from my red journal, a fresh elegy
on turning: twenty-four, away from men, and towards beauty
this letter is a composite of different things, though i guess they’re all about love and identity, beauty and curiosity. each section is a rush of thoughts jotted down in the margins of different journals:
the first hails from my red moleskin, and i wrote this piece the night of my most recent birthday. i paired it with a poem i love because this poem speaks to the same sentiment (though in a different voice).
the second is an attempt at making coherent my scattered reflections of a novel i read recently. it has fully altered my brain chemistry. as i read this precious text, i wrote down my favourite quotes in a book journal i bought last year on my sister’s birthday (we got matching ones, but hers was abandoned to our graveyard of journals too gorgeous to write in). there are some spoilers in this section but i promise it’s worth the read (both my substack and the novel, hehe).
the third was a web of scribbles scratched into a small black notebook that fits in the palm of my hand. i carry it with me everywhere because my other journals are too heavy (my dad always reminds me that i should be kinder to my scoliosis-ridden back). the pages are stained with tea and blueberries, which were my snacks of choice as i watched a movie alone in bed a few weeks ago.
if you read on, i hope you enjoy these messily-woven notes <3
*readers accessing this on email, please click through to the substack app! the email gets cut off prematurely.
✦
nov 18, 2024
today i turn 24 years old. i’m starting to see that my life is mine. some days i’m overwhelmed with the beauty all around me, and other days it’s the weight of dark grief that keeps me held down. twenty-four years is a long time to do the same thing —breathing as little as possible, conserving energy for a fight that’s long been and gone— and so i think it’s time for a change. i started with a hair cut, as girls often do. chopped it all off. it’s the shortest i’ve ever gone. i wonder where i’ll be by the time it grows long again, whose 12am text i’ll secretly wish for. it’s a wonder how things stay the same for so long —long enough that you grow suspicious of the passage of time— and also how it all seems to change in a season. so much is different and yet the habits linger. those are the hardest to kick but i’m gnawing them off with my teeth; nail marks left in the drying earth. the rain came and went, and came and went again, and now, for the first time, i’m not wondering when the drizzle will return. i’m noticing the warm caress of the sun on my thirsty skin, and i am choosing to live in this moment for as long as my body allows. such suffering i’ve caused my body in the last ten years; it’s really a miracle that it has held together despite my unyielding attempts to cleave it at the seams. some edges are frayed, for sure, but all in all, a stranger would still recognize this as a kind of living. i wonder where we would draw the line, if we really had to, between existing (shallow breathing) and living (deep being). ‘suppose it might be when we take hold of time, grasp it stubbornly with white knuckles.
this new life of mine will require energy, and patience. i will have to start planting seeds once more, because now i’ve harvested all i can from the last crop. now that i know i can do it, i don’t think it’ll be too hard to attempt again. although this time i want it to be a ritual of tenderness, not desperate violence. it was gruelling before; a widening wound opening up the earth beneath my feet and i barely got to the shovel in time. now i will be gentle as i walk, and i will ask to be forgiven without making myself bleed. i will plant, and water, and witness, and i will share the fruit when it stuns me with its ripening beauty. when the grief returns, i will remember that my skin has been kissed before, and trust that it will be kissed again.
i will remind myself that beauty will ripen again.
“For the Sake of Strangers” by Dorianne Laux
“No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.”
✦
“Every female wants to be loved by a male. Every woman wants to love and be loved by the males in her life. Whether gay or straight, bisexual or celibate, she wants to feel the love of father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or male friend. If she is heterosexual she wants the love of a male partner. We live in a culture where emotionally starved, deprived females are desperately seeking male love. Our collective hunger is so intense it rends us. And yet we dare not speak it for fear we will be mocked, pitied, shamed. To speak our hunger for male love would demand that we name the intensity of our lack and our loss.” — bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
what if we lived in a world where hooks’ words didn’t ring true? where women didn’t know men — didn’t need or want or love them?
