into being that never existed before.

But words themselves are not magical. Words are spokes; words are clay.

There’s an idea that shows up in fantasy, particularly involving witches or wizards or sorcerers, that a wielder of magic can exercise power over a person or a thing by knowing its True Name. There are also various faith traditions that have the creator speaking the world into being. I do believe in the power of words, but I think fantasy and myth have it a little backward. It’s not that knowledge of a sacred name gives you power. It’s that we learn the true names of things by knowing them, and in the truths we know and distill into words, there is power.

Anyway, that cute little house that went up for sale? They’ve already accepted an offer. But I’m content with the very cozy place I have now, so I have no complaints about the balance of luck in this matter.

On the book side:

While I was on vacation, I finally read Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, and look. It was really fucking adorable. The characters were vivid and likeable, and the story was charmingly threaded with anti-colonialism and a genuine recognition of the value of public service and what it means to do good work, to persist in the work for the right reasons. Plus, you know, just breathtakingly sexy. Also, I developed a total supporting-character crush on Oscar Diaz and would be happy to grill the ribs at his beautiful lake house any day. But also also, the part where this is an alternate universe, yes, please, take me there. McQuiston notes in the acknowledgments at the end that they had the idea for this book in early 2016, and then, like, 2016 actually happened, and as they put it, “Suddenly what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parallel universe needed to be escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality.” The book was originally published in 2019, when we still thought 2016 was a high water mark. So: yeah. It turns out that escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality continues to be a pretty relevant note to hit.

And another book mention: I also recently went on a bit of a binge with the works of R. Cooper, and it’s more than possible that the Familiar Spirits books are what kicked off all my rambling thoughts about magic. I particularly want to hang out with Ezra and Emery from the third book, Nothing More Certain. Or at least watch Ezra’s handicraft videos on YouTube. Cooper’s work is pretty wildly imaginative and spans a remarkably varied range, from urban-fantasy shapeshifters to sci-fi aliens to regular-world firefighters, and includes characters who are non-neurotypical and characters who are ace or a-spec, which still tend to be pretty underrepresented in the genre.

Ok, that’s it from me. I’m going to pop out for a walk in the sunshine. Hope you’re well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

Hope you’re well. Has it been hot where you are? Are you staying safe?

Me, I’ve been on something of an unreasonably grumpy kick. For … well, a few years now, but with a particular resurgence in the last couple weeks. There are many things to be reasonably grumpy about, but then there’s just being a surly bastard, and I regret to say that sometimes that’s me. Partly that’s why I’ve been quiet lately – I have to round up all my grumpy thoughts and try to sort them into some kind of better order, like herding cats. Partly, being grumpy has given me sort of a readers’ block, where I keep starting new books and not getting into them, or picking at things that aren’t really a fault, which is unfair to the book.

Usually, I find romance novels to be a good outlet for channeling an overabundance of feelings that I otherwise don’t have any place to put. I suspect that’s true for a lot of readers, and for a lot of different types of stories. Stories are good carrier vehicles for all kinds of mental and emotional load.

Of course there are some common romance novel tropes and themes that don’t resonate with me. I think it’s because I don’t have the right brain chemistry to sip angst like a fine wine or to revel in embarrassing cringe. On the other hand, I can usually get behind the sudden but inevitable betrayal, or impossible relationships.

And I am down for all manner of longing and pining. I can do longing for days. I’ve got an entire psychological wine cellar full of longing, wardrobes and cabinets, rows and stacks and bulging laundry baskets just overflowing with lush, gorgeous longing. 

Some of that backlog of longing probably comes from being separated from my spouse. We’ve been separated for … a while. It would make a really good story, but it’s not one I’m telling, and anyway we haven’t figured out yet how it ends. And yeah, I do think there’s some relief in channeling some of my real feelings into fictional pining, but I think that only works because I’m already built around nurturing those feelings. It turns out my stupid heart was pretty well fashioned to stand on a rocky shoreline in a wind-tossed shawl, watching my love disappear out to sea. So dumb.

I’ve always liked stories of characters fighting the long fight for each other. One of my all-time favorite fairy tales is The Wild Swans, which is really about enduring love between siblings, with a love story tacked onto the end for dramatic effect. In the story, the princess’s brothers have been turned into swans by their wicked stepmother, and the princess commits to breaking the spell by gathering nettles which she must beat into fibers to make into cloth and then into shirts for all of them. And she must carry this out under a vow of silence; if she speaks a word before the task is done, her brothers will die. I grew up on an old farm in the country where nettles grow in abundance, so it made perfect sense to me that one would have access to that quantity of nettles, and I know exactly what the shredded fibers of their stalks look like when stomped underfoot, and I absolutely know just how much nettle stings hurt like a motherfucker. I also loved swans when I was little, and I couldn’t tell you whether that love of swans or the story came first.

Thinking about what I like about “The Wild Swans,” it has characters who believe in good and persist in being good, and dedication through pain in commitment to love. And that sounds very romantic. But also, the story has a clear fascination with pain. The nettles are kind of a giveaway, right? Except the thing about that is, fascination with pain is all over the place in stories. One way or another, even if it’s not quite so blatant, that’s actually what most stories are about. And I think that’s partly a matter of chemistry. 

Really, you can think about plot in terms of the cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters released in response to stress. Everyone is familiar with “fight or flight,” but that’s a little oversimplified. Depending on the source, these days you might see that expanded to fight, flight, freeze, flop, fawn, fuck, or some subset thereof. This is also a pretty good summary of the types of plot beat that show up in stories, both modern and ancient. The whole theater and aesthetic of ecstatic suffering in religious traditions is all about this. 

We all experience pain. In how we each feel what we feel, and what we do with those feelings, individuals vary wildly. We want our pain to have meaning, or we want to find meaning that takes us out of pain, or for some, maybe pain is the relief that takes one out of oneself. One way or another we are each subject to the workings of our own unique cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, norepinephrine and epinephrine, serotonin and dopamine.

Dopamine is all about wanting. It’s not about fulfillment. When you get the thing you were craving, the magic sparkle of dopamine recedes, and you’re left with the plain actual effects of whatever you just got. Which might be satisfaction and satiety (jackpot!) or might be a damp fizzle that quickly turns to a new craving. For me, ice cream is a really good illustration of this. I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how much I think I want the extra scoop or the larger size, because within the first three bites, that craving will settle down into being entirely content with a small portion, and eating more than that will make me feel gross and jittery. I may want the idea of two scoops, but my body can only handle the reality of one.

I think this is part of the reason fantasies are not necessarily a reliable guidepost for what we actually want; rather fantasies are a place to put all our wanting. Whereas to know the experience you actually want to live, you sort of have to take a stab at living it. And then maybe some of the things you think you might want won't turn out to be quite what you thought, and maybe some things will fit like a glove. But you don't have to solve the whole thing at once. You can try something and decide you don’t like it. You can try it again and decide that you do. We’re meant to change and grow.

Cortisol and adrenaline are exciting in the immediate term, but they’re meant for small doses. The last few years have been chaotic and stressful for the world, and conversations about burnout are happening all over the place. Chronic stress is a drag on the system. But we can get a charge out of an acute stress response. Acute stress and recovery creates positive adaptation in the body. Work out, then rest and refuel. Watch an intense movie with a friend or partner, then talk about it and process your response. Ride a roller coaster, then go eat mini donuts while walking the midway. Have a fight, then make up.

