I thought of never writing a blog again-- but I've been listening to a lot of "sigma male phonk" recently.
The phenomenon of the "sigma male" and related taxa on places like tiktok and specifically their shared meme language, embodied in phonk music and its associated imagery, is really fascinating to me. I am sure I have a thoroughly surface level understanding of what its consumers desire from it, and I remain at a distance-- obviously I am not, despite any pretensions, ever going to be, mentally or otherwise, a Bateman, or a Gosling, a Batman, or Eren Yeager-- much less a "Jonkler." I just find it amusing, the idea of this sort of archetype where the fantasy is being mysterious, cool and unpredictable, complex, bucking norms and forging a fundamentally unique path-- is also very easily defined by a niche subgenre of music, that has similar themes, and also kinda bangs. The contradictions in masculinity are a topic for someone other than me-- I just think the music is kinda dope.
In essence, this kind of undergirds a fantasy of a sort of withdrawal from society.
I've also had to deal with making a decision I would characterize as pretty atypical from social norms recently. That is, I really really really want to never work on my writing again or publish anything publically, because I really really really hate every sliver of attention my work has gotten lately. This might seem like it's against my self interest, after all there are at least a few dozen people who absolutely adore my work and would remember me and my appropriate name and pronouns if I died. However, I have a sordid mental relationship to both the concept of other people's attentions and to the very idea that I have "fans" and also what those fans think about me. If you are reading this, trust-- bet even-- I *despise* you right now. This feeling might pass. You can take it as personally as you want to. Someday the door might reopen and I will be awaiting whatever psychokinetic abuse lies behind it. (At this point I can't imagine anything positive behind that door, but this itself might pass. If I've known myself is that I'm emotionally unpredictable. Perhaps even-- Sigma.) Right now, I am looking back on the motivations of the "me" who decided to publish a bunch of fiction publically for years and I do not understand her at all. Rest assured-- phonk is an appropriate genre for these feelings. These beats carry a certain violence toward the self and toward others. Perhaps I hate all of you because I also hate myself, and therefore, my work.
Anyway.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend this morning. We commiserated a little about how other trans people have reacted to our creative endeavors. Particularly, we'd both had experiences with trans readers of our work who despise the presence of any non-trans, non-queer characters in our work. There are people out there who genuinely believe any "real" queer art must be wholly separatist in nature. Setting aside that conversation, the reason I am not satisfying the amount of "t4t" relationships you want to see in my work is that I don't care about that. I don't value this kind of metric. I am attracted to women, cis or trans, and I will write them fucking. For example, I wrote Karuniya as a pretty "normatively beautiful," sexually confident femme because I find that attractive and I think she goes well with Murati, who is a stuffy weirdo (just like me, fr fr). I don't count the number of relationships in my work that are "t4t" or "c4t" and make sure one number is higher than the other to say something because I don't think this says anything meaningful about whether you value cis or trans people. I just write the relationships I want to with the aesthetics, sexual proclivities and acts that I want to depict. To me it is ridiculous to do otherwise. If I were to just never write a cis person in my work seeking some kind of gold star transgender literary award, I would not be writing about the world as I experience it. Creating a parallel world where it is verboten for cis and trans people to relate to each other positively is just ceding to the popular fascist millieu. Even beyond all that, it's not what I want to write. Forgive me but I will keep going to town on that pussy until I die.
(Glibness aside, you might stop me here and say-- but also you don't write much about men? Yes, I don't. I'm not interested in men. So I don't write about them. I am interested in women. So I write about women, broadly, all kinds of women. It's unrelated to this discussion. We can disagree on what values you think I have but I feel Unjust Depths, outside of a spreadsheet of its relationship aesthetics, has a pretty nuanced view of the relationship of trans women to transness. There's Shalikova, who admired and wanted womanhood; there's Murati, for whom her intentions for transitioning are just almost not a part of her narrative; and Violet Lehner, who, oh boy, oh god, oh golly gee! Now that I think of Violet is one of the t4t ships! Oh no! Oh dear!)
Honestly I'd love it if you stopped reading my work and recommending it to anyone. I would recommend *this* to anyone: NEVER share your art! It is nothing but pain! I can't imagine what it would be like if I had to deal with like, the level of attention a famous youtuber gets, but on my work, by all of you *goddamn* people. I'd tear my fucking hair out--!!
