# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Florence Lawrence Chorus x The Surround Festive Party!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
FLC firmly believe it is never too early for festive togetherness so JOIN US for an evening of classic Florence Lawrence Chorus frivolity in tandem with...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Annual Studio Exhibition of work by studio members and invited artists, writers and musicians on the first weekend of October, 7 & 8 October.

# data[].attributes.body
Photos of The Thing at November's Work In Progress meeting by Matt Taylor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Male bumblers are an epidemic.

These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and perennially confused. What's the difference, the male bumbler wonders, between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one's penis in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing and asking her out?

The world baffles the bumbler. He's astonished to discover that he had power over anyone at all, let alone that he was perceived as using it. What power? he says. Who, me?

The bumbler is the first to confess that he's bad at his job. Take Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who testified Tuesday of the Trump campaign's foreign policy team, which he ran and which is now understood to have been in contact with Russian agents: "We were not a very effective group." Or consider Dave Becky, the manager of disgraced comedian Louis C.K. (who confessed last week to sexual misconduct). Becky avers that "never once, in all of these years, did anyone mention any of the other incidents that were reported recently." One might argue that no one should have needed to mention them; surely, as Louis C.K.'s manager, it was Becky's job to keep tabs on open secrets about his client? Becky's defense? He's a bumbler! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The bumbler doesn't know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was "stunned" by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year. Vice President Mike Pence maintains he had no idea former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lobbying for a foreign power - despite the fact that Flynn himself informed the transition team back in January, and even though Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) had written Pence - who was head of the transition team - to that effect as far back as Nov. 18, 2016. Wait, what? said Pence in March. Surely not! Really?

There's a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men - particularly powerful men - use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture's most muscular myths - that men are clueless - and weaponizes it into an alibi.

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler - the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth - is the best and hardest proof.

Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has been that they're the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct. Men are great but transparent, the story goes: What you see is what you get. They lack guile.

The "privilege" argument holds that this is partly true because men have never needed to deceive. This interesting Twitter thread by Holden Shearer has been making the rounds: "One of the oldest canards in low-denominator comedy is that women are inscrutable and men can't understand them. There's a reason for this and it ain't funny," he writes. The thread is right about the structural problems with lowbrow "women are so confusing!" comedy. "Women VERY frequently say one thing and mean another, display expressions or reactions that don't jibe with their feelings, and so on. But it's actually really easy to decode once you understand why it happens. It is survival behavior," Shearer writes.

But nested in that account is the assumption that the broad majority of men are not dissemblers. The majority are - you guessed it - bumblers! If you've noticed a tendency to treat girls - like the 14-year-old whom now-Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly picked up at her custody hearing - as knowing adults and men in their 30s - like Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump, Jr. - as erring youngsters, large sons and "coffee boys," this is why. Our culture makes that script available. It's why Sessions is so often referred to as an "elf" instead of a gifted manipulator ( here's a very clever analysis of his strategy, which weaponizes our tendency to read white men - even very old attorneys with a long history of maliciously undermining civil rights - as slow, meandering children who know not what they do.)

It's counterintuitive, I know. For decades now, the very idea of a duplicitous, calculating man has been so exceptional as to be almost monstrous; this is the domain of cult leaders, of con artists, of evil men like the husband in Gaslight. And while folks provisionally accept that there are men who "groom" children and "gaslight" women, the reluctance to attach that behavior to any real, flesh-and-blood man we know is extreme. Many people don't actually believe that normal men are capable of it.

Back when Dylan Farrow's allegations about Woody Allen were in the news, people quickly glommed onto Allen's exculpatory claim that Mia Farrow "brainwashed" her children into lying about him. It was fascinating, both because the claim was pretty evidence-free and because Woody Allen had blatantly and repeatedly admitted to manipulating and grooming Soon-Yi Previn. But, because Allen so skillfully deployed the script of the bumbler, everyone failed to see his behavior in those terms. Allen's portrayal of himself - he barely knows what he had for breakfast! - was just that effective. Never mind that he's so organized, ambitious, driven, confident, and purposeful that he successfully puts out a movie a year.

As the accusations of sexual misconduct roiling politics, publishing, and Hollywood continue to stack up, a few things are going to happen. The first stage of a phenomenon like this will always be to characterize the accused men as exceptions, as bad apples. #NotAllMen, the saying goes. But the second is that everyone is going to try to naturalize sexual harassment. If there are this many men doing these things, then surely this is just how men are! that argument will go. There's a corollary lurking underneath there: They can't help themselves. They're bumblers.

That won't wash. But the only way to guard against it is to shed our weird cultural blindness to manipulative male behavior. We must be smarter than our cultural defaults. We need to shed the exculpatory scripts that have mysteriously enabled all these incompetent bumblers to become rich, successful, and admired even as they maintain that they're moral infants.

We do that by looking at the deliberate, active steps they took to conceal what they did.

Take Benjamin Genocchio, who was recently replaced as executive director of the Armory Show, the New York City art fair, after 19 people testified to his inappropriate conduct. "I never intentionally acted in an inappropriate manner nor spoke to or touched a colleague in a sexually inappropriate way," Genocchio said. "To the extent my behavior was perceived as disrespectful, I deeply and sincerely apologize and will ensure it does not happen again."

In short: He's a bumbler!

Before you nod along, agreeing that it's just impossible to know what's appropriate in this day and age, let's look at how the allegations against Genocchio square with his professed confusion. At Artnet's 2014 holiday party at the Gramercy Park Hotel, as Colleen Calvo, the marketing coordinator, was checking guests in at the door, Genocchio allegedly ran his hand up her sequin pants. Per Calvo: "Ben said, 'Is this the only time I get to touch your ass without getting yelled at?'"

Does that sound like someone who doesn't understand the difference between what's appropriate and what's not? Does it instead sound like someone who understands perfectly what the boundaries are and is knowingly violating them? Nor was this isolated: The New York Times confirmed that Genocchio was spoken to repeatedly about his behavior. It was a known problem. He ignored the warnings.

Facts be damned: Genocchio knew he was playing to a wider audience that wouldn't look at those details; he hoped he could activate the bumbler stereotype and use it as an alibi.

This is not what bumblers do. This is what predators do. The actions are malicious, and the mind games are deliberate. So what about their handling of their reputations after the fact? Was this, too, bumbled?

No. In the majority of cases, the accused men were cunning and vindictive stewards of their reputations and did everything they could to ruin their victims.

Harvey Weinstein reportedly destroyed the careers of actresses he harassed; he got them branded as "difficult" or "crazy." He apparently hired ex-Mossad agents to spy on them.

Director Brett Ratner - to choose one unsavory example - addressed Olivia Munn's account in her book about how he masturbated in front of her (she'd left the director anonymous) by identifying himself and claiming he'd slept with her. (He later admitted she never had sex with him). It was a calculated effort to inflict maximum damage on her; to brand her a "slut."

Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly allegedly pressured one of his victims (who worked at the network ) to give him "dirt" on another victim so he could shut down her allegations against him.

Former Fox News chief Roger Ailes reportedly videotaped his victims in compromising situations so he could ruin them later if they misbehaved.

