If you keep calling people uggos I'm going to have a bulimic relapse on your carpet

Sex, The Shards, and the sauna

This year, I started reading Bret Easton Ellis, who writes books about how being hot will kill you and how the limits of hotness¹ will rot your liver from the inside out until you’re coughing up pink foam². I think the books are particularly useful because I can both feel the dramatic irony between what the characters think (beauty as goodness, beauty as the only option) & what I know to be true and feel the narrator’s (so, I naughtily think, writer’s) absolute conviction that white, slim, symmetry is akin to godliness.

A few months ago, I walked into J.T. Pimms, to meet a friend (I’ll call her Claudia, because that is her name) who was at the end of having a pint with another friend (I don’t remember his name, so we can say Dan) and when I sat down they were in the middle of devising a systematisation of hotness, rated out of ten. Is it okay to rate your girlfriend? What if she asks you to? Is there a way to make this rating completely unbiased? Could we use scales? Data points? I’m Sam, it’s nice to meet you!

The Social Network (2013) These four men are ranking women, ranking hotness.

Claudia asked me what I thought and I said something a little less articulate than": “I suppose I don’t think like that, I suppose I think everyone’s scales will be individual and most people’s scales will be dictated by conventional, capital-driven modes of attractiveness, and life actually gets a lot easier when you move beyond that.” This was so incredibly not the tone of the conversation and I could tell immediately that I had killed both Claudia and Dan’s vibe, and so I followed up with: “but maybe that’s just what a six would say.” This made Dan (a man who had fifteen minutes ago used his system to assign his own body 10/10) laugh so hard, it made his mouth split open, it kind of looked like there was something wrong with him, that is the force and joy with which he was laughing, pausing to look at me, and then laughing again. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah.”

Susan in The Shards and Blair in Less Than Zero are described as very hot. They also have no personality, only numbness. More accurately, numbness is their personality: “Numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy,” Elis writes in The Shards, over and over again in different sentence structures and different contexts. There aren’t any ugly people in his novels and there aren’t any fat people, because everyone worth writing about has numbed themselves into a better life, has chosen thinness over feeling, hotness over life. It is also notable that there are very very rarely people who describe themselves as gay, but copious graphic (beautiful, numb, and hot) sex scenes between men. I’m not sure what I’m getting at here, I get the idea that there is something abject to these people about being gay in public, about being marginal (not hot, not slim) in public. Perhaps this abjectness is a type of cringe. The opposite of cringe is, of course, numbness. And in these worlds, numbness is everything.³

About five years ago, when I was twenty, I stopped calling people ugly and made a personal rule out of it. This isn’t because I’m better than you, or whatever⁴, it’s because thinking about other people in those terms makes me genuinely miserable. It makes me look in the mirror a lot and politely ask not to be in pictures. There are years lost to me thinking too much about all of this: about my fear of fatness metabolising into ugliness, ugliness metabolising me into dust. To not call people ugly is an arbitrary rule, an obvious, desperate first step that I clung onto for almost a decade without taking a second step.

In the pub, a few nights ago, my drunk friend called someone ugly and I said “he’s not,” reflexively, and my friend said “I’m glad all of my friends are attractive,” and I said “what” and he said “or do I just think they’re attractive because I like them, or-” and I interrupted, defensively, rudely, “that’s obviously it” and he said, “oh, which of our friends do you think is ugly then.”

Talking about this, correcting people for the way they see the world, publicly desiring a vision of beauty beyond thinness, beyond capital, beyond cis-sexuality, is obviously vibe killing behaviour. Coolness is as much of a system as desirability and in some ways is a system of desirability.⁵ The part of me that wants to be cool and the part of me that wants to be skinny are the same part.⁶ Numbness is so cool. Numbness doesn’t feel hunger, so doesn’t eat. Numbness as reason to exist. Numbness as ecstasy. So pathetic, when I think about it, when I make myself think about it, not even being able to feel your own ecstasy.

I’ve actually seen great success in expanding what beauty means to me, both personally and in a social sense. and one of the best things about this is pretending horniness is socially generative. I recommend it thoroughly. Apart from deep thinking, nothing makes me feel better about my body⁷ than wellness bullshit: yoga, sauna, facemask.

Last week, my friend Aoife drove me and two other friends to the sauna village in Inchicore. She jokingly warned us that the gymbros who frequent it might give us body dysmorphia and before I left I whispered mantras to myself.

Seven saunas of different sizes surrounded three elevated cold plunges of different temperatures. In the first sauna we try, there is a window that directly faces the plunge pools and steams up when one of us pours water onto the coal. A man steps in, winces, and his body tenses, visibly working against the cold. A beautiful couple kiss obnoxiously in the medium-temp plunge. A woman dips a foot into the coldest pool, and removes it before the water hit her ankle. Body after body (for that is what people become at this remove) enter and leave, wet with sweat, then chlorinated water. It becomes harder and harder to breathe. I am turned on but feeling totally unsexual. I suppose what I mean is I am appreciating beauty.

I think this is like, therapy 101⁸, but feeling good about everyone’s body makes me feel okay about my body, and I reconcile cringeness with belief by killing the fear of cringe, killing the idea of cringe, the idea of cool. Trying to understand that when I am worshiping the alter of hotness, that alter is something constructed by, essentially, those four losers in the social network. Killing, killing, killing until something is born. I’m waiting to see what that thing is.

But maybe that’s just what a six would say.

1. In this piece I’m going to use hotness to mean a standard of aesthetic beauty learned from culture, your “conventional beauty standards,” lets say. I’ll use the word beauty to mean something more personal, more (I think) rich.

2. Delicately, grotesquely, waifishly.

3. I’m not complaining— these people and these affects are what he’s best at writing. Spoilers, but The Shards in particular really falls off when he starts trying to get them to feel things, do things with their perfect bodies.

4. I think it so often.

5. When my eating disorder was really bad I used to picture someone thin eating a food before I was allowed to eat it. I drank a lot of diet coke.

6. My favourite drug is ketamine and my second favourite drug is internal family systems therapy.

7. Which, if you don’t know me, is fat and trans.

8. I skipped to advanced, sorry!