this, in many ways, is the central plot of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a sci-fi novel i read 29 years after it was first published. the novel follows a young girl (she is not given a name) who is imprisoned in an underground bunker alongside 39 middle-aged women. she has only known this prison, these women, and the male guards who pace back and forth wordlessly on the other side of the cage. the women know nothing, and have no coherent memory of the world before/outside the bunker.
our protagonist asks the same questions we’re desperate to find answers for: why are they imprisoned? who did this? who is her mother, and why has this girl been left with these women? why don’t they remember how life became this way? what do the guards know? who are they obeying? will the women ever be freed? what exists beyond the cage?
“[The narrator] is not like the other women of the novel, with their memories of the outside world and knowledge of relationships, sex, love and family. Her body never developed the markers of reproduction, and being raised in an underground bunker since an early age, she is in a unique position to be a person without any of the signifiers of personhood. She is an example of a person raised without culture, without societal constructs, without knowledge. She is a pure experiment asking: what does a person become when stripped to the core, raised in isolation? What might a woman be like under these conditions?”
— Ros Schwartz [translator of the text, also penned the introduction] I Who Have Never Known Men
one day an alarm blares, startling the guards who accidentally leave the cage doors unlocked before fleeing. the women escape. they emerge from the bunker onto a barren land and rather than finding answers, they’re met with more questions: where are the others? what happened to the world?
i was immediately captivated by Harpman’s novel which asks questions so radically different from the media i typically consume. as a connoisseur of feminist work, i’ve read countless books (like hooks’ All About Love trilogy) that attempt to unravel the complicated dynamics between men and women, and the patriarchy and female liberation. similarly, i’ve watched movies (like Mad Max: Fury Road) that insist on the message that women are not objects, they cannot be owned. i’m used to these ideas being presented to me in different ways whether that be an academic text or an action-filled blockbuster, but i’d never come across something like this: something that uncompromisingly deletes relationships between men and women from the conversation. patriarchal violence and feminist liberation are hallmarks of my cultural interests, and yet here i am at 24 years old reading a novel that approaches these ideas from a completely new vantage point.
Harpman’s text asks a question i have never thought to answer; she has created a world which renders our language about these topics obsolete. what if we had never known men — not just romantically, but in every sense?
the book’s final sentence prods this query in perhaps the most fascinating and harrowing way: “It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men” (Harpman).
how can we try to understand our protagonist, let alone her womanhood, if we cannot hold it alongside masculinity? while she observes the only men in her world —the prison guards— she does not touch them, speak to them, engage with them in any manner. they are merely bodies that surveil the cage, whip always in hand. some of the women remember traces of the world before —a hint of a loving husband once known, a shred of a crying son once held, an echo of an ailing grandfather once cared for— but none of these memories tether them concretely to a life of meaning with distinct outlines.
and so they live, women amongst women in the bunker, until they are freed into the world. and when they enter the world, they continue to live as women amongst women, searching for answers that do not exist. reading this, i couldn’t help but insert myself into that reality. would i adapt? could i survive? would i miss something i have never known?
✦
like many women friend groups of different generations, i have often contemplated what it would be like if i could live in a commune with my closest girlfriends. i’m 100% positive that this is a conversation that transcends time and space; all women, from the stone ages to gen-alpha, have had this exact same discussion:
“oh my god, imagine if we lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere — just us girls. wouldn’t that be fun?”
“are you kidding? that’s the dream. no boys, no fear, no pain, no farts. we could do whatever we wanted all the time.”
“we could raise animals and bake and frolic in the grass, make up songs and braid each other’s hair and read poetry out loud under the starlight!”
“i wish. maybe if we all don’t get married by the time we’re 35 or something, we can just live together and adopt kids and puppies. we could do that, no?”