What about the seduction phase? There's been a spate of articles about men desperately worried that they've somehow bumbled into harassment. Were these men "accidental" predators? Did they stumble - baffled and confused - into a situation where they haplessly and unknowingly harassed women?

Well, director James Toback apparently used "theater school" language to convince his targets that their vulnerability was artistically necessary. As Rachel McAdams recalls, he "used the same language during my audition - that you have to take risks and sometimes you're going to be uncomfortable and sometimes it's going to feel dangerous. And that's a good thing - when there is danger in the air and you feel like you are out of your comfort zone."

Roy Moore allegedly weaponized the nastiness intrinsic to divorce to convince a mother to leave her child in his care at her custody hearing. "He said, 'Oh, you don't want her to go in there and hear all that. I'll stay out here with her,'" said Nancy Wells, the mother of one of his accusers. "I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl." Moore allegedly picked up the 14-year-old around the corner from her house - presumably so no one would see him - and took her to the woods. The next time he allegedly undressed her, removed his own clothes, and made her touch him.

Oh, and Louis C.K., the ultimate bumbler? The bumbler extraordinaire? He lied. He lied to Marc Maron, a close friend, saying that the rumors about him were false. He appears to have done the same to Pamela Adlon, who defended him against the accusations. Nor does it end there: To hear Louis C.K. tell it, he had no idea his manager was getting the women he'd targeted to keep quiet. To hear his manager tell it, he had no idea Louis C.K. had been up to much of anything at all. Louis C.K. might be any number of things - sick, addicted, depressed, twisted, predatory, egotistical, self-destructive - but one thing he is not is a bumbler.

How many deliberate, premeditated lies, how many carefully set traps, how many instances of deceit do we need before we can admit that men are every bit as duplicitous and two-faced as women are suspected of being? That harassment is not an accident? That predation requires planning? That this gigantic apparatus through which women's careers are destroyed and men's are preserved isn't just happenstance?

Alas, the greatest supporters of the bumbler myth tend to be other men. You might recall that Dustin Hoffman was accused of groping and sexually harassing a 17-year-old on set - of saying things like "I'll have a hard-boiled egg ... and a soft-boiled clitoris." He pleads bumbler: "I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation," he said. And indeed, it is hard to imagine how a teenager at her first job might receive those words. But did her employer defend her when she finally confessed, decades later, that she'd dealt with a hostile work environment? No, director Volker Schlöndorff has instead come to Hoffman's defense: He is "just a kidder," Schlöndorff says. Everyone gave Hoffman a foot massage!

Predatory men normalize their predation and support each other. "You're a target. I'm a target," O'Reilly said in a July 2016 appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers in which he discussed his employer, Ailes. "Anytime somebody could come out and sue us, attack us, go to the press, or anything like that. ... I stand behind Roger 100 percent." Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, before he himself was accused of sexual assault, also defended Ailes. "I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he's helped them," the future president said, adding that Ailes is "just a very, very good person. And, by the way, a very, very talented person." Weinstein supported Roman Polanski, calling the charges that he drugged and anally raped a 13-year-old girl a "so-called crime" and calling the charges themselves "a shocking way to treat such a man." And Oliver Stone, himself accused of groping a model, lamented Weinstein's fate: "It's not easy what he's going through," Stone said. "I'm a believer that you wait until this thing gets to trial. I believe a man shouldn't be condemned by a vigilante system."

This is how the culture attempts to normalize this stuff: by minimizing the damage to women and the agency of men. When actress Katharine Towne described an incident in which Brett Ratner started hitting on her at a dinner party, refused to take no for an answer, and trapped her in a bathroom, here's how his attorney Marty Singer responded: "Even if hypothetically this incident occurred exactly as claimed, how is flirting at a party, complimenting a woman on her appearance, and calling her to ask her for a date wrongful conduct?" Singer said.

Look, this is a moment when our cultural myths about men and women are colliding. It's scary and confusing and way too widespread for comfort. But rather than knee-jerking toward normalizing, it's worth taking a minute to parse just how complicated it is to make sense of the different realities in which men and women have been living. I've written repeatedly about the culture-wide phenomenon of "not-knowing," of how our biggest shared cultural muscles are built to repress knowledge about how routinely women's professional lives are derailed through sexual harassment and misconduct. Emma Thompson called the Weinstein revelations "the tip of the iceberg," and she's right: Economists have long and lazily attributed the exodus of women in various industries to their decision to bear children, but now this giant explanatory iceberg is floating up - this absolutely gigantic, widely denied story about how women are routinely driven from their industries because their male colleagues need to be free to use their professional power to indulge their sexual urges.

Most of us know that when a politician sits on the stand and insists that he "does not recall," that it's a political performance, a manipulative pretense intended to obfuscate. Let's apply that intelligent skepticism toward this rash of professions of male incompetence. To put it in pragmatic terms: You can be a bumbler, or you can keep your job. You can't have both.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Male bumblers are an epidemic. These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and perennially confused. What's the difference, the male bumbler wonders, between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one's penis in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing and asking her out?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On a wind-blown farm on a remote Norwegian shore, with no running water or electricity, Hannah Ryggen worked utterly from scratch on her anti-fascist tapestries. Spinning wool from her sheep, she dyed it with things she'd found by foraging: birch leaves, bark moss and bog rosemary. Urine, too, was an essential part of this alchemical process, and visitors were asked to leave their donations in a bucket. Using a homemade loom, she started weaving - without preparatory drawings - a design she saw in her head. Before you even get to the end result, the conviction, not to mention the sheer stamina required, is staggering.

What Ryggen created in this far-flung spot, where she lived from the mid-1920s, channelled both current affairs and her day-to-day experience. Modern Art Oxford's survey, subtitled Woven Histories, features a rogue's gallery of political thugs, their faces rendered angular and cartoonish by the horizontal and vertical lines of the weave. In one 1936 work, Hitler, Göring and Goebbels pop up like murderous glove puppets with blood-red faces and hands. Three decades later, Lyndon B Johnson's beagle - for the artist a fluffy media distraction from the Vietnam war - becomes a similarly scarlet hound of hell. In between the monsters are freedom fighters, artist martyrs and Ryggen's own family and farmyard animals.

With her rough-hewn style and heartfelt message, Ryggen harnessed the raw power of folk or outsider art. Her seclusion, however, was only geographic. She spent six years as a painter's apprentice before turning, pointedly, to weaving, and her renegade use of traditional rural techniques was just as attention-grabbing in 1930s Norway as it is now. Making tapestries almost exclusively for public spaces, she was known across Europe and America.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Homespun art ... Hannah Ryggen at work 1958. Photograph: Klaus Forbregd/NTNU University Library

Since her death in 1970, the Swedish-born artist has remained a defining figure in Scandinavia, although she has only recently been rediscovered by the wider world. For most in the UK, this exhibition will be a revelation, and not just for her oddball mix of scalding protest and rustic weaving. What's clear here is why Ryggen strikes a chord now. Her art has plenty to say when it comes to today's most urgent political and environmental issues, from the "alt-right" to the slow food movement.

