bondage babies
hi, we are trapped in a cycle of emotionally exploitative outrage
I sleep as long as my body will allow me on Second Sundays. But between partitioning of adderall due to another shortage, faux sunrise & bird chirps from my Philips alarm clock & a dry throat from the heat of my radiator on a not-so-cold day I usually wake up around 7:30 am or so. My radiator does this thing where it spits out water, my roommate jokes that it's Cricket's God because he'll sit in front of it & watch until it boils over spewing hot water all over the corner of my dresser. And until last week when I returned to laying on a borrowed yoga mat to ground myself, I never noticed that the bottom of the dresser facing the radiator is slightly warped. I watched above my head as the water forced it's way out of the blue painters tape tied around the dial, my eyes tracing it's path down to the swollen thin wood covering reminiscent of the headless hormonal zit making it's appearance on my chin. I must've subconsciously known that the disfigurement of my one real piece of furniture was a possibility but for some reason it didn't seem like there was a solution. I landed on placing a ragged bleach discolored multi-grey towel over the leaky tape and it had been working pretty well but it's a bit of an eyesore. So, on this particular Second Sunday, I sprang out of bed at the sound of water spewing out to replace the towel as I had moved it the night before. And once I'm up, I'm up.
Everyday you have to wake up and ~live in a body~ so I spent my early morning calling a ton of doctors, and doing chores & making appointments instead of w*rking. I was on such a roll that I decided try to proactively maintain my body and ended up sitting for two hours in a PACKED urgent care1 complete with little kids coughing. By the time I was done my blood sugar had plummeted and the day was quickly fading. It was like, write this or feel the fleeting winter sun on my face. Guess which won? No clue how I ended up reverse traversing a route to an old job but I remember my glasses fogging up and yelling out that I was "soooo emotional today!!". Yay muscle memory. I paced the sidewalks, angry and upset but it was hella cathartic. I'm tired of being angry & upset, GOD the amount of time I've spent angry and upset and still in the same place. K & I have been talking about moving on & not ruminating which for the most part I'm so much better at but I'm on my period and my old rage habits die hard. So I wrote a note for therapy tomorrow, How can I stop losing time to anger?
i ended up spending the whole time crying, and i slept for four hours after, we're back to the potential trauma specialist conversation because my 'risk is high even though [i've] improved'. it's just that the rate at which I swing between high and low is at a whiplash speed again. and i'm trying, so fucking hard but emdr is $600 for a minimum of six sessions. i'm systemically fried, we all are - i tried to borrow a book on burnout from the library and was #34 in queue.
If you somehow missed the ongoing #BalenciagaGate, you didn't miss much. People are outraged because the world is shit, we're being squeezed for all we've got and seeing rich people be rich people is really fucking gross, unless we can laugh at them. It's obvious why White Lotus & Succession are so popular, even the rich are stuck in transactional exploitative exchanges with no hopes of getting out and the writers do it in such a way that they create the emotional relatability to these otherwise unrelatable characters so we can easily follow along. no shade.
I feel like that's why this controversy won't go away. And honestly, I blame Art's seeming pride in separation from real world application. In fact, I’ve seriously been considering going Warhol and selling out to become an art director because at least then the people I care about will see my work.
Balenciaga trolls super hard all of the times because its current creative director is Vetements originator/founder Demna Gvasalia. Remember DHL? Ikea? Trashbags? Dirty Sneakers? Bernie-Sanders-core? It's giving hypermodern Dada. The ugliest thing they ever did was put Kim Kardashian in black card earrings on a morning talk show.
But this time they hired a NatGeo frequent photographer who takes pictures of kids with their toys and Adults with their excessive gun collections. Funnily enough, one of his images was used in a Chicago Sun Times article this summer titled ‘Why Restrict Child Porn but Not Guns?’ - he’s since had to clarify those words are not his. Anyways, Balenciaga put some very mise on scene props into their campaign and ended up on DietPrada and like every major news source including Tucker Carlson so they're you know, officially canceled by everybody. ...Life comes at you fast, a few weeks ago during Elon Musk's buying of Twitter and Kanye's whole situation they were appreciated for quickly distancing.
Here's a list of hastags I've seen in the past week on my 'trending' Twitter page: #burnbalenciaga, #cancelbalenciaga #balenciagate #balenciagagroomers #balenciagapedos
Like, the internet is outraged to the point that someone commented CANCEL BALENCIAGA2 on an almost two year old post of mine that referenced this article about how the alt-right/Trump & Demna understand media marketing better than most politicians/people/etc. How in all of the Balenciaga SEO on Instagram did they find my post for a workshop I taught in 2021?