“hell yeah we can. and maybe we could open up a little bookstore cafe? OOOOH, and have a floral shop right next door?”
you know, The Conversation™ that we’ve all had during sleepless sleepovers?
as funny and light-hearted as that is to entertain, this exchange has roots in something quite serious: an intergenerational commitment to escape the shackles of patriarchal brutality. thinking about this in our current cultural moment where women across the world are renegotiating our terms of engagement with men (see: South Korea’s 4B movement or the boysober TikTok trend), i wonder if Harpman’s text can illuminate a path forward.
i’m not reinventing the wheel by pointing to the ways in which women’s rights are being actively eroded globally from Trump’s anti-abortion policies to the genocide in Gaza and rampant violence against Sudanese women. it’s no secret why women are increasingly choosing to to sever ties with men. as someone who’s never been serious or active about dating, i was content with living an entire lifetime without exploring a romantic connection with a man. so far, i have built a beautiful life for myself with fulfilling friendships, stimulating hobbies, and healthy(ish) family dynamics. why put myself through the cruelty of dating and heartbreak when i’m perfectly gratified without men?
i was convinced that my feminist lifestyle was a rejection of patriarchal power, but what if that fantasy is itself a fallacy fabricated by the male gaze? as margaret atwood poignantly expounds:
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
— The Robber Bride
*remember this quote, it’ll be on the pop quiz later!
even our attempts to flip patriarchal dynamics are inherently reflections of it. i came to this realization, and then i read I Who Have Never Known Men. i met a young girl who exists wholly outside of this paradigm, and i was fascinated. what does she make of her world, a world where her femininity isn’t defined in contrast to masculinity? how does she mould her identity without it? Harpman tells us that our protagonist “may not have the learned behaviours of dances and marriages, but even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage” (Harpman). is that our fate — to yearn for connections with men, even if we’re committed to whole lives without them?
our narrator seeks to uncover the answer to this riddle, and she prods the other women for explanations even when they’re hesitant to share. she recalls how sometimes “the women would talk of men and love. They’d giggle and tease me when I asked what was so funny” (Harpman). and so we learn that these women who had known and loved men, they missed them. they remembered the gentle embraces and magical butterflies, and yet, “they would also complain about the brutality. It hurt, men didn’t care about women, they got them pregnant and then walked out, saying, ‘How do I know it’s mine?’ Sometimes the women would declare that it was no great loss, and at others they would start to cry” (Harpman).
here they are again, both the beauty and the pain, held together in outstretched palms for us to witness.
✦
in learning about the heartbreaks these women have suffered and realizing that she may perhaps be the most deprived one of all because she can never know this tender experience, our protagonist “understood that [she] was living at the very heart of despair” (Harpman). and so she asks more questions, poking at a wound that won't scab over.
“‘So men were very important?’ She nodded. ‘Men mean you are alive, child. What are we, without a future, without children? The last links in a broken chain.’ ‘So life gave such great pleasure?’ ‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are.’ … I no longer felt humiliated by my ignorance, because I’d touched on a knowledge that was too painful to bear” (Harpman).
she faces the pain of learning what she has lost despite never having had it in the first place, and she demands to know the truth — all of it.
“‘Tell me what it was like,’ I said. ‘How did you live?’ … When all their lives had been shattered, [Denise] was on her second divorce, because, she said, she always chose the wrong men and was never happy with them. Greta couldn’t understand why Denise kept remarrying. She herself had never married, but had lived for years with the same lover and been very happy. That shocked Denise. And they began arguing about whether marriage was a good thing or not. In that wilderness where there were no men to marry, they debated whether it was better to be unfaithful or to leave, and then they burst out laughing. Even I recognized the absurdity of the situation and laughed with them … They felt sorry for me, because I’d never experience love, and it was the same as when they talked about chocolate or the joys of a long, hot bath; I believed them without really being able to imagine what they were talking about” (Harpman).