Early works from the 1930s give a lively impression of Ryggen's sensibility. She focuses on the human dimension in headline news, even as she elevates contemporary figures into idealised archetypes. The tapestry Liselotte Herrmann depicts a young communist executed by the Nazis, as a Madonna, feeding the baby she was separated from. Even at her most homely, Ryggen tracks big issues, as with We and Our Animals, which relates her struggle, in rich oranges and indigos, to consume the beasts she reared and cared for. What's at stake here is more than sentimental. During the Great Depression, not eating livestock was a life or death matter. The Ryggens' smallholding kept them from starving.

This is unashamedly didactic art, its message stripped back to charged symbols and icons. Yet it never feels preachy. What makes the tapestries so memorable is their disarming frankness and jarring humour. Ryggen is happy to include a bird's round butthole, her husband's red nose or her own lopsided breasts, visible through her clothes. In her first overtly political work, Ethiopia, Mussolini is a square-faced Herman Munster with an arrow through his neck in place of a bolt.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Hannah Ryggen, Poem by TS Eliot, 1952. Photograph: © Hannah Ryggen/DACS 2017/Courtesy Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum

Ryggen wasn't burdened by our own questions about the point of political art. That she came from a world where people believed culture made a difference is brought home, horrifically, in her 1940s output, when Norway was occupied, her husband imprisoned and emaciated POWs marched past the farm; 6 October 1942, a huge three-scene tapestry, shows theatre directors from the nearest cultural hotspot Trondheim, who were executed for their leftwing productions. On the right, beyond a bullish Winston Churchill, the Ryggens float on a rose-filled boat, awaiting disaster.

With their coarse weaves and tufted wool, her tapestries have a terrific, material presence. A committed communist, Ryggen used the weft and warp of the tapestry itself as a metaphor for the knotty social bonds that hold us together. She often brought in pattern to suggest this network in ways that make her rejection of preparatory drawings all the more astonishing. Mother's Heart, about her cherished, epileptic daughter Mona, is a kaleidoscopic mix of abstract pattern, nudes, love-hearts and flowers.

Yet beyond the work's physical heft, it's Ryggen's unique one-woman approach to the entire weaving process that really distinguishes her. As eccentric as it first seems, she struck on an art form that completely embodied her beliefs in self-sufficiency, social responsibility and the value of work, from start to finish. It's impossible not to get caught up in her peculiar, impassioned fabrics.

* At Modern Art Oxford until 18 February.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The woman who kept Hitler and Churchill in stitches: Hannah Ryggen Woven Histories review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On a wind-blown farm on a remote Norwegian shore, with no running water or electricity, Hannah Ryggen worked utterly from scratch on her anti-fascist tapestries. Spinning wool from her sheep, she dyed it with things she'd found by foraging: birch leaves, bark moss and bog rosemary.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intercession Printmaking Studio and Gallery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art Gallery and studio specialising in printmaking and expanded print based in Northampton UK.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Intercession Printmaking Studio and Gallery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art Gallery and studio specialising in printmaking and expanded print based in Northampton UK.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Theater of the Obsessed

Interview by Kristin Farr // Portrait by Doreen Kilfeather

Genieve Figgis explores history and classical art through a spontaneously messy process of painting with globs and pours, a deliciously grotesque approach to the figure. Her paintings, like twisted memories of art history class, draw parallels between the problematic depictions of society from the past and today, reminding us that history repeats and our memory is blurry and slippery... goopy, even. She wrestles with her materials, relishing them thoroughly as she inhales the fresh air of the Irish coast and exhales her enthusiasm for paint.

Typically completed in one sitting, her process is theatrical like the stories she reflects. Black metal plays in the background while she sculpts her paint, directing new scenes, playing God, and revealing her characters and their behavior to her audience. These interpretations come through her, conveying a dialogue with the past that speaks to the redundant rise and fall of decency in the world. Emotion and expression is raw in these paintings, pure feeling pouring out with an occasional wink. Threads of grandiosity and ownership are woven in, and Figgis's sly wit questions value and morality as portrayed throughout history. Her work begins with serious intent, but she acknowledges that humor inevitably pokes through. As artist Ad Reinhardt once proclaimed, "Art is too serious to be taken seriously."

There are multiple ways to interpret these reimagined paintings, whether you see them as distorted interpretations of the past, or mirrors of today, revealing the underbelly of our thoughts and desires. Figgis studies the ways we represent our internal landscape visually, and though not all of her work references history, her storyline always portrays the complexity of human experience.

Kristin Farr: Is it fair to say you make art about art? Your interpretation of Fragonard's The Swing grabbed me. How do you respond when asked what your work is about?

Genieve Figgis: My work is about history but I am very interested in the history of art and it is also a theme running through. I love Old Master paintings and I use my work to visit them. I will probably never own one, so I just like to make my own version.

What's the last thing you saw that you wanted to have for yourself, something you wanted to reimagine in paint?
I recently saw a spectacular show in the National Gallery of Ireland entitled Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting. These paintings instantly take you back to the fifteenth century. They represent a time lost and seem like a good place to visit with paint.

Romeo and Juliet is about romance and death. I was thinking of the romantic element of the story, but I was always conscious of how the story ends when making the work. I wanted to make a version which had, for example, horses flying off to the underworld. Instead of focusing on gangs, I made a painting entitled Three Hunks From Verona. I wanted to present a different version of a story which had been well told.That is one of my favorite paintings. I have liked that painting for a long time. I made a version of it in 2014. It was part of my show with Almine Rech Gallery in London, and it was called Kissing by the Window. You also make art referencing different art forms, like your series inspired by Romeo and Juliet. What was your focus within that story?

It's theatrical and romantic. It's heartbreakingly sad. The costumes are beautiful. True love never dies. You love who you love and no one should ever try to interfere with that.

The covers are something that I want to experience. I will never own a Vermeer or a Goya. It must feel exactly like when people sing at Karaoke. In their own minds, they feel just as good and can just try something. A Lady Gaga or Axl Rose song, the audience might feel slightly different about. However, there is no harm in trying, and the experience is the most important part.We are all the same as our predecessors, and "history repeats itself."Yes, I do. As soon as I start pouring the paint, ideas start to flow.I pour and I use brushes too, yes. It's a difficult messy process with no guarantees. I like that.My process is very experimental and always has been. I use a lot of paint. I enjoy working this way. Are your covers of historical paintings just a starting point? In the end, your work isn't really about the originals, is it?

Do you make sketches or keep a photo of the original paintings you're responding to taped up in the studio as you work?
I never pre-sketch. I sometimes have an idea and start working. I do have the image hanging in my studio but I will still do my own thing anyway.

Yes, ha!Messy but fun.I drink coffee, I listen to music. I shuffle through books and magazines before I start mixing the paint. Do you enjoy playing God with your figures who you love and manipulate?

I listen to classical, black metal, pop, jazz, and opera sometimes. All very theatrical and very moving at times. That's what gives me the energy I need.