Positive adaptation to stress presumes recovery. An injury beyond that gets into trauma territory. Healing from trauma is harder, especially if a person doesn’t realize or acknowledge that what they experienced was trauma. It’s like trying to walk off a broken leg.

Romance plots are often heavily character-driven, and coping with or healing past trauma is a common theme. Though that’s not to suggest it’s a unifying theme, as the ways that this shows up and how it’s handled are as varied as human experience itself. 

I also threw out a mention before of pain that takes one out of oneself. That could mean the vicarious experience of a story, being taken out of oneself through the thrilling or gut-wrenching twists of a plot to a final breathtaking resolution of love and justice. But we could also talk about that at the level of the body, and the need to scratch a particular sort of itch.

Kink has gotten a little more mainstream, for better and for worse. For better, because I’m all about sex positivity and people feeling open to explore their desires. But we still live in a culture with a lot of sex negativity, which sometimes gets translated in really unhealthy ways in experimenting with kink, or portrayals of kink in stories. Which is a shame, because the bedrock foundation of good kink is clear and honest communication, consent and boundaries, safety, and aftercare, and the vanilla world could learn a thing or two from that.

There’s sort of a potential catch-22 in portraying healthy kinky relationships in romance novels. It’s generally a distinguishing feature of a romance that the plot includes working through conflict in the relationship between the main characters, so in order for the story to be interesting, the characters have to have some looming issues about unresolved feelings or miscommunications between them. But stormy unresolved feelings and failure to communicate openly and honestly are dangerous things to bring into a kinky scene. You need those feelings to build an interesting story; you need to check those feelings, or navigate them very carefully, to avoid creating a bad scene. 

For Real by Alexis Hall does this very beautifully. This is a romance between an older submissive man, Laurie, and a young dominant man, Toby, and among Hall’s fans is sort of notoriously the one with the lemon meringue pie (which, to be fair, is a pretty remarkable scene with fairly intense predicament bondage). It’s a story that plays around with the challenges of being young and trying to figure out who you are under the weight of the weird bullshit of the world, or being not-so-young and trying to continue to find meaning in a world that is so full of bullshit. There’s a bit where Toby complains about the insipid stupidity of asking, after reading the poem The Jaguar, “What does Ted Hughes think about zoos?” – I think about that a lot. There’s also a knifepoint scene in the book where Toby convinces Laurie to take him to a sex party, and they almost do something really ill-advised, and then they don’t. And look, I know that’s the most vague description possible, but it’s not really about the specific thing that happens (or doesn’t) in that moment. It’s the way that the story has placed all these threads leading up to that moment, and then suddenly presses down hard so that the entire universe narrows to this pinpoint of suspense, being braced for a bad impact and already wincing, and then instead, it turns sweet, and the pure relief is like a physical sensation of its own.

Alexis Hall is on my mind because he has another book coming out in just over a week, Husband Material, which I’m very excited to get my hands on. (I read a preview of the first few chapters back in February and wrote about it here.) It follows up Boyfriend Material, which is an entirely different sort of emotional roller coaster from For Real, one with no kink and a lot of whimsy, and also the baggage we get saddled with, and what it means to fuck up badly and try again anyway, and how we show up for the people we care about.

I’m on vacation with family this week, going to a place with the express purpose of relaxing. Honestly, I’ve kind of forgotten how this works, but I’m sure my family will remind me.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

If you haven’t noticed, I’m an overthinker by nature. This has been a hell of a week for it. 

One thing I think about a lot is the way that we think about how we think about what we think we think about. That is, there’s what you actually think about, the whole mess of your perceptions and reactions and speculations and stray idle thoughts and sneaky cognitive biases. And what you think you think about is mostly just barely skimming off the top of that. And then most of our discourse in society comes from people hashing out opinions taken from that bare skimming of the mind. So then how you think about that social discourse is where it’s very easy to get disheartened about what shitheads people can be. But there’s also opportunity to take a breath and reframe, to look at what assumptions or fears or priorities are implicit and unspoken in the ways that people express their opinions, which also requires airing out your own assumptions and fears and priorities if you’re going to think about any of this properly.

Last week, before the news of Friday, Lyz Lenz published a really excellent interview with Regina Bateson, who is currently a professor of public and international affairs. In 2017, Bateson ran for Congress, and in her campaign she repeatedly encountered the barrier of the perception that women are less electable because “other people are sexist.” After Bateson lost that election, she went on to study this phenomenon of perceived electability as “strategic discrimination” to better understand its effects as well as how it might be overcome.

Bateson’s field is political science, but for me, this lights up the part of my brain with a passion for behavioral economics. Politics and public policy and economics are pretty innately entwined, after all. I first got interested in behavioral economics when I was in college, not through any class but through an article I stumbled across in The Economist which I was idly reading during my late shift working the front desk of a dormitory. The article talked about a study on the sometimes unintuitive collective impact of individual decisions. The researchers had created a simple computer model of households moving within a city map to examine the effect of bias over time. The map started as a randomized mix of yellow and blue households. The question was, how much bias does it take on the part of the movers to end up with neighborhoods that self-segregate into yellow versus blue? And it turns out: it didn’t take much at all. If moving households were assigned a preference of having even one neighbor of the same color, then over a not-very-large number of moves, neighborhoods would begin to look dramatically segregated.

It feels unintuitive because our tendency is to think, “If we remove most of the bias, then results should be mostly unbiased.” But really, it shouldn’t be that hard to grasp that any bias is going to lead to biased results. We wouldn’t say, “If I remove most of the arsenic from the sugar bowl, then it should be fine to set it out for tea.”

What particularly fascinates me about Bateson’s research is her finding that individuals significantly overestimate how racist and sexist other people truly are. Call this what we think about how other people think about what they think they think about. We’re not actually very good at understanding “them.” If what defines “us” versus “them” is that “us” are those having views that we approve of, presumably “them” must have lots of views that we object to. But everyone is part of an “us.” There is no “them.”

But of course, yes, I’m very aware that I’m writing this on the heels of the US Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade, and indeed, I do feel the creepy avaricious gaze of the religious right trying to stare directly into my uterus. Maybe sometimes there’s a “them.” Sometimes other people are sexist or racist, and it doesn’t matter that they aren’t very sexist or racist. Any arsenic in the sugar bowl is too much arsenic.

Roe v. Wade protected the right to abortion before viability of the fetus, but if you ask a lawyer about Roe v. Wade, they had better talk about “penumbras and emanations,” or you should get your deposit back. I’m not much of a scholar of constitutional law, but I do at least recall that much. Patients’ privacy is not directly protected in the Constitution; it’s not an enumerated protected right in the Bill of Rights. But the Court found that a right to privacy was implied by the penumbras of rights explicitly protected. This “penumbras” framework originated in Griswold, in which the Court struck down a state law against contraceptives as an unconstitutional intrusion upon the right of marital privacy. In Roe, that implicit right of privacy is what was held to protect individuals from state interference in their personal medical decisions including the decision to terminate a pregnancy pre-viability. (That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but damn it, this is not a legal brief, and I can be a little loose with my summation.)

