A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

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Truly inhabiting the sex symbol label in hip-hop can never just be about being the finest person alive—it’s the music that completes the allure. While I felt quietly emboldened by Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, and Trina as a teen in the ’90s, I also daydreamed of being Method Man’s ride-or-die. At 14, when hip-hop was shedding its sateen finish, I hung a giant poster of DMX’s stunningly shirtless and bloody cover of It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot on my bedroom wall. I mailed a handwritten letter to Ja Rule in the 2000s when fan clubs were in style. (Who knows if he ever got it.) In college, I drew a replica of another then-crush, Nelly, mean-mugging on the cover of XXL. I’m sure, in my young mind, there was danger in finding sex appeal in a hardcore hottie, and maybe part of the lust was a desire to be seen as the girl in the crew who was loved upon and seemingly protected.

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child. 

Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post. 

Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.

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Media coverage of the natural world rarely acknowledges it, but queerness exists everywhere we look. Homosexuality can be found in 1,500 species. In the wild, there are also examples of asexuality, gender fluidity, polyamory, and sexual voraciousness, including gender-swapping fish, sadomasochist snails, genderqueer lions, birthing male seahorses, partially asexual ants, same-sex songbirds and flamingos, aroused bonobos, and exuberantly sexual dolphins. 

It’s ironic when you consider that homophobia originated from the idea that homosexual behavior is a crime against nature. What is considered “natural” or “unnatural” has been used to discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people, as well as people of color and Indigenous people, for generations. And yet, nature has always been flamboyantly queer, insatiable in its appetite for sex, pleasure, and new life. 

Queer ecology is the application of queer theory to nature. It seeks to challenge dominant systems of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, colonialism, and capitalism and show how these destructive ideologies distance us from our natural environment. How we understand the natural world, and our place in it, has been heavily influenced by media that positions nature as pure and bountiful. The moniker “Mother Nature” emphasizes its life-giving and nurturing qualities. But nature also rages and destroys and fornicates as if life depended on it which, of course, it does. 

Some scholars argue that heteropatriarchy is fueling environmental collapse. In contrast, queer communities of care and support, built by people who are ostracized from their families, better reflect the symbiotic relationships in nature. Our planet is home to immense diversity in terms of both sex and gender. This should inspire us to expand our understanding of human identity, sexuality, pleasure, and desire. 

Consider the New Mexico whiptail lizard, which reproduces through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction that allows the female to create a viable offspring without a mate. Consider, too, the “birds and the bees” talk: It’s the clichéd story parents use to explain how babies are made, though as Micha Rahder notes, it’s an insult to birds and bees to have their ravenous sex lives reduced to a heteronormative fable. Both are infinitely more sexually adventurous than (most) humans.

The natural world is much wilder than we can ever imagine. We have so much to learn.

As we bear witness to the destruction wrought by climate change, we need new ways of interacting with the environment. As you’ll see in this reading list, queer ecology offers a new lens through which we can reimagine our relationships with our bodies, our peers, and nature. 

How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time (Alex Johnson, Orion Magazine, March 2011)

This thoughtful personal essay by queer conservationist Alex Johnson, laid out in the form of a lesson plan, joyfully challenges the double standard inherent in believing that nature intended for only a man and a woman to love each other and that humans ought to tear the earth apart to extract fossil fuels. Nature writing tends to be either beatific in describing the wonders of the natural world or despairing at how we are destroying it. But Johnson’s essay calmly collapses that dichotomy, noting how we “call geese beautiful and elegant and faithful until they are shitting all over the lawn and terrorizing young children.”

Writing about nature means accepting that it will prove you wrong. And right. And render you generally confused. Nature is mysterious, and our part in the pageant is shrouded in mystery as well. This means contradiction and paradox and irony. It means that there will always be an exception. Nature has always humiliated the self-congratulatory scientist.