I have four dogs and a cat who I like to hang out with. I love living by the coast and being close to the sea. It is an important part of my daily ritual. It makes me happy.I found the image was still controversial but I put my own humorous twist on it. I think people will find things in art which are very personal to them and they will relate to. The Swing was important to me because it takes me back to my favorite part of French history, which is pre-revolutionary France. Tell me about your dogs and your coastal lifestyle.

I really enjoyed seeing the paintings come alive. Working on the project was a very enjoyable experience. Robert Devereaux was Queen Elizabeth's hunky boy toy.

My favorite paintings have always had figures in them. I love the work of Elizabeth Peyton, Cecily Brown and Dana Schutz. Velazquez, Goya, Fragonard and Boucher. I love the theatrical element. They are all about performance.Oh yes, I love people and animals and nature. What we do here on earth is interesting. Humans are complex and extremely mysterious.I was always interested in art when I was child and I come from a very creative home. My father had a workshop at the side of our home. He made furniture, frames and clocks, spray painting them and even metal casting. He was very enthusiastic about everything he made and this was a big part of our family life. Who are some of your favorite postmodern painters?

Do you have any dream projects? Do you ever paint in an extra-large scale?
I think the larger works I do make are much more fun. I haven't shown many of them yet. They are much more challenging as I use a lot of paint. I would never want to make anything that's too predictable.

I love the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Louvre in Paris and The National Gallery in London. I have a long list of places that I would still like to visit, and I hope I might get to do some of them soon. It is very inspirational and I take notes and read about the various themes that interest me. I am currently reading six different books. That will all filter down into the work.I wouldn't want to say anything too early about the work as it is still evolving. I am very excited about it. I love making the work. The journey and the process are the most important part. I know that when I feel like this, the end result will be good. What are your favorite museums, and what's your approach to doing research for your own work?

I hope that they will feel I have been experimental and that I truly loved what I did.

People have been very generous and kind when they have commented online. I would be very happy to hear that they are much more interesting in person when they see them in actual reality.I love looking at ideas of the past in Old Masters. They were made to tell you a story. Some of the portraits have the authority and theatricality, like Chancellor Séguier by Charles Le Brun at the Louvre museum in Paris. I enjoy looking at people from the past and how they portrayed themselves.I just love paint and lots of it. It's very challenging but addictive. Eyes are the windows of the soul. I usually start off on a serious note but somehow the humour comes out in the end. What are some favorite comments you've heard about your work?

genievefiggis.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Juxtapoz Magazine - Genieve Figgis: Theater of the Obsessed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interview by Kristin Farr // Portrait by Doreen Kilfeather Genieve Figgis explores history and classical art through a spontaneously messy process of painting with globs and pours, a deliciously grotesque approach to the figure.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On the second day I spent with the Manson Bloggers, we found a tongue hanging from a tree. This was in the northwestern fringes of Los Angeles County, the half-wild, half-suburban part of the city that the Manson Family once called home. These days, most of the land is owned by the state and nearby there is a church; on top of a hill, a ten-foot cross looms in right-angled judgment. The Manson Bloggers did not seem to notice the cross, because they had another mission in mind: finding the Manson Tree, a gnarled oak that's notable because Charles Manson used to perch in its crook and strum the guitar.

We had to scramble over a highway railing to reach the old oak. As we got close, I saw that some previous visitor had thrown a white rope over one of the tree's branches. Something was dangling from the rope-a sweet potato, I thought. Or some sort of lumpy, orangish doll. The Manson Bloggers knew better. "It's a cow's tongue," Deb said. She was right. Up close, it was unmistakable, a length of moist muscle, obscene and obscurely violent. The tongue was covered with rainbow sprinkles, the kind you'd put on a child's scoop of vanilla ice cream. One end of the white rope was tied around the tongue's root, where it had once been attached to the back of the cow's throat. The other end of the rope was tied around a bottle of fish-oil pills. There was one AA battery inside the fish-oil bottle. On the ground was a crumpled-up shopping bag from H&M.

The Manson Bloggers and I stared for a moment in mute wonder. The tongue, the rope, the sprinkles, the fish-oil bottle, the battery, the H&M bag: it all spoke to some inexplicable ritual, a dark magic that somehow brought together cult murder, fast fashion, and nutritional supplements. I'll be honest, I was spooked. The bloggers took it all in stride. Maybe their world accommodated more strangeness than mine. Or perhaps they were just used to finding messages of violence in unexpected places.

One year earlier, in the first throes of my renewed interest in the Manson Family, I had taken the Helter Skelter bus tour operated by Dearly Departed, an outfit specializing in Los Angeles death and murder sites. It sells out nearly every weekend, which is surprising given that there's actually not much to see anymore. Scott Michaels, Dearly Departed's founder and main guide, set the tone with a custom soundtrack of hits from 1969 ("In the Year 2525," "Hair"), cozy oldies made newly spooky by our proximity to death. He also included extensive multimedia add-ons, such as cleavage-heavy clips from Sharon Tate's early films and Jay Sebring's cameo on the old bang-pow Batman TV show. Going on the tour is a little like taking a road trip through the parking lots and strip malls of central Los Angeles, accompanied by a group of strangers wearing various skull accessories. Many of the sites aren't visible or no longer exist. The former Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive has been demolished; the site of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca's murders in Los Feliz is mostly hidden by a hedge.

In Los Feliz, Michaels slowed the bus and pointed across the street. That Pinkberry, he told our group-two Australian newlyweds in matching museum of death T-shirts, a mother and daughter both in light goth attire, an ominously normal-looking guy from Boston in a Red Sox shirt, and a man in a leather jacket who wouldn't stop grinning-once had a pay phone out front. And it was that very pay phone that Rosemary LaBianca's son used to call his sister the day he found his mother's and stepfather's bodies. I took a picture of the Pinkberry. We pulled into a parking lot. "This flower shop used to be a gas station. And that gas station may have been where Tex Watson refueled the yellow 1959 Ford the night he killed Sharon Tate," Michaels said. The parking lot felt surreal, eerily familiar. I shivered. "Also, it's the flower shop where Ruth worked in Six Feet Under," he added. I took another picture.

We drove by the house where, as Michaels told us, the murderers had pulled over and used a garden hose to wash the blood from their hands. "Oh my god," leather jacket said. "There's a garden hose in the driveway." I took a picture of the hose. "The people who live here don't like us coming by," Michaels said. "But it's not like they own the street." Michaels and Red Sox shirt engaged in some idle shop talk about how difficult it had been to track down and purchase a carving fork exactly like the one that Tex had used to carve WAR into Leno LaBianca's stomach.

Halfway through, we stopped so Michaels could use the bathroom. I bought a coffee from a taco truck and stood near the smokers, half-hoping I'd make a friend. Our group was unselfconsciously chatty, in the way of fan conventions or trade shows. Red Sox was saying that he'd read Helter Skelter twice in preparation for this tour, bringing his grand total to twelve. He was also a fan of Michaels's celebrity death photos website. His favorite celebrity death photo was of either Chris Farley or Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. I must have accidentally given him a weird look. "I mean, if you died, I would never look at pictures of you," he assured me.

"Thanks," I said, feeling unfamous.