Pro-life conservatives have been playing a long game to overturn Roe, which has finally paid off. And the thing is, the law is a game. It’s a game of rules, where some of the rules give the players the power to make up other rules. As a player, you can play by navigating the rules as you encounter them, or you can play by seeking to circumvent the rules, or you can play by introducing rules more favorable to yourself. But there are consequences to playing like that. When all the poker chips are piled at one greedy corner of the table, when the Jenga tower is teetering at the slightest breath, what happens next? 

Under the superficial gamesmanship, the law is, at its core, a system of reckoning with consequences. And the reason this is important is that consequences exist. They always exist, independent of what we want them to be or think they should be or wish they weren’t. We tend to think of the law as determining the consequence of certain actions. But that’s not really how it works. Actions have consequences, and then as a society we use the law to shift the burden of those consequences one direction or another. 

People are very prone to magical thinking. We think things should be a particular way and somehow that means therefore they must be. We mistake the feeling of certainty for actual truth. But being certain of something is no guarantee of being right. Fundamentally, we are not very good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. Our brains are made for fantasy. That’s the main show in your frontal lobe, even when it’s all very mundane, even when it’s just thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner, or what that shelf from IKEA is going to look like in the living room, or that conversation you need to have with so-and-so. Imagination is a very powerful tool. But it can also be deeply misleading.

Right now there is some pro-life cishet couple in Alabama or Kentucky or Arkansas or Ohio congratulating each other on this hard-fought win that protects the precious unborn. And next week or next month, one half of that couple is going to develop an ectopic pregnancy or have an incomplete miscarriage that leads to sepsis. And they are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their moralizing did not protect them from this outcome. Maybe she just dies and leaves him picking up the pieces. Or maybe he figures out how to get her, in hideous pain, transported to another state where she can get the medical treatment that might save her life. I am not wishing this on anyone: I am just pointing out that this happens. Consequences exist. This is going to be a consequence of an absolute ban on abortion in these and other states. 

The way pro-life people think about abortion has almost nothing to do with the realities of biology, and it’s really only loosely aligned with morality, from one extremely narrow vantage point. There’s what they think they think about, and all their righteous justification around what they think they think, and almost none of it has any relationship to the actual reality of the world as it is.

There has also been a lot of fist-shaking against the injustice of a Supreme Court flying in the face of majority opinion, but that’s not a bandwagon I can jump on. Since when is majority opinion a good measure of justice? That is literally the foundation of the doctrine of substantive due process (which is what Justice Thomas attacked in his how-can-I-be-more-of-an-asshole concurrence). Many of the civil rights victories won in the Supreme Court have broken with popular opinion. The problem with banning abortion is not that most people support access to abortion. Dobbs framed the question as whether the Constitution confers a right to abortion, but that’s not really the question either. The issue is to what extent the state may abridge a person’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy, including whether a state can impose laws restricting a person’s ability to seek safe medical care to terminate a pregnancy… as well as whether individuals whose pregnancies don’t end in live birth can be prosecuted by the state for not carrying their pregnancy to term. 

If Congress doesn’t step in to codify protection of individual medical decisions including abortion and the privacy of information relating to possible pregnancy, and to bar prosecution of individuals for pregnancies not ending in a live birth, then this question is going to return again and again to the courts. And it’s going to happen in the form of that bereaved husband whose wife died while her doctor was on the phone with the hospital’s lawyer, trying to sort out whether the hospital could provide the treatment that would save her life. Or it’s going to be an appeal of a criminal conviction for a woman who gave premature birth to a stillborn child and was then prosecuted based on her anxiety-fueled internet searches for “what causes miscarriage.” Or a trans man who is prosecuted for trying to commit suicide while pregnant. 

I could keep coming up with scenarios. As any lawyer could tell you, there will always be another set of facts to argue. 

Consequences exist, and that includes consequences of injustice. In an unjust system, the ethical choice is to fight the system, to engage in resistance and civil disobedience. There are lots of ways to get organized. Maybe consider contributing to a legal defense fund. Brush up on your rights as a protester. I’m not saying you should start a riot, but if you do, call me for bail. 

And when you’re tired and aching and you can’t think about this train wreck for one more fucking second, ground yourself in something that gives you joy. I mean, take a minute to wallow in your feelings first. Take a deep breath, holler a good what the fucking fuck (aloud or in your mind), heave that breath out on a sob, and maybe do that a couple times. Then press the heels of your hands to your eyes on one more deep breath, and drop your arms, roll your shoulders a couple of times, and go look at pictures of cute animals for a while. Go hug someone you love. Take a walk outside and look for birds and flowers. Fix yourself a nice beverage and drink it slowly. Read a book.

Reading is my safe place. There are lots of ways that I’m in love with the world, lots of ways that I can seek grounding in a breath or a touch or a good cuppa, but books are my refuge. When all else fails, I hide in a book until I can breathe again. I am so grateful that I live in a time and place where I have access to such an incredible universe of other people’s imaginations and knowledge and experiences. It has been a rough couple of years, and I mean that on a personal level as well as the raging collective dumpster fire that we all have been living through. Stories remind me of the things worth fighting for.

Last week I read You & Me by Tal Bauer. And then I read it again, and then I read it again. It’s a romance between two 40-ish single dads of varsity football star sons. I am clueless about football, but then so is Luke, whose perspective the book is told from. Luke’s marriage had already been fractured before his wife died the previous year, and he is desperate to rebuild his relationship with his angry and distant son. He meets Landon when Luke shows up at a football practice (previously his wife’s sole domain), and Landon gets him to volunteer with the booster club. They hit it off as friends immediately, and then Luke has a literal bi-awakening moment and realizes he’s completely fallen for his new best friend.

And ok, if I describe this story, honestly it sounds like nothing I would ever voluntarily pick up, because I’m generally not into sports, or Texas, or things that might be blurbed as “the tender tale of two people who heal their hearts and learn to love again,” or “a beautiful story of fathers and sons,” or “the truth might tear them apart… or just might make them stronger than ever.” But I picked this up based on a recommendation, and I’m so glad I did because I just absolutely loved the hell out of it. The characters are great, and the relationships among all the characters are truly lovely. The friends-to-lovers arc is beautifully done, and the dynamic between Luke and Landon is sweet and heart-warming and sensuous and hot. Also I learned about a wine that I now want to try, and a cool job that I didn’t know anything about, and ok, I even liked the football stuff.

Also, the bi-awakening moment hit remarkably close to home. Not quite the same, but the feeling of it. For me, I’ve known pretty much all my life that I could find women physically attractive, but I hadn’t ever met a woman I was seriously interested in having an actual relationship with. I was comfortable identifying as straight because it accurately reflected my dating history. At that time, it felt to me like I wasn’t really “bi enough” to call myself bi, as if it’s a title you have to earn (which today, I recognize as internalized bi erasure, but we get to learn these things about ourselves and that’s ok). I had ended a relationship at the start of the year, and a few weeks later, a friend started to invite me to hang out with her and a couple other work friends, one of whom was funny and smart and could wear the hell out of a black v-neck t-shirt. We got to be great friends. I remember that when I bought a bottle of her preferred brand of liquor for a friendly birthday celebration in the spring, I was just thinking about what would make a nice gift for my new friend who I really liked. And then somewhere a couple weeks later it struck me that I was, in fact, absolutely and completely head over heels in love with her. Not falling in love, but straight up gone. She was still entangled with her previous girlfriend at that point, and I thought, oh god, I’m her straight friend who she knows isn’t going to hit on her because she’s expecting me to be straight, and she has a girlfriend, and now I’m going to come over all schmoopy and cow-eyed at her, and it’s going to be so uncomfortable and ruin our friends’ night hangouts. And then I just buckled in for the ride of having this funny, amazing friend with only the small price to pay of having to regularly restrain myself from climbing into her lap because that would be uncool. 

