For Shame

Zephaniah and Gillian Anderson

File: Jesus Christ - Hofmann.jpg - Wikimedia Commons—Jesus surprised you didn’t think he was good when you were the one wicked one.

Is it Monday? It seems that is, and therefore we’re back to the routine of Zoom Morning Prayer at the early hour of seven, which puts a certain kind of frame around the world. As the days get shorter and rosy-fingered dawn starts taking her sweet time to appear over the horizon, it will be harder and harder to be awake to hear the solemn reading of God’s holy Word, but for now, I am well able to imbibe the measured rhythms of prayer with my morning oolong.

Of course, as usual, I ruined it by wandering around Twitter for a few minutes, and then clicking on the New York Times where I discovered this… I was going to say “Fresh Hell” but upon reflection, it is more like Stale, nay even Boring Turpitude. It’s called “Gillian Anderson Wants Women to Put Pleasure First: With a new book about fantasies, the ‘Sex Education’ star is hoping to help women tap into their most intimate desires — in and out of the bedroom.”

In 1998, when Gillian Anderson posed for the cover of the now-defunct feminist magazine Jane, she had already been voted the “world’s sexiest woman” by the readers of FHM magazine. She had also recently won a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for her role as the F.B.I. special agent Dr. Dana Scully on “The X-Files.” But on the day of the shoot, all she could think about was how fat she felt.

Poor thing. I can readily sympathize. I know what it’s like to obsess over my relative girth and what everyone else is thinking about it, which, for me mercifully, is probably nothing because I’ve never been on TV and don’t have any plans to take up the habit any time soon. The article is long and not very interesting, so I’ll just skip down a bit:

Over the past few years, Ms. Anderson has taken on a handful of side projects focused on women’s pleasure, including publishing a new book, “Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous,” on Sept. 17. The book is meant to help women feel more comfortable expressing their most intimate desires and embracing what feels good. “We think of pleasure as being frivolous,” she said, sitting cross-legged on a cream-colored couch, wearing a black sundress and no makeup or shoes. But “what is the point of this complex, torturous existence that we find ourselves in as human beings if there can’t be an element of joy and pleasure?”

That last line, O Best Beloved, is what is so irritating about everything that I read in places like the New York Times. The line begins with a good and reasonable question—what is the point of this complex, tortuous existence—but then veers right off the rails. Shouldn’t you want to know what is the point of this complex, torturous existence? Shouldn’t that occupy some of the hours of each swiftly passing day? Must one rush past the contemplation of this purgatorial wilderness to the task of writing more boring books about sex? Couldn’t you just pause there for a few minutes? Because if you don’t know what the point of existence is, how can you even begin to consider the meanings of joy or pleasure? Asking for a friend, as it were.

So anyway:

Ms. Anderson’s publisher set up an encrypted portal for women to submit their fantasies. They received 1,118 letters, Ms. Conrad said, and used 174 in the book — including a fantasy written by Ms. Anderson. (She won’t reveal which one.)

Believe me, I won’t be reading the book and therefore do not care. Here’s the terrible part:

Contributors fantasized about having sex in a church (“In the pews, under the stained-glass windows, staring at Jesus on the cross”); sex with sibling heirs to an art fortune; sex with Harry Styles. They wrote of their desires to have sex with a female therapist and with a best friend. Several women dreamed about having sex with robots attuned to their every desire. And yet, Ms. Anderson told me, “I was taken by the amount of shame today.” Many of the submissions expressed the same feelings of ambivalence women had conveyed to Ms. Friday half a century earlier. Then and now, women wrote of feeling embarrassed by their perceived physical imperfections, or feeling guilty about their sexual appetite or desires, particularly when they involved anything beyond heterosexual sex within marriage.

I suppose it would not be popular to suggest that we all make hats reading Make America Ashamed Again, or MAAAA. It could be a sort of cry of dereliction, some kind of miserable wail everyone utters when they discover that the pursuit of pleasure, without knowing anything about what it is for or why it exists, will always lead to futility and despair. Hashtag Ecclesiastes. Hashtag Solomon Was Smarter Than All Of Us And Still Failed.