As the van drove through Laurel Canyon, it began to rain-nothing dramatic, just the slow, gray spit of a failed Los Angeles day. Michaels passed around a binder stuffed with crime scene photos and autopsy reports. I flipped through it quickly; I'd seen it all before. Instead, stuck in traffic between sites, I stared out the window at nail salons and doughnut shops, places where no one-or at least no one I care about-had been killed.

My relationship with the Manson Family began in high school, when I read prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's 1974 book Helter Skelter, the best seller that helped establish the contemporary true-crime genre. The book's cover, with its lurid red font and promise of never-before-seen photos, seemed to hint at violence and weird sex. It was much more alluring than anything else on my parents' library shelves. I wolfed it down and spent a week in a Manson Girl haze, imagining myself in the thrall of a googly-eyed guru, eager to do his murderous bidding.

Of course Charlie is popular with teens-all that misdirected fury, those pseudo-deep slogans. No sense makes sense. Pain's not bad; it's good-it teaches you things. As described by Bugliosi, the Manson Family's aesthetic was like an adolescent imagining of the hippie era: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, cheesy 1960s Satanism, motorcycles and long hair and trippy murals painted on vans.

This Manson phase was part of a broader crush that I, a late-'90s teen, had on the 1960s. I was unhappy, for reasons I didn't understand. My big, suburban high school was all clamor and boredom; I spent my evenings talking to my best internet friend, a twentysomething New Yorker I'd never met in real life, and half-heartedly embarking on an eating disorder. My romantic interpretation of my low-level malaise was that I just didn't belong to my own time. And so I wrote papers on Vietnam draft dodgers and rescued my dad's old Rolling Stones records from the attic.

In true crush fashion, I idealized and misunderstood my object of affection. In the apocryphal, utopian 1960s of my imagination, young people had power, and weirdness was socially sanctioned. Even better, people felt as though they were a part of something bigger, something that gave their lives urgency and meaning. Then was different from now in some crucial, ineffable way. Now was disappointing. Then was better.

The Manson Girl I most often fantasized about being friends with was Leslie Van Houten, the one with the pretty hair and the high IQ. In high school, everyone wanted to be Leslie's friend, too-at least at first. She was elected homecoming princess two years in a row. When she was thirteen, her parents split up, and she lost her social footing. She started hanging out with the other kids from divorced families, the bad kids. Drugs-first weed, then LSD and mescaline and DMT and mushrooms-helped. "It took me away from who I was at that moment," Van Houten said at her 2013 parole hearing. "And what was wrong with who you were?" a prison official asked. "I felt that I was out of place," Van Houten replied. At seventeen, Van Houten got pregnant; her mother convinced her to get an illegal abortion. The procedure took place in her childhood bedroom.

Van Houten tried out a few different lives before she took up with the Manson Family. She took steps to become a nun, then moved to an ashram for a while. In 1968, she met Charles Manson. She was nineteen years old.

In those early days, Charles Manson was a gentle man, with a vague, cultivated air of mysticism. His followers describe thinking of him as an elf, or an angel. It all fit in with the LSD fairyland they imagined themselves living in. There was lots of barefoot capering and talk of magic. The growing Manson Family worked to rid themselves of their pesky, greedy egos; the goal was to be like a finger on a hand, an instrument designed for a higher purpose.

Over the course of a few months, the Manson Family's communal fantasyland grew darker. Love and elves gave way to knives and paranoia and stories about the coming race war. Maybe there wasn't any less LSD, but there was certainly more speed. The night of the Tate murders, Van Houten wasn't picked to go along. She felt left out, and worried that she wasn't committed enough to the cause. The next evening, the night of the LaBianca murders, when Manson allowed her to get into the car with the others, she was relieved. Whatever happened, at least she would be a part of it.

An interest in murders and cults and cult murders makes sense in teenagers. Being sixteen feels chaotic and a little insane, even under the best circumstances; the appeal of these stories is not so different from the melodrama of many young-adult novels. Like many teenage fans of the lurid and macabre, I had moved on to more-complex icons of rebellion by the time I graduated from high school. Charles Manson now seemed to me to have as much depth as a T-shirt decal. Murder fandom felt like a relic of a more turbulent time-something that could wash off, like unfortunate eyeliner.

For some people, though, the obsession doesn't fade with time.

There are a dozen regularly updated Manson Family websites; the most interesting was born as Evil Liz's Manson Cult, but is now simply called the Manson Family Blog. The site hosts dozens of contemporary photographs of former Manson Family members and associates. Leslie Van Houten and most of the other famous Manson Girls are all still in prison, of course; instead, the Manson Family Blog focuses its energy on more-peripheral members, people who would qualify as celebrities only within this very small subculture. Through various sneaky means, including, allegedly, exploiting lax Facebook privacy controls, the Manson Bloggers track down photographs of these people as they are now.

These photographs would look banal to the uninitiated: a grandmotherly type on a bench, clutching a water bottle; a short woman standing on the beach, flanked by three young men-her sons? These people are infamous not because they've killed anyone-they haven't-but because when they were fourteen or nineteen or twenty-three, they had the bad luck or bad taste to befriend some people who did.

In the intervening four decades, some of these ex-Manson Family members changed their names or became born-again-whatever it took to distance themselves from their turbulent, murder-adjacent youths. Sometimes these people write angry emails to the Manson Bloggers, asking for their photos to be taken down. It's easy to imagine them looking back at their former selves, shaking their heads, and thinking, That person isn't me anymore. But the Manson Family Blog is always there to remind them: yes, yes it is.

The Manson Bloggers spend hours hanging out with each other virtually, via emails and chat rooms, blog posts and blog comments. A few years ago, they decided to meet in person for the first time. It went so well that they now take an annual trip to Southern California to visit various Manson sites together.

I had returned from the Manson bus tour unfulfilled, convinced that there was something I still hadn't figured out. When the Manson Bloggers told me I could tag along on their next trip, I was thrilled. But whenever I told anyone what I was about to do, I got all tongue-tied and embarrassed. It seemed important to clarify that I wasn't myself fascinated by the Manson Family anymore, of course; instead, I was interested in people who were interested in Charles Manson precisely because I was no longer one of them.

Even though I would be staying with them in the four-bedroom house they'd rented for the occasion, in the weeks leading up to the trip the Manson Bloggers were still cagey about telling me anything about themselves. By the time I landed at LAX, the whole trip was starting to seem like an idea that was great in the abstract but terrible in practice. It was springtime, and the Southern California air felt soft and smelled like car exhaust and flowers. The radio played one '70s lite-rock hit after another, and I was grateful for the traffic, because it postponed the moment when I'd have to walk into a house full of strangers and try to make small talk about a forty-year-old cult murder.

But that turned out to be a silly thing to worry about, because when I walked in the door I found the Manson Bloggers so intent on each other that my arrival barely registered. They were talking shop with the eagerness of model-train enthusiasts. I grabbed a beer and tried to follow the rapid-fire discussion about unsolved Northern California murders and Roman Polanski's sexual preferences. It was tricky-like all subcultures, when the Manson Bloggers feel safe, they speak in a kind of in-group argot, full of nicknames, acronyms, and arcane references. There were hardly any mentions of husbands, wives, children, jobs, any of the infrastructure of daily life. Instead, they gossiped about minor Manson Family characters as if they were mutual friends.