And then, you know, more stuff happened. A soggy music festival, an overturned kayak, spending two hours looking for each other for lunch in the park. Going to the movies together. Panicking and running away and then texting to say, Sorry I freaked, can we talk about this?

Reader, I married her. And if I were Charlotte Bronte writing Beasley Eyre, that’s where the story would end, with a charming epilogue about our dinosaur-and-robot themed wedding. Because that’s how romance novels work. 

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

Happy Juneteenth to you. This week I was reading up a little on Frederick Douglass, and I want to share this quote, which I think is appropriate for the holiday and which also applies equally well in the context of Pride Month:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, at the age of 20. He published his first autobiography in 1845. He then visited Ireland, coinciding with the Great Famine there; he had the experience of freedom from racism while also witnessing levels of poverty that reminded him of the conditions of slavery. (In a letter discussing this he commented, “he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his anti-slavery faith.”) After his return to the US, he began publishing an abolitionist newspaper in 1847. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848. In the 1850s he advocated for the integration of schools. Douglass’s activism made him one of the most prominent voices of the abolitionist movement. His understanding of the power of photography also led to him being the most photographed American of the 19th century.

Through the lens of history, we know that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln in 1863, and that slavery was finally abolished in America by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. And there’s a great temptation when looking back at historical events to think that there must have been an inevitability to their progress — that because we can draw the line from one event to the next to see how things proceeded, therefore the path must have been predictable, the end foreseeable. But that is the narrative fallacy. In truth, when Douglass escaped from his enslaver at the age of twenty, he could not know whether he’d be recaptured and returned, beaten or killed or made to live in chains. Certainly that was the fate of many others. When Douglass wrote his first autobiography or began publishing his newspaper, he could not have known whether his message would carry or whether he’d be murdered by an angry mob, like abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy famously had been a decade earlier.

I find it astounding and deeply awe-inspiring that Frederick Douglass pitted himself against injustice with such absolute determination, with no assurance of success and many examples of bloody retribution. And of course there were a great many people who played a part in the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet in a very real sense, you could say that Douglass was a uniquely pivotal figure who devoted his life to this cause, and he fucking won.

Just something to think about the next time you’re wondering whether it’s worth continuing to fight that uphill battle. Because: yes. Yes, it is. It’s the only way it can ever be won.

Of course, it’s a bit hard to pivot to romance novels from there. I do love me a noble sentiment, but you know, Frederick Douglass also had to wash his hair and trim his nails and pick out his clothes in the morning, and I bet he occasionally cussed when he spilled his coffee, and he probably got gassy when he ate too much broccoli. The little ordinary things of life are so much the same for all of us.

I recently have been reading a little more poetry again. I think of myself as eclectic in my taste, but in poetry as in romance, there are definitely things I’m drawn to. I like poetry that feels like a brisk knock on the doorframe or like sunlight plucked from dappled leaves; where there may be shadows and sorrows, a discovery of crawling things under old damp wood, or a memorial to grief, rough like stone against the fingertips; but then there is a return to this moment, a remembering of what is transient and precious. I don’t think poems need to have a point, the same way flowers don’t need to have a point; and yet sometimes flowers mean a lot, whether that’s a rose garden or a field of poppies.

In romance writing, I think the thing that I look for most is the arc of relational intelligence drawn by the story. I can’t put it into better words than that. There are books that should not have worked for me at all from the perspective of tropes that annoy me or plot twists that make me gnash my teeth, that somehow still worked for me in the context of the arc of the story and the way the characters fit together. The characters can start heart-dumb and grow wise, or they can start wise and then realize they weren’t so wise as they thought. They can be opposites who attract or a matched pair, sweet or smart or snarky or stoic. They can let each other down and forgive each other — but there has to be enough substance there to be worth forgiveness. They should bring out the best in each other.

I guess that’s it in a nutshell. I like stories about characters who ultimately bring out the best in each other.

So on that note, it’s book time.

I recently read The Love Study by Kris Ripper. I thought this was an extremely sweet story, and I liked the way that it played around with expectations of relationships and romance and other ways of looking at what we want from a partner. It’s written in first-person from the perspective of Declan, and the very first thing we learn about Declan is that he left his last boyfriend at the altar. He’s repeatedly teased about this by his friends, including the ex-boyfriend who remains one of his closest friends despite having been left at the altar, but it’s also left him totally afraid of romance and relationships. He meets Sidney, a genderqueer person who runs an advice show on YouTube. Sidney doesn’t date, and this sort of opens the field for Declan to spill his guts about his own conflicted feelings about dating, which leads to Sidney coming up with the idea for “The Love Study,” to bring Declan on their show as a guest, set him up with a series of dates, and talk about how it goes. Which is a great idea, except that it turns out the person Declan is feeling the most interested in is Sidney.

There were a few things about how the characters in this book communicate that might not have worked for me in a different story. One big recurring one: I struggled a bit with how regularly Declan’s friends gave him shit for leaving his ex-boyfriend at the altar, given that it seemed pretty obvious that he was kinda traumatized by the whole thing — not to mention everyone’s agreement that in hindsight he and the ex-boyfriend would not have made each other happy and their marriage would have been a train wreck, which means Declan did the right thing in not going through with it, even if he didn’t do it in the optimal way. But overall I really liked the friends, and I think this is actually a realistic sort of blindspot that can exist in real life friendships — you think that you’re teasing someone over an amusing anecdote for years and really have no clue that your poor friend feels it like the twist of a knife every time. And ultimately I was very satisfied with how this particular bit gets tied off at the end of the story.

I also thought this had an interesting take on its theme about conventional romance not being for everyone. Declan and Sidney’s chemistry is at its weakest when they try to do conventional romantic date type things, and recognizing that is part of them figuring out How To Relationship with each other. But what was funny to me is that their experience of spending quality time with each other and having good chemistry outside the context of conventional hearts-and-flowers romance? That very highly corresponds with my own actual lived experience of good relationships, and what I suspect is the actual lived experience of a lot of people. So it ended up for me being a sort of meditation on how we can trip ourselves up falling into cultural normative patterns that feel like something we’re “supposed to” do even when we ought to know better, even when we think we’ve shed the conventional mindset.

Also, I really liked it that one of the main characters politely called out the other for their internalized ableism about their anxiety. Because I had never really thought of it in those terms. There’s a lot of self-deprecating language that people use which masks some pretty negative self-talk that can be very unhelpful. Be compassionate with yourself, you know? Treat yourself the way you would want someone you love to be treated.

There are two follow-up books, The Hate Project and The Life Revamp, featuring characters from the same friend group. Haven’t read these yet but am looking forward to both.