At Last, An Entire Institute for Queer Ecology (Landon Peoples, Atmos, January 2021)

Established in 2017, The Institute for Queer Ecology (IQECO) is a collaborative “organism” that is guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonized thought. Landon Peoples’ wide-ranging interview with its founder, Lee Pivnik, explores the institute’s creative mission to champion inventive solutions to the climate crisis. The institute aims to challenge mainstream ideas of humans versus nature and celebrate opportunities for synergy with the natural world. Lee, who identifies as queer, reflects on the intersections between his own identity, evolution, and the false binary that exists between culture and nature. This conversation offers a useful framework on how to find “beautiful fluidity” in a time of constant change.

The Institute of Queer Ecology acts as a visioning tool to speculate and imagine a new world that we can inhabit together—thinking of change as this grounding, universal principle that we first see in ourselves, and then acknowledging ourselves as individuals in the beautiful fluidity that queerness promises at the individual level—where you have the ability to constantly make yourself resistant to categorization.

Brigitte Baptiste: “It’s Time to Reframe Sustainable Work Through a Queer Lens” (Najit Benrabaa, Welcome To The Jungle, March 2022)

“There’s nothing more queer than nature,” Brigitte Baptiste argues in her short but compelling TEDx talk. Baptiste, one of the world’s most influential environmental experts, founded the leading biodiversity research center in her native Colombia. She has advised the U.N., written more than a dozen books, and won international prizes for her work. Najit Benrabaa’s interview covers Baptiste’s unique career path, “green capitalism,” and how a queer lens informs her work. Her fascinating personal story runs in parallel to her work as a biologist in Colombia, which is the most biodiverse country in the world per square kilometer. 

The queer view of biodiversity helps us assign new words to the transformations instead of reducing ourselves to canonical parameters or stereotyped descriptions. There is multiplicity in species and ecosystems. Queer ecology is a different way of looking at nature—it insists on the fact that we can enjoy, without prejudice, the diversity of life forms and sexualities being expressed.

On Not Becoming an Ecosexual (Meghan Flaherty, VQR, Winter 2022) 

Grassilingus, anyone? In her funny and thought-provoking essay, Meghan Flaherty examines ecosexuality and wonders how we ought to interact with nature. Her essay is carnal and complex, layering works of indigenous wisdom like Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass with the teachings of Instagram personalities like @MyOrgasmicLife, who calls herself the “Brené Brown of pussy.” Flaherty discovers, as both a gardener and an intellectual, that engaging with nature without exploiting it restores us in ways we can’t yet define. Quoting Kimmerer, she concludes that “any action on behalf of life will be reciprocated: ‘We restore the land, and the land restores us.’”

There is no dualism. There is no big divide. We are all connected, with or without souls. Hierarchy, any domination in the web of life, hurts everyone. “All flourishing is mutual.” We flourish, all of us together, or we flourish not at all. We start respecting all these “others”—nature, perhaps, first and foremost—or we die.

Qualities of Earth (Rebecca May Johnson, Granta, May 2020)

Rebecca May Johnson’s piece also begins in her garden. During the COVID lockdown, she passes her time growing vegetables and experiences how challenging it is to contain nature’s voracious appetite for life. Dividing land into allotments rented by individual gardeners proves futile as the vegetables copulate underground; growing courgettes and pumpkins side by side, she harvests strange hybrid crops with ombréd colors and alien textures. As she weeds, she listens to podcasts about gay women in France who are banned from having children through IVF. She thinks of her friends trying to become pregnant, of the “the intense, repressive hell” of making babies under patriarchy. Her essay expands into an argument for generosity — in terms of both material things and one’s frame of reference — as she shares the produce from her teeming garden with friends, lest they rot in the soil. 

That violent heteronormative cultures of sex and reproduction among humans are attributed to ‘nature’ feels astonishing after spending time on the allotment. The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel that makes a mockery of conservative ideas of the natural.