The next morning, we drove out to Chatsworth to meet Stoner. Stoner spends his days in the Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park, digging for relics. Over the years, Stoner has found bedsprings, light-switch plates, charred wood, a spoon, a belt buckle. Most are about forty years old, and closely resemble trash. Like most relics, they are notable because of who touched them, what they were in proximity to, what they may have witnessed. Stoner believes he's found Spahn Ranch, the cowboy/porn movie set where the Manson Family lived for a little while, leading tourists on trail rides, buying drugs from bikers, filming soft-core porn.

Stoner has a black goatee and is wearing a FREE LESLIE VAN HOUTeN T-shirt. He told me that he'd been into the Manson Family since he was a misfit among the misfits at Beverly Hills High School in the 1980s, doodling Charles Manson's face in his notebook instead of the Iron Maiden logo. The first time he went to prison, he was sent to Corcoran, the same place Charles Manson himself has been incarcerated for years. During rec periods, Stoner would sometimes sit in the yard and stare at the tall white walls of the building that houses Charlie. "People'd be like, 'What are you doing, man?'" he said. "And I'd just wanna say, Just let me sit here and look for a minute, OK? He's right over there, and this is as close as I'm ever gonna get. "

The Manson Bloggers and I dig around in the sandy dirt with our hands. Someone unearths a curved ceramic shard, perhaps part of a coffee cup. I discover a tarnished penny, dated 1968. Stoner, who has lots of tattoos and a friendly, open face, insists that I keep it.

Stoner is not homeless, exactly, but he's not particularly homed at the moment. After showing us the dig site, he takes us to his friend's apartment in Chatsworth, where he's currently crashing. He keeps his relics on the narrow concrete patio. They are neatly arranged on flattened cardboard-shards of pottery, bent nails, rusty mattress springs. People who are in the market for objects that Charlie may have touched know that Stoner is the person to call. He recently sold a similar Manson-era penny for twenty dollars. The nails are his most popular product. "Symbolism," he tells us, shrugging.

In a way, the Manson Girls have never been able to live beyond their adolescence. In 1977, Leslie Van Houten was granted a retrial for the murder of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. After months of testimony and twenty-five days of deliberation, the jury declared itself deadlocked: five members voted for manslaughter, which would've meant she'd be free on the basis of time served; seven were set on first-degree murder. The prosecutor refused to negotiate a plea and insisted on yet another trial. In the time between the end of the second trial and the beginning of the third, Van Houten was released on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail. At that point, she had been locked up for eight years, much of that time in solitary confinement.

In the days after her release, Van Houten celebrated her freedom by going to the beach with her mother and attending a pizza-and-Scrabble party thrown by her lawyer. She was fragile, grateful, easily startled. She found grocery stores overwhelming. Some of the things she enjoyed about being free, she told a friend, were "ironing, the smell of fresh clothes, walks down a sidewalk." She worked as a legal secretary and didn't attempt to change her name. She understood that her period of freedom was something of a test-she had to prove that she was able to live in the world uneventfully. For six months, she did exactly that.

Then, in her third trial, Van Houten was convicted of two counts of felony robbery-murder, and sentenced to seven years to life. Her good behavior both in and out of prison made her cautiously hopeful when she first became eligible for parole, in 1980. At that point, she had been in prison longer than many murderers; many of the other women who had been on California's death row when she and the other Manson Girls were first locked up had since been released. But the parole board declined to release her. "[One of the board] insinuated to a reporter that he saw me as similar to 'that girl with eight personalities,'" Van Houten wrote to a friend afterward. "They don't understand how I can be normal now and have been part of the crime ten years ago."

For Van Houten, parole hearings soon came to feel like a cycle of anticipation and despair. (The victims' families, called on to testify about their loss at every hearing, also find the repetition of the murder story exhausting and demoralizing; the LaBianca family was part of a group that lobbied for a California law that allows for parole denials of up to fifteen years at a time.) She'd spend the years after a parole denial following the parole board's recommendations to a T: more therapy, more volunteering, more education, more support groups. But at every hearing, she was denied again, for a shifting set of reasons-she was not remorseful enough, or she was too remorseful and therefore self-aggrandizing. She didn't apologize enough or in the correct words.

These hearings are on public record, and you can go online and read through the transcripts. It seems to me that although the parole board gives recommendations about what it thinks Van Houten should do to prepare herself for life in the outside world, what it's really struggling with is something deeper. A puzzle of self, an ontological knot: is Leslie Van Houten the same person at thirty (or forty or fifty or sixty-five) as she was at nineteen? If she's not, that seems to indicate a fundamental instability of some kind, a dangerously wobbly sense of identity. But if she is, then isn't she capable of killing again?

Tex Watson and Susan Atkins, two of the other Manson Family members convicted of murder, found Jesus in prison. They blame the devil for their sins. I can understand the appeal a murderer might find in being reborn. It's a neat solution, one that offers the possibility of a fresh self. A do-over. For whatever reason, Van Houten has refused the clarity of such a solution.

In 2013, Van Houten's parole was denied for the twentieth time:

You have failed today to explain at this hearing as to why it is specifically-why it is and what it is about you that would cause you-you're a smart person. You were a smart teenager. You came from a good family. Why would you commit such horrific atrocities?... And the reasons for that, I still do not understand. You have failed to make the connection of how you went from Point A to Point B.

On one of my evenings with the Manson Bloggers, they sat around drinking beers and trying to explain how a murder that had nothing to do with them ended up being the defining interest of their lives.

Patty started out selling odds and ends on eBay. She wasn't really in it for the money; it was the social scene on the message boards where you could chat with other sellers that drew her in. At the same time, she was gobbling up true-crime books. One day she went online to look up a detail from a book about Manson and found the blogs. They were much more fun than eBay, basically.

Deb was adopted as a baby, felt misunderstood as a teenager. As an adult, she taught herself how to navigate the bureaucracy of municipal records so she could track down her birth mother. She had these fantasies of a glorious reunion, maternal acceptance and understanding, the broken world made whole again, etc. Her birth mother turned out to be a drug-addicted prostitute; she and Deb didn't have much to say to each other. The whole thing dropped Deb into a depression for a while, though she shrugs it off now. The Manson Family Blog allows Deb to put her crack research skills to use; she can pretty much find anyone.

Max Frost is a stunt-car driver-Hollywood odd-job man in his early thirties, a native Los Angeleno with nervous fingers that don't look right without a cigarette. He is a representative of a particular LA type: a guy subsisting on the margins of a rich system, fueled by road rage, chain smoking, and black humor. You look at him and think: Things didn't go the way he thought they might. Max got really into Manson years ago, drawn in by the Southern California specificity of the conspiracies, the drama circling around places he had been, and also the way everything knit together so neatly, the glorious improbability of all that coincidence. He got a little too far in, maybe; the Manson universe started to take up too much space in his brain, which tends toward obsessiveness anyway. He had to quit. For a little while, he had a mental moratorium on all things Manson. But then a few years ago, he started peeking at the websites. It didn't take long before the interest rose up in him again. Or maybe it had been dormant in there all along.