However.
(Please click on your favorite "Best Sigma Male Tiktok Songs" compilation for this next part.)
As ever there are competing drives here. I have recognized and indulged the part of myself that would love to throw all of this in the fucking trash and never be in dialog with any of you and any of it ever again-- but in sitting here in contemplation, just me and (*checks the tracklist*) DJ Paul, really--? Anyway-- I realize that this is partially the same thing I fear when I see people have this reaction to my work. It is a fantasy of withdrawing from the world in a certain way. A certain kind of trans woman does not want to be reminded of cis people in her consumption of fantasy media-- she reads my work, and is annoyed at my engagement with and perhaps even my attraction to cis women. She wants a world separable from the pain that her experience has brought her. That's fair, I suppose-- she can just not read my work. There is a burgeoning movement of people making this kind of work, work that is actively hostile toward cis people. That's not what I'm trying to do but anyone can do what they want-- I'm pro the girlies writing anything. I don't care. However, this relates back to my own dilemma. I want to retreat into a fantasy where I can write authentically without being reminded of the world. Without speaking to the world or hearing back from it. Me and the girlie are not dissimilar in this regard. I don't want to have to hear from her-- I don't want the interactive part of art where I create something, it leaves me, and it is interpreted, outside me, without my voice, without my argument. Without me saying what I said up there to explain what I'm trying to do, and without the possibility of rejection, argument-- things that hurt, because just as the girlies might overidentify with my work and despise the parts of it which do not speak to their own experience, I overidentify with my work. I made it. It's an expression of something in *me* uniquely. Interactions with it can hurt me.
Running away from authorship in that sense is indulging in a fantasy. Maybe even a dangerous one; maybe one anti-thetical to the work itself.
I write works with a communist politics because I am one, because it is what I believe. If I believe what I purport to, then just flipping the table and disappearing is ceding ground to my own suppression. I don't believe in separatist fantasies, I don't believe they can work, fundamentally-- I believe in class solidarity among workers. I write cis people in my work because even aside me being horny I believe I can love them, that we can love each other, that we can have solidarity. And if I believe that, then I should stick around. Because my work has had a positive impact on some people. Because my work represents something to somebody. It's not self aggrandizing to say, that despite all the annoyance it brings to me, a deeply antisocial person thrust into a position of extremely minor celebrity among a very small group of people-- I think my work has done some good for some people. People who feel seen. People who have never read a story with trans people period and people who haven't read a story like mine with trans people in it. People who have read a ton of this shit and are happy to have more. Whatever. People. And one of the main reasons I started writing not just Unjust Depths but anything at all is that I want to tell stories that I wanted to read that nobody else was making.
In addition to me (theoretically) enjoying the act of expression, I also think it is valuable to resist indulging that impulse to escape from everything at, let's face it, extremely minor inconveniences. I feel like I'm someone who minimizes my own feelings a lot, but my fans are my least problem, and I'm going to try to just not think about any of you for a while. That does also include just not writing Unjust Depths for a while. Extremely buried lede but I'm working on something else and having a blast. I love writing. Maybe someday you'll see it, when the bizarre rhetorical structures that make decisions in my brain without my consent all decide that I'm ready again, and I probably will be. Beyond writing this, eventually I do want to return to Unjust Depths. I think that I'm going to try to write a bunch and only when I have enough writing for a few weeks of posting, will I publish anything. A kind of "seasonal" release schedule-- I'd said before I wanted to do this sometime. I'm expecting 2025 will be a TERRIBLE year so I think it's the year to be nice to myself and not try to force myself too hard. Hopefully we'll both have fun and not die.
Anyway uh fuck how does this relate to all of you as like a pithy moral. I guess like, don't give me grief. Because in way it's giving yourself grief. Because If I'm mentally ill enough I will eventually convince myself of the opposite of everything I've said here (sigma) and then-- you'll read someone else's webnovel. Also I've been listening to a lot of Dungeon Synth recently, because the thing I'm writing now is a fantasy set partially in a quasi-medieval Great Hungarian Plain. As in all my work, the elves are still italian.