That’s all from me today. Hope you’re well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I was talking to a coworker last week about mental health in the workplace, managing personal ups and downs and how that affects being able to show up the way that you want to. They were talking about wanting to pursue new opportunities but also worrying about falling flat on their face because new things mean transition which means stress which means potential mental health impact. Of course I’m eliding quite a bit, but that was kind of the core of it.

The thing is, I’m actually right in the midst of taking on a new opportunity at work, so it was a very timely subject for me. And I think I had some intelligent, or at least intelligible, things to say on the subject, from taking a page from Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are to a more prosaic “screw expectations, I’m just gonna do what I think is meaningful.” But I think there’s another piece that I overlooked in that conversation, which is opportunity cost.

Economics teaches that the opportunity cost of a choice is the set of options foreclosed by that choice. If I have an apple, and I eat it, then I can no longer sell it, nor can I put it in a pie. Those are two clear, straightforward opportunity costs of eating the apple.

If I’m considering a new venture that interests me, and I go for it and then belly-flop hard into the pavement, that is obviously not a super fun outcome. But if I don’t go for it, I’m avoiding a risk of failure at the cost of a 100% certain result of me not getting to do the thing I’m interested in. So the question isn’t really whether you’re afraid of falling on your face. It’s whether falling on your face is the worst possible outcome—whether the chance of doing something new is worth the risk of it not working out.

Thinking about the cost balance of risk, I regularly do ask myself just that: “what’s the worst that could happen here?” And I find that to be a genuinely helpful question. Because you can break it down into worst possible and worst likely.

Like, say I’m co-planning an event that’s expected to draw a large video audience. As the event approaches, I’m thinking about what I need to do to be fully prepared, so I walk through the logistics, maybe do a dry run of the expected program to test the features I want to use and check pacing. And then rather than spiraling on every possible thing that might go wrong, I jump straight into the deep end and ask, “what’s the worst that could happen?” And the worst possible thing is, oh, the presenter could literally have a heart attack on camera, and I’d have to figure out how to close down the presentation with minimal trauma to the participants and maybe how to contact emergency services for someone sitting in a remote location (assuming, worst case scenario, that the presenter was alone and completely incapacitated). But that’s pretty unlikely, right? Not impossible, but unlikely. The worst-case likely scenario is that the presenter’s video feed is bad, or that someone says something awkward or inappropriate, which would be non-ideal but deal-with-able. Anything short of a heart attack is not so bad. And the most likely thing to go wrong is that the presentation runs overlong and we’d have to cut short some portion or miss Q&A at the end. That’s not even a bad outcome at this point, right? Just a hiccup. (In fact, this is why it’s always a good idea to allot generous time for Q&A. Pro tip.)

Sort of a pivot, but not unrelated to catastrophizing and opportunity cost: I read a thing last week, 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture, which proposes an idea that is worth considering. Yet also I couldn’t help coming away with an overall impression of:

I do get the point that the author is making. I really do. But I think that you could alternatively title this “14 Warning Signs That You Personally Are Living in a Cultural Echo Chamber.” Or possibly “14 Warning Signs That You Are Hung Up on a Dream of a Counterculture That Existed in the 1970s.” As to the 14 points themselves, they’re not wrong, but also I think there’s a meaningful counterpoint for every single one.

For instance, “Indie music and alt music are marginalized”—well yeah, man, that is pretty much definitional of independent and alternative. It’s kind of there in the name. Nonetheless, today you can actually find these artists on mainstream platforms whereas 30 years ago your only chance of hearing their music would be to see them at a show and or maybe get one of their songs on a mixtape from a music-head friend. It’s different for indie musicians today, but I’m not sure it’s uniformly worse.

Or how about, “Five companies have almost complete control over the book business—where, in an earlier day, dozens of indie publishers thrived.” Sort of? This one is complicated, for sure. But it’s way more complicated than could be fit into a pithy tweet. Small press publishing is a very different animal than it once was, but so is self-publishing, and that influence has opened up avenues for marginalized people to tell their stories and for previously unmarketable subgenres to find audiences and absolutely flourish.

Jordan Hawk wrote a blog post this week celebrating 10 Years of Widdershins, in which he bullet-pointed all the prevailing “marketing wisdom” that clearly said this book was doomed. And instead it was successful beyond anything he could’ve expected and kicked off an 11-book series. (The whole series is fantastic. Just so good.) So, y’know, there’s a win.

I’m pretty sure people in my day-to-day life don’t typically see me and think, “Wow, what an iconoclast! I bet she’s really tuned into the counterculture.” And yet, that’s kinda where I live, not because I’m under any illusion that I’m so hip and edgy (I mean, no one even uses “hip” or “edgy” anymore, right?), but because I like queer stuff, and because I’m interested in stories that I hadn’t heard before, and because I like to go down rabbit holes of quirky recommendations by people whose art (or whose taste in art) I enjoy. And perhaps in no small part because I actually think about who I’m giving money to, for what, and whether there might be a better alternative.

So, speaking of queer stuff, it was recently my great, great pleasure to read the sapphic romance that, oh man, I have been fucking waiting for my whole life. Seriously. And it was One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston.

This was my first McQuiston. Their previous book Red, White, and Royal Blue is also sitting in my TBR pile as a recommended read, but I’ve been slow to pick it up because I may have kind of an eensy little bias against princes. (Also billionaires. Because, you know, gross.) And then here comes One Last Stop with an intriguing premise but also a cute pink cover. I mean, cute, but too cute? And here’s me with all my baggage around the pink-washing of women’s relationships and, like, cerebralization of feminine sexuality, as if women aren’t responsible for writing a huge proportion of the filthiest smut on the market.

So it was with some trepidation that I finally got around to actually opening the dang book. And within the first three pages, I was hooked. We meet August having just moved to New York, as she’s scoping out a potential apartment and roommates, and immediately we’re introduced to a tattooed psychic, an artist who works with blowtorches and frog bones, with a hint at other quirky characters to come, against the backdrop of a vividly drawn walk-up above a fried chicken joint. By the end of the first chapter, August has landed a job at a pancake place. She’s heading to her first day of new classes when she dramatically spills her coffee down her front, then meets Jane on the subway, who comes to her rescue with the gift of a scarf. And I was so charmed by August’s thought:

She can’t believe a tall butch subway angel saw her crying into her coffee tits.

August is a perpetual college student trying to find her thing, with a very unusual girl-detective upbringing. Jane is dark-haired, dark-eyed, strong-willed, outwardly badass, but also very kind with a secret marshmallow center. (Which is, uh, kind of my jam. I may have a type.) The attraction and sexual tension and pure wanting between these characters is just great. There is on-page sex which ends up being kind of euphemistically described but is nonetheless pretty clear about who’s doing what to whom and how.

There’s some suspension of disbelief required around a sketchy bit of science, but I thought it was well handled in the story. Also, a portion of the plot relies on a pretty unlikely coincidence. But listen: when I was twenty years old, I worked at the front desk of a hotel in Montana where I checked in a guest visiting from somewhere on the east coast. In small talk, I mentioned that I was from a small town in the midwest. Surprisingly, she recognized it and said, oh, I think I knew someone from there years ago, back when my husband and I were living in Austria. It turns out that twenty years earlier, this woman who was living on the other side of the world had met and become friends with my mom’s cousin while she was in Vienna. So, unlikely coincidences happen.

I also really deeply loved some of the notes on queer history from the 1970s. Just really powerful stories.