By the end of our five days together, the Manson Bloggers have turned our shared rental house into something of a middle-aged parody of the wild Spahn Ranch compound. The Manson Bloggers stay up late, talking and drinking beer. They seem to feel freed from the constraints of their daily lives, and thus empowered to break rules:

"I never eat pizza!" the very healthy Matt says, eating pizza.

I haven't yet been able to enter into the spirit of the house. The Manson Bloggers' fandom is exhausting to be around. It is confident and seemingly inexhaustible. I plead a headache and retreat to my assigned room. Lying in bed, I can hear the happy, muffled sound of their chatter.

It's not actually accurate to say that my interest in Manson Family obsessives is purely anthropological. The truth is that my Manson feelings came back in my late twenties, when I thought I was old enough to know better. What happened was, I got sad. So sad that I woke up one morning and my depression had given itself a name: the black rock. I found this name maudlin and embarrassing, even as it also felt true.

I was prepared for much of how depression felt-its smothering quality, the strange stuff it does to time-but this embarrassment took me by surprise. There was something unbearably adolescent about my unhappiness, the way it made me self-absorbed and attention-seeking. It felt so... unsubtle. When I could read again (for a while, even that part of me was defective), all I was interested in was Charles Manson. It wasn't comfort food, because it wasn't comfortable. Discomfort food, then, maybe-stories that embodied the kind of darkness I was holding close to my heart. My diet devolved until I was eating only Cheerios and Dove Bars; I listened to nothing but Cat Power. My face began to break out for the first time in years. It was like one of those terrible dreams where you find yourself back in high school, awkward and anxious and fully consumed with your own awkwardness and anxiety, all your grown-up perspective and wise patience having evaporated like the mirage they always were. Of course you're back there. You've always been there. The real delusion was when you thought you had left any of it behind.

The next night after dinner, Max showed me his clip reel on YouTube. Back in the day, Max was a peripheral member of the Brat Pack. The two of us sat on the couch and watched young Max punch Charlie Sheen in the face. It looked fake, but fun. In the next clip, Max wore a leather jacket and drove too fast. He did a lot of sneering. It was a strange feeling, sitting there next to him, watching him watch himself. If you were in the mood to torture yourself with regret, watching your young self interacting with movie stars would be a good way to do it. That vast distance from there to here. The tragic, inevitable one-way procession of time.

But Max was smiling as he watched himself. Another clip: a close-up of his face, which was smooth and tender, a young man's face. He looked lovely even when he sneered. This time, he was in a cafeteria that looked so platonically high-school that I thought I recognized it from my own anxiety dreams, until I realized it was from 90210. Young Max got flung into a cafeteria table. Trays went flying. The clip cut off right before the inevitable food fight began. Grown-up Max watched himself and laughed. Bemused by his youth and anger. By all the things that had brought him here.

There's an old thought experiment that was first recorded by Plutarch, though it may well date from before that. After killing the Minotaur, Theseus sailed from Crete back to Athens, where the Athenians preserved his ship as a memorial to his triumph. For years-centuries, even-they diligently cared for the ship, making necessary repairs and replacing rotten boards. Eventually, long after Theseus's death, not even a single wooden board from the original ship remained. Everyone still called it "the ship of Theseus," even though it no longer had physical parts that had ever been touched by Theseus. John Locke tells a more humble version of the same puzzle involving a favorite sock that gets patched up over and over again until none of the original material remains.

This paradox used to depress me in both its sock and warship forms. Here's what I thought the moral was: despite the most dramatic internal (or even external) renovations, you are always stuck being you. Because of course the one thing you can't escape is your own shape. Your cells die and regenerate throughout your lifetime. Can't they come up with anything imaginative or new to create? But no, they keep on making you. Thinking about it like that is a good way to make life sound like a trap, or a prison cell.

Lately, I've been wondering if I have it all wrong. In these past couple of years, my friends have started having babies, and this completely normal but also miraculous thing keeps happening where I can see my friend's face in her baby. And now that I've known some babies since birth, I get to watch them grow up and see how they have the same face the whole time. Miracle doesn't feel like an overblown word for that: for the fact that something stays the same even as it is transformed.

On the day the Manson Bloggers and I found the cow tongue covered in sprinkles, I followed Matt and Stoner down a steep hillside near Spahn Ranch. They had something they wanted to show me. It turned out to be less a walk than a scramble, made more arduous by the full afternoon heat of summer. Desert plants scratched at my ankles. Finally, the ground leveled out and we saw what we had come to see: a rusty car squatting in the sunbaked dirt. As local legend has it, Manson Girl Mary Brunner went to test-drive a new Volkswagen, somehow convinced the poor salesman to step out of the car, and then drove off without him. The Manson Family stripped the car for its parts and then pushed it off the cliff above us.

It must've been fantastic to watch it fall. And now it lives here, this remnant of her adventure, or mistake, or whatever you want to call it. Matt and Stoner touched the chassis with a kind of joyful reverence. After a moment, I did, too. I thought about the Manson shards still lodged in me, leftover bits of something adolescent and melodramatic and disturbing. And how they are maybe not a ruin but a relic. Something precious from a long time ago. O

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Believer Outside the Manson Pinkberry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the second day I spent with the Manson Bloggers, we found a tongue hanging from a tree. This was in the northwestern fringes of Los Angeles County, the half-wild, half-suburban part of the city that the Manson Family once called home.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
number 474 My humour, my neuroses, my big open face and heart. inspired by Jessica Harby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it. Close your eyes and think of America.

We are expected to keep quiet about the men who prey upon us, as though their predation was our choice, not theirs. We are expected to sit quietly as men debate whether or not the state should be allowed to forcibly use our bodies as incubators. We are expected to not complain as we are diminished, degraded and discredited.

We are expected to agree (and we comply!) with the paternal admonition that it is irresponsible and hyperemotional to request one female president after 241 years of male ones - because that would be tokenism, anti-democratic and dangerous - as though generations of white male politicians haven't proven themselves utterly disinterested in caring for the needs of communities to which they do not belong. As though white men's monopolistic death-grip on power in America doesn't belie precisely the kind of "identity politics" they claim to abhor. As though competent, qualified women are so thin on the ground that even a concerted, sincere, large-scale search for one would be a long shot, and any resulting candidate a compromise.

Meanwhile, as a reminder of the bar for male competence, Donald Trump is the president.

Tuesday, voters - some angry, some hopeful despite themselves - went to the polls and told a different story: the first openly trans woman elected to the Virginia legislature, a surge of female Democratic candidates across the nation, many of them victorious.

I did not call myself a feminist until I was nearly 20 years old. My world had taught me that feminists were ugly and ridiculous, and I did not want to be ugly and ridiculous. I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was a woman's most effective currency. It was my best shot at success, or at least safety, and I wasn't sophisticated enough to see that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren't success and safety at all. They are domestication and implied violence.

To put it another way, it took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry. Feminism is the collective manifestation of female anger.