Queering the Food System (Daphne Chouliaraki Milner, Atmos, June 2022)

The food on my table is a persistent connection I have with nature. Whether it’s the herbs I grow on my windowsills or the veggies I pick up at the farmer’s market, it’s thrilling to think about nature’s queerness as I prepare dinner for my girlfriend. Like most people, we rely on an agricultural industry that exploits the earth’s resources for profit. Queer farmers, many of them nonwhite, are redefining what it means to farm the land respectfully, thinking of their crops “not as resources to be extracted, but rather as members of an ecosystem.” Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes about mindful land practices and behavior-based animal management, reimagining one of the most environmentally damaging industries on the planet. This piece highlights the many challenges with monoculture farming and charts a path toward a more equitable and healthier future for the planet and all of its inhabitants. 

“Queer theory complicates reductive binary understandings of the world; it complicates ideas of hierarchy; it complicates the idea that there are better positions and worse positions”, said Benedict Morrison, member of Quinta, an ecovillage and LGBTQIA+ community project. “Queering our food systems is an attempt at radical empathy. It’s an attempt to always find the value in difference.”

Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regular newsletter and is working on her first book.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Copy-editor: Peter Rubin

That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.

Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.

When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.

The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.

He told me he was a bus driver for the city; I told him I was between jobs but was mostly a writer. As we talked, away from the roar of the party, I watched his desire over the top of my champagne glass, and I started drinking that in, too. He matched the pace of my quips and my laughter was real. I gave him my number because it was another night when it seemed like anything could happen.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought about a medieval classroom’s curriculum or what it might have been like to attend. Apparently they could be a lot more racy than you’d think. Chaucer’s story Reeve’s Tale, is about rape, for example. Poems about deflowered nuns and lascivious men whose sexual appetites earned comparisons to animals were read to children and adults. In a fascinating and fresh review-essay for the London Review of Books, Irina Dumitrescu looks at ancient depications of sexuality, and the idea of obscenity, through Carissa Harris’ book Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. “In her meticulously argued new book,” Dumitrescu writes, “Carissa Harris shows that obscenity was used to convey vastly different lessons about sex and ethics in medieval literature. Focusing on sexual language in Middle English and Middle Scots, her study explores the way texts deployed for (heterosexual) erotic education often combined ‘the irresistible pull of arousal and titillation and the revulsive push of shame and disgust’.”

For much of the 20th century, academics argued that the concept of obscenity was born along with the printing press and state censorship of erotic material. One can understand where this idea came from: even a fleeting encounter with medieval art is likely to turn up lurid depictions of sex organs and bodily orifices. Take the naked man crouching at the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, his genitalia on full display. (In 2018, George Garnett achieved brief internet fame by counting the 93 phalluses, human and equine, shown on the tapestry, and documenting their states of tumescence.) Medieval manuscript pages often have a stately central text surrounded by rollicking activity. Nuns harvest penises from trees in the lower margins of a manuscript of the Roman de la rose, and a naked man presents his behind to be pierced by a monkey’s lance beneath the prayers of the Rutland Psalter. Pilgrim badges, popular medieval souvenirs made of cheap metal alloys, depict vulvas dressed as pilgrims, winged penises and female smiths forging phalluses. Erotic imagery is carved into stone corbels and on the undersides of wooden choir seats in medieval churches.

But none of this should be taken as proof that there was no concept of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The notion that some things are lewd or filthy is distinct from the desire to regulate them by political means. The influential seventh-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville used the adjective ‘obscenus’ to describe the love of prostitutes and those parts of the body that excite people to shameful acts. In the 12th century, the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux railed against heretics doing ‘heinous and obscene’ things in private, comparing them to the stinking behinds of foxes. In the Roman de la rose, the Lover upbraids the allegorical figure of Reason for using the word coilles (‘balls’). He argues that this isn’t dignified in the mouth of a courteous girl (an unwitting double entendre), but Reason defends her usage. God made the generative organs and women enjoy the pleasures these afford, whatever word is used to describe them. Not all medieval copyists of the Roman de la rose agreed with this argument: a number of versions leave out this passage. People in the Middle Ages certainly understood certain things to be filthy or shameful, but such topics could also inspire prayerful reflection or be used to explain the error of a poor line of verse.