✦
and now, here i am, sitting with all of these women’s words swirling around in my head. i’m not sure how to make sense of it all; the sharp, searing pain of living in a relentlessly brutal patriarchal world, and the knowledge that despite our efforts to sunder ourselves from men, we need them. not for the logistics of survival, but for meaning.
perhaps the answer is (as is often the case), returning to bell hooks. i reach for her work when i’m feeling lost, and it is often a buoy returning me back to a place of hopeful surrender. in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, she carves out a path we can follow if we want to build healing and sustainable relations with men.
she tells us that “to truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys, we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions. To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled” (hooks).
i think this is where we can begin. instead of cutting off our relations as a desperate plea for self-protection, we could fare better by returning to love as an instrument of self-preservation. marrying M. Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth” with Erico Fromm’s notion that “love is action and not solely feeling” (hooks), we may be able to practice a kind of loving that is radical, liberatory, and healing. a kind of loving that understands the role men have in our lives.
✦
“‘Handsome, beautiful — I suppose they’re words from before, from when things happened?’ I asked her. She gazed at me for a while, then looked away. ‘I was beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I still am, I’d need a mirror … ‘Being beautiful, was that for the men?’ I was almost sure it was, but I sometimes heard the women say otherwise. ‘Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.’ ‘Am I beautiful?’ I saw her smile, but her smile was heart-rending.”
— Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
i wanted to begin this concluding section with a quote from Harpman’s text as it is an appropriate bridge between my previous discussion about love with this next one about beauty.
even though i hate to admit it, i’m obsessed with beauty; i’ve been this way ever since i was young. i remember sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed in beirut watching her get dressed for work as the early morning sunlight lazily cascaded through the open window. i would watch mesmerized as she draped jewelry over her body, layered different textiles, and swept stunning colours across her eyelids. as i observed this seemingly endless ritual, i had the impression that being beautiful came easily to her. despite the clear efforts she took to ready herself for the world, it felt like a necessary and natural practice … one that wasn’t passed down.
as i grew older, i began to feel that beauty wasn’t part of me like it was other girls. whereas they were pretty all the time, reaching for beauty was an exhausting performance for me, and i was sure that the audience wasn’t fooled. i wrestled with this for years and now i know it will haunt me forever, this incessant need to be a darling.
this knowledge hit me like a ton of bricks the other day when i was on the bus going home. i had 45 minutes left on my commute: perfect time for a nap. i cocooned into my seat and relaxed into rest. a few songs later, i felt the gaze of a man on me. i didn’t have to look up to confirm that he was in fact staring; i could feel his eyes from across the aisle, and i instinctively shifted to lengthen my neck to hide my double-chin, placed my hand daintily across my lap to appear like the women in those captivating victorian paintings. even as i was drifting off, i was contorting my body to appear beautiful, and it wasn’t even because i thought he was attractive or that i wanted his attention. he could’ve been a ghost for all i care; it was the mere fact that i was being observed that made me hyper-aware of my image, and i simply wasn’t willing to look any way but effortlessly dazzling. how sick is that? is that our fate? whereas Harpman’s protagonist is free from the ceaseless male gaze, i’m left with it everywhere i go?
and then, just to spite this man and to signal my disgust at my internalization of the male gaze, i reverted right back to my little hunched gremlin pose. that’ll show ‘em.
i share all of this to say: beauty is a concept so intimately bound up with femininity and our relations with one another. enter: The Substance.
*spoilers ahead; consider yourself warned
✦
i’m sitting criss-cross on my bed (back straight, because having impeccable posture is my new obsession), my laptop propped up on a pillow in front of me. on my lap i’ve laid out my nightly skincare: plumping skin toner, BHA liquid exfoliator, hyaluronic acid drops, niacinimide serum, overnight repair moisturizer, and squaline marine algae eye cream. after applying it all, i run a guasha over my face in quick but firm movements, recalling a tiktok i watched about proper technique for effective lymphatic drainage. following the same steps i’ve done a million times before, mindlessly watching vanderpump rules and drinking tea (with only one spoon of sugar now; i’m trying to cut down), i consider watching something different tonight — maybe something less mind-numbing. googling 2024 best movies as i load up a streaming site, i randomly choose a new one with margaret qualley: the substance. the name is familiar; i must’ve heard about it on a pop culture podcast, but i can’t recall the plot.