The Public has demanded answers for the BDSM teddy bears, references to losing First Amendment cases on 'virtual child porn' and now cannibalist Christian callouts. And they demand answers from the celebrities that have stayed 'oddly' silent in the midst of all of this. So, of course, Kim Kardashian was one of the first to break. And of course she had to repost her statement about her SHOCKED DISGUSTED & APPALLED-ness.
On their end, Balenciaga proceeded to sue the production company under the guise of not knowing even though they are known for being very in the know. They've since backtracked & claim sole responsiblity for their wrong choice of imagery re: children with 'BDSM bears' and failure to properly assess & validate images. Also, they claim the case documents of a 'supreme court ruling 'united states v williams 2008, which confirms as illegal and not protected by freedom of speech the promotion of child pornographry' were left over from a television drama. They go on to say they are revising their way of working, working with child protection organization, etc etc. It's all very reminiscent of recent apologies by canceled celebrities. Never forget, corporations are people too.
When I was in undergrad, I had a Tumblr, and on Tumblr were gifs of two girls adorned with flower crowns & the fattest black kohl cat-eyes I'd ever seen. These two girls both named Marie were swinging on technicolor chandeliers and dancing on tables covered in cakes, roasted birds and gelatin molds. I was obsessed with New Wave at the time like any Tumblr Girl worth her denim cutoffs & clinical depression. In Daisies, the Maries decide to be 'spoiled like the world' and go on to disinterestedly cut up sausages while dodging lovesick suitors, steal from bathroom attendees who compliment their style and manipulate older men into taking them both out to dinner only to jump off of speeding trains just in time to escape the expected transactional relations for said meals. I'm a receipt queen so, of course, I did a ton of research into the film's production and satirical approach. The color shifting film and jump cuts I was so fond of were in part due to Věra Chytilová having a small budget, in fact, some of the film was funded by the Czechoslovak government under the guise of being a moral tale where the victims are punished; it technically is. Daisies was later banned for it's wasteful portrayal of food but also because it's a scathing critique of the political landscape.
And because I was so enthralled with that film, my professor recommended Sweet Movie to me. Don't watch Sweet Movie, it's burned into my brain forever and omg I hate Otto Muehl. Sweet Movie basically has a similar critique but not at all, it's satire, it's shock and there is no subtlety whatsoever. In fact, the main actress quit after giving an unsimulated handjob. I feel like I can't describe it at all so here's a list of scenes: Karl Marx head pirate ship floating down the canals of Amsterdam, minors seduced into having sex with a grown woman on piles of sugar & then being murdered on said piles of sugar, a virginity pageant contest to see who has the best tightest virginal pussy, an orgy with diapered Vienna Actionists & a ton of body fluids, gorilla grip coochie sex emergencies at the top of the Eiffel Tower and about a thousand other batshit situations. It's in the Criterion Collection. The director knew the film would ruin his reputation (it did) but decided that it must be made.
Twenty-two year old me was not prepared but honestly, if I hadn't known it was all real, as in a grown woman was really brushing her breasts against a minor, I may have been okay with it. But it wasn't so it's not! And it’s definitely not something I would’ve ran across on my own unlike Salo, which I have avoided because it's supposed to be horrendously disgusting yet isn't nearly as bad because it relies more on emotional disgust than visual.
On a different note, I've never outright said it but I do sex work, and I have on and off for the past four years because I live in the hyper-capitalist corporation that is New York. We need to do better on picking up sensationalized political talking points with very real consequences for those who are just trying to survive/thrive in a way that is less soul crushing than like working at Starbucks or a Fortune 500 company or Miami Art Basel; it can be exploitative but is usually much more worth it. I'm fucking tired and want to rest. It's an act of resistance.
Anyways, Julia Fox said it best (you see how even this, the first article on Google makes a choice to girlboss and ignore her statement about no children being hurt & us ignoring when they are?)3.
xo, Sydney
ps. for the time being expect 3-4 essays a month from me. you can probably figure out why. thanks for reading i truly appreciate you all supporting my practice in a way that is sustainable for me. Make sure to like this post, comment and/or share so I get more traction <3
Please please please please please go get boosted/flu vaccinated/mask etc. Both the CityMed & LevelUp by my house were so full that people were standing, little kids were coughing,
I may be paraphrasing
I'm also a victim of a ton of child abuse & neglect, the majority of the time no one said or did shit. My m*m is a psychiatrist.