Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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In 2021 a man on an island approached me and asked me if I was trans. When I said yes, he told me “I could barely tell, you’ve become very attractive to men, you must feel like you’ve reached your goal.” Playing with the male gaze seems to be a losing battle. You get judged and reduced by men and, perhaps even more so, by women. Internalized misogyny seeps out as jealousy, and people find other ways to feel superior to you: well, she’s not very intelligent, well she’s trans. How dare she not abide by the rules: be sexually attractive, but not too sexually attractive, lest you want to be seen as the town slut, or in Pamela Anderson’s case in the 90’s, the world’s slut. I’m not willing to turn myself inside out and deny sides of me that are equally important to my life and being. Pamela Anderson became a sex symbol, and decades later she’s reached the status of a much deeper icon. Why did it take society so long to realize that she had a brain, that she could write superb poetry, that her main motivation in life has never been to be the hottest girl in the world? Women who pose nude, or even semi-nude, as I did on my own book cover, are rarely taken seriously as intellectuals and artistic subjects, especially if your body is considered normatively attractive to the male gaze. Within the music industry I can list many examples of women who’ve challenged this notion, from Courtney Love to Lil’Kim, from Madonna to Beyoncé. All artists who insist upon both being hot and sexy and being taken seriously as artistic creators. Their endeavors have not gone unpunished, detractors say that Kurt Cobain wrote Courtney Love’s songs and Notorious B.I.G. wrote Lil’Kim’s…Seriously? The literary world is even more conservative. Just look at the backlash to Sophia June’s article “ The Makings of a Literary It-Girl, ” where women finding new, sexier ways to market their books and their personas was frowned upon as ultra-capitalist and frivolous. How predictable. The mainstream […]
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The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
Hanif Kureishi You have been back in your London home for several months now, after a year in different hospitals,