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Deenie Hartzog-Mislock | Longreads | April 2020 | 13 minutes (3,341 words)

About two years ago, I stopped feeling beautiful. Around that time, my husband stopped touching me. “I don’t feel sexy,” I told our therapist from the gray, tufted chenille seat adjacent to my husband’s. I kneaded a wet tissue, worn into holes, between my thumbs. “When he doesn’t touch me, it makes me feel bad about my body. And then I treat my body poorly, and then I hate the way I look and feel.”

I knew better. I knew our lack of sexual intimacy wasn’t about the soft, expanding skin that stubbornly clung to my midsection, or my thighs, so much thicker, dimplier now than they used to be, my entire shape a soft, aging pear. So different from what it was when I was a dancer in college, spending whole days in pale pink tights — when I was leaner, younger. I knew this was about him, his childhood (always the childhood), his work, and his insecurities. But I needed my therapist’s advice. After two years of starts and stops, his reasons for not wanting to have sex, however valid, floated from his mouth and immediately vaporized into thick, gray clouds that followed me around, threatening to dampen my self-esteem at any moment.

It’s my body, isn’t it? Do you not love me anymore? Through the dim light of our bedroom, after another botched attempt to physically pull him out from under the emotional weight he couldn’t seem to escape, I would ask these loaded questions while tears careened down my cheeks and onto the crumpled sheets between us. No, I love your body, he’d say. Of course I still love you. But I didn’t believe him. And sometimes I still don’t.

***

We weren’t always like this. Nine years into our relationship, five years into marriage, as tensions arose financially and professionally; as the prospect of starting or not starting a family became difficult to ignore; as expectations and rifts in his identity grew more tenuous; our sex life dissipated. After a few months, I was angry, frustrated.

Then my husband disappeared into himself entirely. He stopped smiling. His laughter ceased to echo. I retreated into work. We shifted around one another. Months passed. We went to therapy. Once or twice he accepted my plea for sex, disguised as an invitation, but it was different now. Like a chore he’d been asked to complete. Each time we danced around the prospect of physical intimacy, I could feel his tension rising like the upward turning of a volume knob. More months passed. The New Year came and went. I pointed out the last time we’d had sex. “I’m well aware how long it’s been,” he said.

“You know, intimacy comes in many forms,” our therapist said as she handed us a large, artfully illustrated sex therapy guide, thinking we could get “inspired” by looking at the visuals. Thanks, but I know what a blowjob looks like.

I’ve quietly cried myself to sleep in bed next to him. I’ve cried in front of him at restaurants, in our kitchen, and in the car; alone in the hallway and outside with the dog. I’ve ceremoniously lost my shit, yelling about all the other men I’ve dreamt of sleeping with — celebrities, that shirtless guy in my yoga class, the faceless composites of men who can give me the one thing in fantasy that my husband no longer offers me in reality: desire.

“If you really want to have sex with me, like you say you do, then wouldn’t you just do it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s not that simple.”

I’ve tried nearly everything to buy us more time — tended to my emotional wounds with long outdoor walks, gone away from him for weeks to focus on my writing, extended vacations with girlfriends — because I married a good man. A responsible, kind, loyal man with a big heart; my creative equal. I make sense of the world through words. He does it through music. And when I hear him in his studio, plucking strings and punching pedals, making ambient sounds that permeate every corner of our home, I know he’s trying to say what he can’t articulate verbally — or physically. So I stay on the sidelines, crying, dreaming, waiting.