This book delighted me over and over. I killed a stack of post-it notes tagging lines that spoke to me. Not just romance-y ones but, for instance:

“More things are covered in ball sweat than you might imagine,” Niko says thoughtfully. “Ball sweat, actually, is all around us.”

I think that’s the right note to leave you on. Hope you’re well.

Lots of love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I am writing to you on a rainy Wednesday evening. I had tuna casserole for dinner (affectionately known in my family as “tuna noodle glop”) and shared some tuna with my cat, who is small and kindly and very dumb, who I love very much. I am now drinking a modest glass of the limited-run Lemonade rosé from Day Wines—the backstory being that these grapes had been intended for a classic pinot noir, and then a devastating wildfire season meant a change of plans. Turns out smoke and ash are not a great mix with vineyards. The name refers to that ol’ saw, “When life gives you lemons…”

Getting juice off the grape skins quickly can dramatically minimize smoke effect in wine, so instead of making a red Pinot noir from these sites, we very gently pressed the fruit, settled it many times, and fermented it in the fashion of a white wine off of the skins. Like the rest of 2020, we made the best of a difficult situation and thankfully, the results are delicious.

I am sipping this wine and thinking about the fact that in 2022 so far, my country has experienced 214 mass shootings, resulting in 243 deaths and nearly a thousand people injured, and an untold thousands of people terrorized and traumatized. That’s so far this year. It is May.

How do you process this? Here’s one thing I did:

It turns out, if you carefully count out 243 beads, out loud, letting each number stand in for a name you don’t know, it takes about eleven minutes. I spent probably close to two hours stringing them, in a strand that measures 64 inches long, which is just a few inches shorter than my own height. Each color grouping represents deaths from a single incident, as recorded by the Gun Violence Archive.

I’m thinking about what else I can do, actually do. Stories and dramas train us to think in terms of grand sweeping gestures or to think that there must be some clear narrative arc we can adhere to, but that’s not how life actually works. What actually happens is that we all muddle around as best we can, and sometimes we try things that prove totally useless, and sometimes we try things that seem like complete crap only for whatever quirk of time and place, the crap attempt actually turns into something real and meaningful.

For instance, on a personal level, I have sort of muddled my way into being a key organizer of Diversity & Inclusion programming within my organization. I co-lead a mentoring program. I have done some really cool stuff with our Pride chapter, and it all started with “hey, I think it would be neat if…” Like, in a couple weeks, I’ll be working on a “make your own custom pride ribbon” event because I thought it would be fun to do crafts with coworkers—and also inspired a bit by the fact that it still warms my damn heart when I walk around the building and see the rainbow ribbons we handed out pre-pandemic still tacked up on cube walls and in offices.

What I mean is, I’ve worked on little things that I thought were worth doing, and it turns out that those little things have added up to more meaningful things over time. So I’m not going to think about what’s insurmountable. I’m just going to think about what I can do.

I graduated from high school the same year as the Columbine school shooting. My entire adult life has been watching this country stay stuck in the mire of tolerating gun violence to appease a small minority of wackadoos. There’s no making lemonade out of this unrelenting grief. I am all out of optimism, but by god, it turns out where I can’t be optimistic, I can still be obstinate. I’m looking at this damn mountain and all I’ve got is this little shovel, but I’m going to look for the best place to get started nevertheless.

On the book front, and speaking of obstinate bisexuals, I’ve been rereading the Will Darling Adventures trilogy by KJ Charles, for the eleventy-third time. This is probably one of my very all-time favorite reads, in any genre. Will Darling was a trench raider in the Great War who, through a few twists of fate, finds himself proprietor of a used bookshop inherited from an uncle he barely knew. When it turns out that his uncle apparently had come into possession of some very dangerous information, Will doesn’t know who he can trust. Kim Secretan presents himself as an ally whose curiosity is piqued by the mystery, but who the hell is this Secretan fellow anyway?

There are so many great twists here. The plot of each book stands alone, with no cliffhangers between books, but you’ll definitely want to read them in order to avoid spoilers. And the relationship between these characters is just brilliantly drawn. The perspective is third-person but close in to Will, no switching point of view, which means that you get walloped by events just as he does, and you steadily see Kim’s character develop as Will comes to better understand him in all his complexity. There are also some key supporting characters who appear in each book, in particular Will’s best friend Maisie Jones, and also the Honorable Phoebe Stephens-Prince, who are a delight in themselves.

Kind of a shorter letter today. Hope you’re safe and well.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I have been a little too much in my own head with trying to come up with something clever for you. Part of my brain lately has been taken over by work stuff, which is mostly not that interesting unless you work on the same stuff. Another part of my brain has been preoccupied with bodily autonomy and civil liberties, but there’s nothing I have to add to that discourse that hasn’t been better said already by others.

(I can’t find the meme to share so will just add: if you know a woman, or a person with a uterus, who needs help to go camping in a state that is friendly to camping, then I volunteer to drive and pay for meals and gas. Because everyone should have the fundamental autonomy as a human being to decide what is right for their own body, including the decision to go camping.)

I also found out about a week and a half ago that I’m anemic, and it turns out seriously iron-deficient so I have probably been dancing with anemia for quite some time without realizing it. Which does kind of explain why I’m so tired all the damn time, and also why sometimes my brain no make words so good.

So I’m doing something different this issue and, in lieu of a longer essay, will be subjecting you to my musical stylings. I started playing guitar when I was in law school and desperately needed something else to do with my brain. I can just manage to bang out chords but have never made much progress beyond that. But really the guitar is just an excuse to sing.

I would probably sing all the time if it were socially acceptable, just idly while I was going about my business. But that doesn’t really work in, say, an office setting, or while out shopping for groceries. So instead I try to keep to only mildly-oddball levels of breaking into song, among friends and family. And of course I sing to my cat—most often a tuneless little cat song that goes something like “You are a monster / monster, monster / You are a monster / monster beast.” The more tuneless, the better.

Before we get to the musical portion of today’s love letter, though, let’s talk books. And then if you’re not into low-production-quality folk acoustic jams, you can bail once the guitar starts.

I just reread the Big Bad Wolf series by Charlie Adhara, and man, it’s just so good every time. These books bring a fresh take to the ol’ werewolf-shapeshifter romance. In the world of these stories, werewolves live in secret amongst ordinary humans and only recently have come out to the government. Cooper Dayton is an agent of the BSI, a special hush-hush branch of the FBI that specifically deals with werewolf crime. On the heels of a bungled case by some other BSI agents which resulted in the needless shooting of two young wolves, Cooper is selected as part of a pilot program to be partnered with Oliver Park, an agent of the werewolf governing organization called the Trust. Or does Park have another agenda? So kicks off the five-book series, with new settings and fresh mysteries to unfold in each book.

I really enjoy how these stories are built out over the course of the series. We are introduced to the deeper complexities of wolf culture as Cooper is, with new layers developed in each book. Cooper and Oliver’s relationship likewise continues to develop on a long arc through the series. It’s a lot of fun on a first read, but even better, it’s particularly rewarding on a reread, when conversations and events take on an entirely more nuanced cast once you understand each character’s backstory and motivations.

