On February 15, 2021, I downloaded the application called FaceApp to my phone, just for a laugh. I’d had a new phone for a few months, and I was curious. Although the app allowed users to change age, shape, or hairstyle, I was, specifically and exclusively, interested in the gender-swap function. I fed in a mug-shot-style selfie and in return got something that didn’t displease me: a picture of an attractive woman in whose face my features were discernible. Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that had lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I had seldom allowed myself such a graphic self-depiction; over the years I had occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman but had always immediately destroyed the results. And yet I didn’t delete that cyber-image. Instead, over the next week or so I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12: snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see, laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl, from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman, I could now see, was a coherent phenomenon, consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.
There are moments in history that are so monumental that they cause the world to freeze on its axis, demanding the attention of all humankind and forever changing who we are.
July 16, 1969: Man walks on the moon, birthing conspiracy theorists who insist that man has definitely not walked on the moon. November 2, 2016: The Chicago Cubs win the World Series, alerting us all to the fact that the end is nigh. March 25, 2019: The internet is introduced to the "St. Louis Bagel," and within minutes the population of Twitter begins to violently collapse in on itself like a dying star.
Edmund White’s new metafictional novel, “A Previous Life,” takes place mostly in 2050, and his future is very much like our present. Covid seems to have passed. People continue to connect on Facebook. Museums and theaters still exist, at least in the form of a London revival of Matthew Lopez’s 2018 play “The Inheritance.” Academics — yes, there is still academia — research and write intellectual works, among them, it turns out, a biography of White himself, even if “scholars have worked more on Sedaris.”
If ever there was a moment to brush up on your knowledge of the immune system, this is that moment. (Okay, March-April 2020 may have been preferable, but you can still catch up.) And Immune is the perfect vehicle to help you do that. This book is phenomenal. It is engaging, it is informative, it is extremely clear and well-organized, it is helpful and illuminating and relevant and eye-opening and incredibly timely. And it is beautiful. Go get it and read it.
Corseting, girdling, foot-binding, liposuctioning, circumcising, Botoxing, bleaching, douching, vajazzling, plugging with jade eggs, burning at the stake, stoning in the square, sterilizing without consent — what doesn’t culture do with female bodies?
The subject could fill an encyclopedia; in Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies, historian Catherine McCormack narrows it down to women in art history and visual culture, from Old Masters to female artists, influencers, and celebrities. Identifying four historical tropes that have defined and constrained women in art and beyond (Venus, mothers, maidens and dead damsels, and monsters,) she brings insight and expertise to the subject. She writes,
Human judgments are eccentric. Many factors influence them and vary across individuals, times, situations. Some judgments are biased towards or against certain phenomena, showing predictable systematic deviation from desirable human behaviour, while some are unpredictable; they are noisy. In Noise, the authors highlight such crucial flaws of human judgment which they define as random/chaotic deviations from targeted behaviour that invite no causal explanation.
My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.
Years later, I suddenly think of you
scuttling through the walls of my cabin
in Flagstaff, where I’d come to escape.