some good writing about desire
i am a big fan of Emma Garland's newsletter Gabrielle. which honestly could be the whole post, heading "some good writing about desire", body "read Gabrielle". but i want to more specifically point to a recent essay she wrote about shame:
Emma Garland
and just as a treat, here's the first para, because it's great and you'll get a sense of whether you'll be interested from it:
Like many women, I once dated a guy who punched a hole in my headboard. He wasn’t a violent man whatsoever, but he had certain sexual impulses that he didn’t like. In the heat of the moment, rather than act on them, he would hit something – the headboard, the wall, himself. It was sad, not least because they were impulses that dovetailed with my own, so I would sometimes find myself in the humiliating position of feeling jealous of a wall. Still, there was nothing to be done about it. Shame had already taken root.
she talks a little bit about changing mores, as examined through culture, but if you want more on that, she also wrote this recent piece for Dazed, as a kind of update to the 2021 essay, Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny:
Dazed
she talks a bit about Nosferatu in that, which she previously went deeper on:
Emma Garland
i think you can take this whole cultural criticism thing too far, people's lives are wild and diverse and buck against trends in every which way. a classic variance within groups is larger than variance between groups situation. but also it is so hard to talk about vibes changing without reference to a thing, and i love the way that criticism, good criticism, can use culture as a lever to grasp otherwise very slippery things.
anyway, some good writing, i recommend it.