as the film rolls through the opening sequence, i try not to beat myself up about the fact that i picked at my skin today; a self-destructive habit i developed years ago to punish my body for not doing enough (or maybe for doing too much). the scars, retribution for mistakes i can barely even remember now. i tell myself i’ll do better tomorrow; i actually have therapy in the evening so i should probably try out some of the healthy coping mechanisms my psychiatrist recommended so i can tell her how good of a therapist she is. i want her to feel good about herself, to feel like she’s helping, you know? wouldn’t want her to feel like a broken record giving me the same advice for four years now.
i return my focus to the screen, but i notice i’m seven minutes deep with no recollection of what i’ve just seen. i scroll back, exit out of the 50 pop-up ads that come up (the only con of pirating movies) and try to focus this time.
by the time the film’s credit scenes roll 2 hours and 20 minutes later, i’m both utterly horrified and thoroughly entertained. if you haven’t seen it yet (i highly recommend that you do), here’s the TLDR: Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is a 50-year old celebrity with a successful Jane Fonda-esque exercise show. after overhearing her boss demanding they cast a younger and hotter version because she’s simply gotten too old (read: fundamentally revolting, i’m nauseous just at the thought), Elisabeth gets desperate. after hearing this pitch for a new drug:
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one, and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can’t escape from yourself.” — The Substance
she goes for it. i mean, can you blame her? it’s an irresistible offer. damn, i wish it was real.
at first, everything is perfect: her young and sexy new-self (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley) gets cast on the show. she’s adored, admired, and envied. she’s literally The Perfect Woman™: tight skin, hairless body, blemish-free face, perky butt, rosy cheeks, healthy hair, soft skinny arms, cellulite-free legs. it’s euphoric to witness, and although i’m supposed to judge Elisabeth for this sacrifice, a small part of me gets it. it’s the trade-off none of us will admit wanting but will secretly wish for when left alone with our own thoughts.
the intoxicating fantasy of Being Beautiful is enticing even to the most feminist of us, and i’ll admit it was gratifying to see another woman finally achieve The Dream. the movie sobers you up quickly, though, as Sue starts depleting Elisabeth’s lifeforce to gain more time in her world, and we see the toll it takes on Elisabeth. by the end of the film, Elisabeth is transformed to a disgusting, monstrous creature; Demi Moore becoming officially un-DemiMoored.
perhaps the most heartbreaking scene occurs around the halfway point when Elisabeth tries to reclaim her life by going out on a date. despite feeling like an actual ogre in comparison to the flawless Sue, she is determined to fight for her life, to fight to see her own beauty. she gets ready and is about to head out when she takes one last look at herself in the mirror.
aaaaand, of course, it’s the classic moment depicted in countless other films; i’m sure you’ve seen it in I, Tonya. if you haven’t do yourself a favour:
it’s not that they’re about to go on a date with a man that causes the freakout; it’s the mere fact of being perceived at all that is utterly devastating. remember the Margaret Atwood quote from before, about each of us being a woman with a man inside, watching a woman?
you get it, right? you get it.
here’s a tiktok just to rub some more salt in the wound:
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TLDR: being a woman is exhausting and relentless. beauty is poisonous, we’re never free from it, and i don’t have any more bell hooks quotes to save us from this one. it hurts, we suffer, we love, we suffer.
i guess what i’m trying to say is that finding my way in the world as a girl is hard, and sometimes i reach for mediums like novels or films to help me move forward. without a clear answer, i suppose we’ll have to keep holding all of the things at once: the beauty, the suffering, the love, the wounds, the yearning, the fear.
maybe that’s our fate? to carry it all?
✦
"I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all” (Harpman).
✦
if you read this far, i applaud you.
thank you for indulging me.