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I can’t accept that sex should be this complicated between two people who love each other, who’ve been having satisfying sexual experiences for years. Why can’t you just have sex with me? I cry at how pathetic it sounds to ask him this. It makes me feel like a child asking for candy in the grocery store, ashamed because I already know the answer.

I can’t accept that my husband is allowed to be unhappy and that it has nothing to do with me, the woman who has been tasked to keep him happy. That his unhappiness — not his love for me — has stripped him of all desires, and not just for sex, for life, too. No, I’ve believed that there is something wrong with me, with the way my body must feel in his hands, against him, because that’s what women have been led to believe all our lives. It’s our fault.

I recognize that I have fallen prey to two very dangerous and false ideas: That men are expected to desire sex always, in perpetuity, and that their masculinity is defined by this. Secondly, that arousal is subject solely to physical appearance. But the logic necessary to dismantle false ideas is rarely anywhere to be found when you’re near ready to detonate your life.

***

“I want you to do something every day that makes you feel sexy, all on your own,” our therapist said. I thought to myself about all those fantasy men. I don’t think that’s what she had in mind when she said, “all on your own.”

“What makes you feel sexy?” she asked.

“Being active,” I said. “After a run or a hot yoga class, when I’m covered in sweat. I feel sexy when I feel strong.”

When my muscles feel as though I’ve stretched them to the furthest corner of my skin, it puts me back in my body like when I was a dancer — the feeling that breath, brain, and limbs are a cohesive, connected system. In duets, I loved the way our shapes curled against one another, the elegant, tactile nature of handling a torso, the way we’d bend and sway, passing our weight back and forth with nothing between us but a thin black leotard. Back then the flick of a wrist conjured enough emotion to crack the ceiling; the soar of a grand jeté or the scooping gesture of a deep plié were centered, focused manifestations of something bigger than me. My body was a conduit for feeling, but also a disposal of it. “Use it, or leave it at the door,” my dance instructor used to say. So I used it on the floor. I moved through it.

“Also, I feel sexy when he thinks I’m sexy,” I said looking to my husband. “How fucked up is that?” I asked her. “I’ve believed, all this time, that I’m only as beautiful as he thinks I am.”

***

Appearances, especially those of the body, were not something I was taught to value, at least directly. Though in the deep south of the 1980s, that’s exactly what one was subconsciously taught to use as a standard of self worth. But I was a chubby, energetic kid, so I was lauded for other traits, like good grades. I was taught the importance of being a kind and moral person. I got laughs for being funny. I was quirky. My family raised me to be confident at every age and size, surrounded by a slew of Lebanese aunts who would have told me I was gorgeous if I had the face and body of a groundhog.

My weight fluctuated dramatically all my life; I’ve cycled through more denim digits than I can count. Attention for my appearance didn’t come until I grew older — until I got skinny. In college, when I was throwing up cheeseburgers in order to compete, aesthetically, with the other dancers, men and women praised me for dropping down to a size 0. I was so thin I could pull on a pair of jeans, button and zip them, and slip them right off, gliding past my bony hips that way. It was such a novelty it might as well have been a party trick. I’d never been so small, and the message I received was not new or revolutionary, but it was simple and powerful: The thinner I was, the more positive attention I received. Even then, though, I was never as thin as the best dancers. My meaty ass still got in the way of my arabesque.

I stopped dancing a couple of years after I graduated in 2005, when I moved to New York City. All those years obsessing over my size had exhausted me. I stopped reading books like Diet For Dancers, which recommended diet plans as low as 1,000 calories a day (after a day of rehearsal!). I saw a health coach to reeducate myself on how to be a non-dancer living in the world of wellness. I skipped workouts. I started eating French fries. (Gasp!) My shape changed again, and this time, I allowed it to. I just wanted to be normal, to stop calculating the number of calories in every bite and how many God-Awful-Boring-Hours-On-An-Elliptical I’d have to endure to lose it. I thought, finally, I could be content with my body.