I also find the dynamic between Cooper and Oliver to be uniquely lovely and satisfying. Both are very strong characters with their own messy baggage, and they find such joy and sweetness in each other. There is explicit sex in these books, and a lot of the sex is quite playful, with elements of roleplay. The sex scenes also do a beautiful job modeling what it can look like to check in on your partner as you’re playing out a scene, to make sure that you’re on the same page and still all enthusiastically consenting.

The series starts with The Wolf at the Door. Highly recommended.

And now onto the musical portion. For the audio recording, I’ll be queueing up four songs to play at the end, and I will do my best to get the sound balance to come out right-ish, but this is my first attempt at something like this in Audacity, so no guarantees it will be seamless. If you’re reading the text version, each song is separately posted to Instagram and linked at the end.

That’s all my news. Oh, and I got a wee bit of a sunburn this past weekend because it’s finally, finally getting warm enough to run around jacketless and even in short sleeves. My daffodils are coming up and just about on the verge of blooming. The grass is finally greening up, and trees are leafing out, and all the things of the earth are stretching out and remembering that it’s good to be alive. Hope you feel that too.

Love,

Beas

"Iris" by Goo Goo Dolls, with an extra verse and some gratuitous rearrangement

"Almost (Sweet Music)" by Hozier

“No Place Away” by Greg Brown

“Out Loud” by Dispatch

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

I’ve been chasing around some related-unrelated thoughts around beauty culture and, like, performative beauty, and the cultural dialogues around those things.

And before I wade in, it’s probably worth noting that this is all a foreign fucking land to me. I find it fascinating in the same way that I find other foreign cultures fascinating, but I did not grow up immersed in beauty culture.

I mean, it was around. I wasn’t raised in a convent, or a naked forest child running with wolves. I had access to television; for a while as a teenager I had a subscription to Seventeen magazine. When I was little, my youngest aunt would sometimes let me play dress-up with her wardrobe and makeup, and another aunt gave me a treasure trove of hand-me-downs that I remember mostly as an assortment of flowing rayon tops, plus one extremely chic strapless white-with-black-polka-dots party dress.

But women in my family didn’t talk about dieting. Nobody “put their face on” in the morning. My grandma Dorothy had two tongue-in-cheek rules of fashion: (1) make sure the back seam of your pants lines up with your butt crack and (2) check that your nipples are lined up, not pointing off in different directions. And that about sums up fashion-consciousness in the home where I grew up.

I was aware that there was an unspoken language around makeup and clothes going on around me. But I couldn’t ever quite catch it, or figure out how to translate it. I knew that getting it wrong invited ridicule, but I had no clue how to get it right. And I mostly didn’t care. If I had no hope of being able to Do Fashion, then I was just going to Be Myself, and that worked out pretty well.

By the end of high school, I’d settled into a wardrobe of loose sweaters and men’s button-downs and baggy jeans, and I was extremely comfortable with that. In my 20s, I figured out cute t-shirts and pants that fit and the whole realm of business casual. And that pretty much remains the extent of my fashion range.

Likewise, I was never especially fixated on my weight or my body shape. I was a bit on the heavier side in high school and college, but I don’t ever remember feeling unhappy about it. I lost a ton of weight when I started law school (a combination of stress and then figuring out how to work out to help with stress), something I’d never expected would happen but kind of enjoyed the results of; gained some back by the time I graduated; then lost it all again and then some when I was practicing law (mostly stress again, and too much subsisting on Tootsie Rolls at the office rather than taking a break to eat actual food).

Having inhabited a decent range of clothing sizes in my adult life, I can pretty confidently say that at any given time how I’ve felt about my body, or what I think my body looks like, only loosely correlates with the number on the scale or the size on a clothing label. And for that matter, the number on the scale and the size on the clothing label seem to have a pretty loose relationship with each other as well.

But makeup and hair are still mostly a mystery to me. So last year, I thought I’d have a little adventure and treat myself to a cheesecake/boudoir photo shoot, complete with professionally styled hair and makeup, in celebration of my upcoming 40th birthday and in defiance of the weird apocalypse we’ve been living through. Like, let me commemorate this cleavage for history, basically.

And very unexpectedly, it opened up a whole weird can of identity crisis and gender dysphoria. I was not at all prepared for that.

Like, this is me, but this is really NOT me:

I can’t imagine it’s likely that I’d even be recognized from this photo because it is just so many thousands of miles away from how I actually show up in the world, in real life.

The photographer did a nice job from the perspective of fulfilling the expectations laid out for this kind of photo shoot. It just turns out that instead of thinking, “Wow, I look cute in these,” I actually feel much more, “egad, what is this eldritch horror before me,” like I uncanny-valleyed myself right into pod person territory. And again, I think that’s very much my own reaction. Objectively, they’re perfectly good photos.

But it’s made me wonder if my reaction was also me getting walloped by same the Beauty Culture Stick that is beating other people over the head all the time. Like, as a foreign traveler in Beautylandia, my reaction felt extreme because it was my first time eating the spicy beauty noodles, but it turns out that other people are eating these spicy noodles all the time, and sure it makes your mouth burn and your nose run but the pain is nothing when you love the noodles.

Only I don’t love the noodles. Keep your stupid spicy beauty noodles.

But you know what I do love? The artistry of Courtney Act, the drag persona of Shane Jenek and one of the most stupidly gorgeous women in the world:

Likewise, Jameela Jamil is a phenomenally talented human being, and among her talents is the genuine artistry she cultivates around being bloody gorgeous:

So I have huge respect for the art that goes into a look like that. And there’s a part of me that thinks, shit, maybe I should try the photoshoot again, but with like a 4-hour drag makeup booking first, and just create a whole different madcap adventure persona. Maybe the problem wasn’t too much makeup but not enough, because I should’ve been aiming for straight-up unrealism instead of augmented reality.

And actually, I think this is sort of the whole unrealistic-beauty-standards problem in a nutshell. The point of highly augmented beauty is that it’s largely unattainable. It’s beautiful because it’s unreal. If you fall into the trap of thinking it’s supposed to be real, or that it’s a sustainable state of being, or that it’s a requirement of the social sphere in which you operate, then you’re in for a world of hurt.

So, bit of a quick tangent: you’re about to lose the game.

If you’re not familiar, the game is quite simple. If you think about the game, then you lose the game. Now that you know about the game, you too are playing the game. And you’ll be playing it unthinkingly for all the time that goes by until something reminds you of the game, at which point you’ll think about the game, thus losing the game. So, you can really only play the game by losing. And the more you think about or care about playing the game, the more time you’ll spending losing it.

But this is also kinda how beauty culture works.

That is, you can only really engage with beauty culture—that is, with getting fit and being fashionable and having great skin and on-trend hair and makeup—by paying attention to what I’m going to call “areas of improvement” as the most non-judgmental term I can think of. If you have a really healthy self-image and good attitude, maybe you can do this from a strong growth-mindset orientation, giving yourself credit for everything good you’ve got going on, and gently, or with a sense of humor, giving yourself notes on what you want to do differently or improve on.

Of course, most of us are not that kind to ourselves. Rather, most people’s notes on self-improvement tend to involve a lot of internal flagellation and name-calling.

And beauty culture isn’t for me, but I can see why it’s alluring. There are a number of non-trivial ways in which it’s a material advantage to be an attractive person. It’s just that I think once you pass some hard-to-quantify threshold of attractiveness, you hit a long tail of rapidly diminishing returns. Where that threshold falls is going to be context specific. But the long tail will always be there. So, since you can only play this game by losing, it’s a question of where you decide “enough” falls, or where to balance caring and fuck-it, so that you don’t continue to invest endless energy into playing and losing the beauty game.

