Dear Readers:
Welcome to Issue 15 of Obsessions, one lesbian’s obsession with the body and culture. The best things you can do right now to support my work is to ‘heart’ the posts, promote it on Twitter, and forward my work to people you know. I would love to know in the comments: Did you watch Titanic? What kind of cultural touchstone does it represent for you? As I’m not offering a subscription service right now, you can also venmo me @Renee-Greiner if you feel like paying for my snacks.
My ex is obsessed with Kate Winslet. She thinks Winslet is a great actor. I, on the other hand, cannot tell whether Kate Winslet is a great actor or not.
B level acting I can pinpoint. Terrible acting I can definitely read. A level acting, well, I just don’t think I actually have any idea how to measure that. I think it means Viola Davis and it probably does mean Kate Winslet. I have no clue why Meryl Streep is considered la crème de la crème. I just know that other actors like to fawn over Streep the way gay women fawn over Kristen Stewart.
If I’m watching a cis male actor say in monotone, “Why did you kill my father?” in the same tone that he says, “I don’t believe in equal pay for equal work. I believe in a libertarian philosophy which says that all folks will get screwed at the exact rate of pay they allow themselves to be screwed at.” If I’m watching this cis guy and he’s speaking these lines in monotone, he might be a very bad actor or he might be playing a character that is a bit neurodivergent, a bit patriarchial, and a bit influenced by serial killers (this kind of character actually exists in Prodigal Son where the detective, a son to an actual serial killer, investigates unsolved serial murders). So my point is if the actor speaks in monotone, I don’t always know if he is a bad actor or if he is playing a man with limited emotional expression (many men).
A level acting, well, I just don’t think I actually know what that means. Part of this lies in not being an actor myself. Most of the time the actors do no write the scripts or create their own lighting. I think that Sandra Oh’s acting in Killing Eve second season is grade A. I think Lena Dunham playing Hannah Horvath is grade A, but I have no idea if the acting she’s doing is the difficult kind. Like if you listen to an opera singer, and she jumps two octaves in 1 to 2 seconds without cracking, you kinda know that is grade A. With acting, I just don’t know the equivalent.
Anyways, in Season 3, Episode 11 of Girls, the character Hannah sleeps with this handsome doctor after telling him she’s been putting her trash from the café where she works into his trash.
“Yeah but I didn’t think that I did [want to be happy]. I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences all of them so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them but it gets so tiring trying to take in all the experiences for everybody letting anyone say anything to me. And then I came here and saw you and you got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff and the robe and your touching me that way and I realize I’m not different. I want what everyone wants. I want all the things. I just want to be happy…. If anything, I think I’m just too smart and too sensitive and too like not crazy. So that I’m feeling all these big feelings and containing all this stuff for everybody else and it’s like, okay I read this article about Fiona Apple in New York Magazine where she said, “Oh everybody acts like I’m nuts. I’m not nuts, I just want to feel it all.” That’s what I’m like. I just want to feel it all.”
So basically from watching tv, I’ve realized I can’t tell A level from B level acting. I know that Girls captures that feeling of a certain kind of middle to upper middle class white girl who wants to be an artist in her 20s. She is naïve and self-involved and relatable. And because her character does not eat salads or try to lose weight, she sets a very basic bar for the idea that a young woman gets to be an asshole and gets to want things that are not babies nor a certain kind of straight-sized body. Unfortunately for me, this story came to me in the form of a straight girl when I was already grown-up. The Girls HBO show that stars a very queer girl has yet to exist.
When Rose poses for Jack’s drawing on the chaise lounge, I remember thinking, “Oh, that is what I look like naked.” Granted, that body in 1997 was still not en vogue, and granted I was only 15 years old and apparently a teenager’s athletic body can be considered rubenesque. But I saw myself in her flesh while wishing to see myself in her experience. I was living before Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not An Apology. Before teenage characters like Kat existed in Euphoria. I was living in a world that still hated fat people and gay people and hated us pretty loudly.
I don’t really care about good acting if the character is just another overrepresented stereotype. This means that for me I find issue with the awkwardly dressed, awkwardly speaking Asian lesbian in Good Trouble. It’s a reminder to me that folks continue to be more concerned with social signaling (we care about gay women, God damn it) than actually caring about us. It’s not that you can’t make an awkward gay woman character (Work in Progress Oh My God Oh My God Oh my God); it’s that you have to have a raison d’etre.
I would be happy to have another Titanic movie where someone pays me millions of dollars to strip while Rachel Maddow worships me. I see no issue and I have no acting training. I want the money as much as I want to be worshipped. Once I get the money, I’ll hire someone to go back and tear a new asshole to all the comedians who cowardly made fun of lesbians in the 1990s. I want more for my queer community. I want money for therapy for my community. I want free sperm banks specifically catering to queer women. I want more cis women directors to do their own God-damned research. I want credit where credit is due. I want us to take care of our crones. I want straight women to stop expecting me to care about their concerns and to start caring about my community (it’s not my job to help you fight better with cis hetero men…it’s your job so show me your on my team in the first place). And I want all of the feminists that are now reading Audre Lorde to realize that the feminism of 2021 requires a kind of bravery that is uncomfortable.
I know that my writing has been venturing into territory that makes me uncomfortable recently. The writing is unedited and what ends up arriving in your inbox will feel incomplete. The writing feels messy and mistaken. What happened in April 2021 is that my depression raged hard. And I was unable to write to you because I was barely above ground. I’m incredibly grateful for when I get to feel some security in myself, some sense of worthiness completely independent of anything else. That feeling though, that I am totally enough and worthy, can be sometimes hard to grasp for me. And like many members of the queer community who were born in the early 1980’s, I have had to live through some hell to get here. And I think even my closest straight friends truly don’t understand what that hell was. And so sometimes I miss my writing deadlines because I genuinely can’t sit still and write. And it’s unfortunate that a society can cause trauma and then take no responsibility for healing that trauma. I do hope that we can all remember to look for our individual witches, the crones and dark angels that lead us to some epic truth about who we really are. Because that is something I do believe in, epic truths carried by witches to everyone.
I wish you some sweet protection and sweet rest.
Renee