***

Now, in my late 30’s, the prime of my youth has passed, and time continues to show me what it can do to an aging body, breasts, and skin. My features, the ones men once admired, have changed — less taut, less petite, less lean everywhere. At my best, I’m unconcerned, grateful for a strong, feminine figure. But old habits die hard.

In the absence of sex, I’ve been frustrated that men do not look at me the way they used to. And yet, furious that I care at all. What angers me more than the south-sloping evolution of my physical identity is that the very people I seek approval from are the people I want to educate, whose hold over me I want to diminish, whose minds I want to change: Men. When I catch their eyes, I get a familiar shiver of exhilaration, a feeling I’ve known ever since I was old enough to understand it: Power.

“You know,” I told my husband a few years after we married, “I seek nearly all my validation from you now. Just you.” I used to get it from strangers on the subway, in bars and restaurants, on the street. I collected glances from men and used them as ammo for my self-esteem. It’s not that I think we ought to stop flirting after marriage (puh-lease). But I thought that by drawing the bulk of my physical validation from my husband, by focusing my efforts in one place, I’d be less likely to stray in this marathon of a relationship. The problem: Drawing validation from somewhere that is not self-generating, but a fallible external source like another human, is as likely to disappoint as the series finale of Game of Thrones.

In a world where women are made to feel that we are lesser than, weaker than, we are often taught that sex and appearance are our only weapons with which to compete — and it’s pervasive: in the workplace, on social media, even in politics. I don’t disagree with using sexuality as one way to move through this world. The issue is that society has made this our primary mode of leverage, and if we exist or age outside of society’s prescribed standards of beauty — narrow ideas about age, race, shape, size — we often lose our perceived power. As single women, as wives, as figures of desire.

Is this not the most backwards shit you’ve ever heard? And still we are told that in order to be deemed sexually desirable by the world, we must fall within a range of an acceptable prototype. Does the world not gauge us based on size (among other things) with a scale that ranges from “hot” to “socially accepted,” and then a quick phase out to “invisible”?

Cellulite! Back fat! For many women, these are the most natural characteristics of the female body — as natural as giving birth, as growing old — and yet, somewhere along the way, through so many forms of messaging, we were taught they were unnatural and meant to be concealed. Mainstream media is moving at a crawl to be more inclusive. Be Yourself! they say. But look gorgeous (and effortless!) while you do it! Don’t care what other people think! they proclaim. But only if you look how we want you to look. Otherwise you’ll be trolled.

***

Gen Z-ers are growing up in a world drastically more body positive than the one I was brought up in, but I wonder what it will take to rewire my history? My inner dialogue must be the most toxic, damaging aspect of my conundrum, one so deep-seated I couldn’t possibly trace its origin — though perhaps it was cemented the day another fourth grader, a boy, called me fat in front of the class. Or each time I bought into the lie that this dress will be the one that makes me love my body.

The amount of time, energy, and money most women spend trying to change their form or conceal their shape is certifiably ludicrous. If we materialized the physical insecurities of every woman and spread them out like a blanket over the earth, would they cover more ground than all the oceans combined? I want desperately to be free of guilt, shame, and failure around the expansion and reshaping of my form, but there is a man’s voice in the back of my head reminding me that soon enough, I will fade into his periphery.

In Shrill, Lindy West brilliantly articulated a larger frustration when she wrote, “When you raise every woman to believe that we are insignificant, that we are broken, that we are sick, that the only cure is starvation and restraint and smallness; when you pit women against one another, keep us shackled by shame and hunger, obsessing over our flaws rather than our power and potential; when you leverage all of that to sap our money and our time — that moves the rudder of the world. It steers humanity toward conservatism and walls and the narrow interests of men, and it keeps us adrift in waters that are secondary to men’s pleasure and convenience.”