On to the book review, taking a sharp left turn into murder and mayhem: I just finished binge-reading the full Snow & Winter series by C.S. Poe, starting with The Mystery of Nevermore. Sebastian Snow is a snarky know-it-all antique dealer in New York who gets pulled into amateur sleuthing when a telltale smell leads to discovery of a telltale heart beneath the floorboards of his shop. Calvin Winter is one of the detectives who gets involved with the case, and as more Edgar Allen Poe-related clues surface, he reluctantly leverages Snow’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things 19th-century. Of course, sparks fly.

Snow has total color blindness, achromatopsia, and is functionally blind in brightly-lit conditions. I think I found that aspect of his character and how it fits into the story to be particularly interesting because of my own experience of visual snow, even though it’s really not at all the same thing. There are a couple of instances in the story where someone throws on the bright overhead lights, or where Snow walks out into bright daylight, that gave me a surprisingly visceral jolt of recognition. I also envy his red-tinted contact lenses.

These are cleverly constructed mysteries, loaded with all kinds of interesting historical trivia. I found the characters very endearing, especially in the ways they continue to grow and develop over the course of the series. The books are in first person, from Snow’s perspective, and he makes some maddening ding-dong choices along the way; but he also shows some self-awareness about it, that basically he’s compulsively scratching an itch even when he knows he should stop, which awareness helped with suspension of disbelief for some of the ding-ier-dong-ier decisions.

Altogether clever and fun reads (I mean, in a murdery way) that really made me want to go poke around quirky antique stores in New York (in a non-murdery way).

That’s all my news. It has been a cold spring these past few weeks, but hoping for some warmer weather soon.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com

Dear Reader,

In my regular work life, this past week marked our official return to the office. My workplace is one of those that’s trying out a partial in-office, partial work-from-home model. So I will be going into the office two days a week, and it’s a roll of the dice whether those two days align with the in-office days of any of the coworkers I might happen to wish to bump into.

I took the opportunity on returning to clear out some old papers and whatnot. There’s been a lot of joking around about all the printouts or office tchotchkes or office supplies that we’ve been able to do without perfectly well for the past two years, and lots of full waste bins and recycling bins. But there are a few tattered favorites that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, which will continue to live on my cube walls:

On the left is a diagram of a plane full of bullet holes, sometimes used to illustrate survivorship bias. If you’re not familiar with the story behind this image: During WWII, the navy was trying to figure out how to optimize armoring its bombers. Armor is protective, obviously, but also heavy, so adding more armor means the plane is less nimble and requires more fuel. So how do you maximize protection of the aircraft without adding unnecessary bulk? Study was undertaken of planes coming back from bombing runs to map out where they were taking hits from enemy fire. It was mathematician Abraham Wald who pointed out that the most important information was actually where they were finding no hits—because planes that were struck in those areas didn’t return.

On the right is a printout of an xkcd comic, Is It Worth the Time? This is a chart that maps out how much time you can spend on making something more efficient, depending on the frequency of the task and how much time you can shave off. It’s tongue in cheek, not exactly a practical reference, and yet it’s a surprisingly useful reality check. For instance, it turns out that it may be well worth spending a significant chunk of time to clean up a bullshit process that you have to do five times a day, even if you only end up shaving five minutes off, if you think you’re going to have to keep doing it over the next five years.

I like both of these examples because they’re pointing out something a little counterintuitive. But also, I like the way they point little bit to the importance of the aggregation of small data or small steps.

All knowledge, all creation, all change is iterative. Sometimes you can make a big leap, or the big leap happens to you whether you like it or not. But day to day, most things don’t progress leap by leap, and mostly that’s not actually a very useful way to try to operate.

Learning a language happens word by phrase. Building a patio happens strata by strata, stone by stone. A 3D printer lays down material layer by layer. Improving aerobic capacity happens through an aggregation of physiological changes starting at the mitochondrial level. Embroidery happens a stitch at a time, and learning to draw goes stroke by stroke.

Above is my first drawing using my fancy pants new drawing tablet. It’s a character from The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting by KJ Charles. And look, on the one hand, it’s not an especially great drawing, but on the other hand, it’s a pretty good effort for someone who doesn’t actually know anything about drawing. I’m very pleased with it and don’t feel a need to pretend false modesty, but I can also see lots of ways it could be better.

Ira Glass talked about the challenge in creative life of the gap between what you know to be good and what you’re capable of producing when you’re starting out. And the way to shrink that gap is to produce a lot of creative output, some of which will inevitably be garbage, and that’s ok. I also remember years ago when I first listened to that original Ira Glass on Storytelling set of recordings, the line that really stood out to me was, “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap” (at 1:47). Sifting out the garbage is part of the creative process.

I think there’s also another factor to the creative learning curve, which is that in learning and grappling with the sausage-making of art (or of making anything, really), you develop a better feel for the iterative development that everything goes through. That is, the work in progress stops looking so much like garbage and starts to look more like a work in progress. Which ideally carries over into how you start to look at other things, because maybe every hot mess is actually a creative opportunity. And if you chip away at it, tossing out the garbage bits and enhancing and refining the interesting bits, eventually you can end up with something pretty cool.

I guess maybe what I’m really talking about is perseverance.

This is the third inspirational thingie I kept on the wall:

I love the bold sentiment, we shall have to write them ourselves!, then with that acknowledgment, but oof, it is very laborious. It is indeed laborious! But that’s ok, isn’t it? I mean, what else are we here for?

On the book front, I thought I’d make it easy for myself this week and talk about A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. Except it turns out that this book is so much a part of me, and I have so many feelings about it, that I’m not even sure where to start. The story isn’t expressly queer, but Forster was himself gay, and the entire book revolves around the questions of truth and love, the well-intentioned sucking mire of social convention, the elusive eternal why and the answering yes, and what it might look like to find a place you won’t do too much harm and stand in it for all you’re worth, facing the sunshine.

A Room with a View takes place in Italy and England, contrasting the vivid, sensual, slightly chaotic life of the former with the constrained, confining respectability that is the preoccupation of the latter. The English tourist is the subject of some ridicule, but so is the English expat who scorns the English tourist. On her tour of Italy, Lucy Honeychurch brings all her cultural preconceptions, along with her tiresome and tireless cousin as chaperone—and also a longing for adventure, a natural sense of the beating heart of the world around her, and a sense of bafflement, of being teased by something elusive, but quite what the something is, and how to find it out, remains a mystery. Italy throws that all into relief, and I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to read A Room with a View and come away not wanting to visit Florence; yet it’s also really not about Italy, exactly. It’s about how truth and beauty and kindness are real, and important; and also, how we can be such dummies, and we make dumb choices, but there’s nothing for it but to own up to it.

Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view… You have to go cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle that you have made yourself… [F]or we fight for more than Love or Pleasure: there is Truth. Truth counts, Truth does count.

This has been a lovely weekend where I am, which is a welcome break from the dreary weather we’d been having. I actually got a bit of a sunburn yesterday. So worth it.

Love,

Beas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sapiosexualloveletter.substack.com