***

So, OK fine, fuck the world. And the patriarchy. But what happens when we turn into our most intimate relationship — our long-term partnership or marriage — the one that is not of the world, but made of our deepest, most sacred selves, and we are rejected sexually? Where do we have to go? How long can I maintain unwavering pride in a body deemed unfuckable by the one person I threw in all my chips for? In sexlessness, it’s been impossible for me not to recall the validation I received back in college, impossible not to wonder, If I make myself smaller, will he see me?

In a quest for balance, I avoid wellness propaganda that exists for the wrong reasons. I don’t care about summer-body six packs. I just want to put on a pair of pants without feeling as though I’m a moral failure for allowing them to tug so passionately across my hips. I don’t subscribe to routines that encourage scales, measurements, and restriction. I am thoughtful about the language I use around food and fitness, careful not to encourage thinness or dieting. I want to be educated on every body’s struggles with self-image, and understand how I can help create a world in which narrow, specific ideals of beauty are no longer the norm. I want to stop thinking about my body so much.

And yet, I don’t wear shorts because I hate my legs. I’d rather wear a bedazzled Glad bag with drawstring ties than a body-skimming dress that might — God forbid — reveal the pillow of my belly in its entirety. Once a friend of my father’s, while slightly inebriated, told me he saw a photo in which it looked like I’d “eaten too much strawberry shortcake.” I was too shocked to tell him to fuck off. And now I think about it every time I wear that pair of jeans.

If, at my thickest, men do not see me, I default to old habits of blaming myself. If my husband doesn’t touch me, I am certain it’s because he is repulsed by the idea of getting in bed with a skin-toned marshmallow. Regardless of how beautiful I find my shape and size to be in all its iterations, I don’t know what to believe about my body if someone is not telling me what they think about it. And with that, I am perpetrating a toxic cycle that won’t change until I do.

I am honest with my husband about my struggles. I don’t know what else to do, or how to move past a lifetime of body image trauma without first acknowledging it in front of someone I trust. My therapist will continue to insist this is intimacy. While I know she’s technically right, I scoff at this soft-core emotional foreplay. There are only so many hours we can spend hashing out our emotional hang ups, only so many nights I can fight my disappointment as he kisses my shoulder and then turns his back to me, again, uninterested in what my body has to offer.

I want a physical conversation. I want him to be greedy with me. I want to feel the weight of his body without the weight of his anxiety. I want it to be easy. I want to pretend that marriage is not so complicated. I want to be back in the dance studio, sliding limbs across limbs. I want to be yanked by their hands, flung into their arms, hooked by my ribcage.

***

“Would you be up for trying something a little different?” my therapist asked in one of our last sessions. God, what was she going to ask us to do now? We’d already been asked to hop into the driver’s seat of an imaginary car to revisit our childhood selves; point to basic emotions on a laminated piece of paper; and gaze, unflinchingly, into each other’s eyes without laughing.

“Uh, sure.”

She sat us on the floor with our backs touching and our sitz bones stacked on a pillow.

“I want you to move slowly back and forth, keeping your backs aligned.” She spoke in a soft, soothing tone. “Move left and right, and forward if you like, supporting the weight of each other as you move.” And we did.

I could have swayed like that forever, his weight propped against me. For once, he held no tension in his neck. He did not resist me when I pushed my spine into his. He followed the curve of me when I leaned forward, releasing his body onto mine. For a moment, I was back in the dance studio, back in my body. Afterwards my therapist asked how that made us feel. “It made me feel beautiful,” I told her.

Back in the tufted chenille chairs she asked what we were thinking; what did we want from the future? I said I wanted more surrender from him. He said he was working on articulating his more complicated feelings, on expressing them instead of hiding them. Just as I was about to move on to the next thing, my husband interjected. “And healing.” He turned his piercing blue eyes onto me. “It’s about healing.”

* * *

Deenie Hartzog-Mislock is a writer and copy director living in Los Angeles.

Editor: Sari Botton