They suppress our anger for a reason. Let's prove them right.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.

# data[].attributes.body
"Right now, we also want to rage. We are not done describing all the ways this shit isn’t okay and hasn’t been okay for longer than you can believe."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I'm sick of being asked to suffer so a man can grow."

- Alexandra Petri

"Everyone. Fucking. Knew."

- Scott Rosenberg

This is actually happening.

The so-called "revelations" about endemic male sexual aggression in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, in the tech world, and in communities large and small have not stopped, despite every conceivable effort to dismiss, discredit, shame, and belittle the survivors coming forward to demand a different world. The most uncomfortable revelation is the fact that none of this, really, was that revelatory.

A great many people knew. Maybe they didn't know all of it, but they knew enough to feel tainted by a complicity that hobbled their compassion.

It turns out that this isn't about individual monsters. It never was. This is about structural violence, about a culture that decided long ago that women's agency and dignity were worth sacrificing to protect the reputation of powerful men and the institutions that enabled their entitlement. Everyone, including the "good guys," knew it was happening. We just didn't think it was all that wrong. At least, not wrong enough to make a fuss about, because the people groping their callous, violent way through life knew they'd get away with it, and most of the men around them were permitted the luxury of ignorance.

Except that now that seems to be changing. Now, Old Dinosaurs are wondering how to negotiate with an oncoming asteroid. Current or former Stupid Young Men are in a state of panic about their imminent introduction to the concept of "consequences," leading to the question: what, precisely, is the age when men are expected to take responsibility for their behavior?

The answer, with any luck, is "The Digital One."

Very few men seem sure what to do in this situation. I have been asked, repeatedly, what men and boys ought to be doing now. How should we behave differently? How guilty should we be feeling? What do women actually want?

Good. You're finally asking. I suspect that if more of you had asked that question earlier, if you'd asked it often, and if you'd paid attention to the answers, we wouldn't have to have this conversation - which nobody wants to be having - right now. It's a shame, honestly, that it had to come to this. But here we are, and here we're going to stay while powerful scumbags all over the world take a break from public life to spend more time with the police, and while people who've nursed private hurts for years start putting the puzzle pieces together until they recognize the shape of injustice.

I'm sorry; you're new here. The notion that women's agency and dignity might be more important than men's right to act like grabby children whenever they want may feel like uncharted territory, but some of us have lived here all along. You don't know your way around, and the whole place seems full of hidden terrors, and you're tired and scared and being here makes you feel ignorant and powerless. You haven't learned the language - they didn't offer it at your school - and you wish you knew how to ask basic questions, like where is the nearest station, and how much is that sandwich, and do you know the name of a good defense lawyer? You wish you knew how to translate simple ideas, like: I'm hungry, and I'm lonely, and my entire life I've let my fear of women's rejection control my behavior and that fear seemed so overwhelming that it didn't matter who got hurt as long as I didn't have to feel it and everyone else seemed to agree and now I don't know who to be or how to act, or I think there's a train leaving soon and I might need to be on it.

Lately I've been spending a good deal of time at the help desk, pointing men in the direction of possible answers. I mind this sort of work less than most because it actually happens to be my job. I write about this for a living. I listen and I take notes. The messages wink on my phone in freakish chromagreen, like Gatsby's lights across the harbor: men reaching out to a world of women they have never really known, across a gulf they don't know if they're brave enough to bridge.

The notion that women's agency and dignity might be more important than men's right to act like grabby children whenever they want may feel like uncharted territory, but some of us have lived here all along.

My friend's husband wants to know if he did the right thing in standing up to a superior at work who said he was going to stop hiring "hot women" because he'd only want to assault them.

My photographer friend wants to know why he didn't listen properly to the rumors about predators in his industry, and if he can make up for that now.

My environmental activist friend is worried that the stupid things he did as a teenager will obviate the work he's doing today.

Nobody wants to be having this conversation, but we need to have it. Avoidance of this conversation has shaped our culture; cultures are defined not only by the stories they tell, but also by the ones they don't. It's the negative space that gives definition to the picture we have of how men and women ought to live together - and that picture, of course, is the work of a series of old masters.

We have built entire lives, families, and communities around the absence of this conversation. And yet here we are, having it anyway. So let's deal with some common queries, the very first of which is: how do we handle what we know now about how women have been treated for so long?

* * *

This is a question in two parts. It's a question about how men should now relate to women in particular, and to their own sexuality in general. It is also a question about how we all cope with the consequences. How do we deal with suspecting what we suspect, with knowing what we know about our own past behavior? The very first thing we must do is to continue to know it - to actively know it, rather than filing it away in the spam folder of our collective consciousness. We must stay here, in this difficult place. We must look at what we have done and allowed to be done to others, without flinching or making excuses.

Last week, as a fresh set of allegations threatened to topple the British government, a radio host asked me if flirting is now banned. No. It isn't. To the mainly-female people who are on the receiving end, the difference between flirting and harassment - between sex and rape - are extremely clear. To some of the mainly-male people who do these things, there appears to be no difference, and when you start to explain the difference they run, in short succession, out of excuses and out of the room.

Shockingly, this conversation is not about you and your boner.

The fact that a great many men I have spoken to genuinely seem to think that the main issue here is how and whether they're going to be able to get laid in the future is... I'm going to swallow a scream, and say that it's "interesting." Shockingly, this conversation is not about you and your boner. But since the difference between sex and sexual violence apparently needs explaining, put both hands on the table for a second and listen.

(Nobody here thinks that the entire arena of sexuality is necessarily dangerous and violent for women. Actually, no, that's not true: plenty of people think that. Mostly male people who have spent generations imagining sex and violent conquest as one and the same, fetishizing the two together until the popular erotic imagination left little clear air between passion and assault. Some of us have been on the wrong end of that trajectory for so damn long that we've given up trying to find a way to be intimate with men that doesn't cause us pain or risk our lives, and I imagine that those people, the vast majority of whom are women, do think of the male sex itself as inherently treacherous, unsalvageable, and irredeemably violent.)

Sex, however, is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, as is the fact that a great many men seem unable to tell the difference. It is maddening, the way those of us who complain about abuse are accused of trying to shut down sex and sexuality, as if we'd ever been allowed to be active sexual participants, as if abuse and the fear of abuse hadn't made pleasurable sex all but impossible for so many of us.

Sex is not the problem, but for some people sexism itself has become eroticized, and that, yes, is a problem. "It's not flirtation that any of us take issue with," said my best friend, late one night after another round of exhausting emotional work trying to shore up the shuddering self-image of the men we know so they don't collapse on top of us. "It's entitlement. Projection. Objectification. We know when we're being dehumanized. Good flirting is the kind where they see us. They won't know how to flirt the right way until they start unlearning how to look at us."

John Berger famously said that "'men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at." I'm sick of being looked at. I want to be seen. There are none so emotionally blind as those who look at a person standing right in front of them and see a mirror, not a window.

Many of the men I have talked to about this have begun of their own volition to speak about "no longer objectifying women." To wonder whether they should just stop looking at pretty women at all, if the act of desiring another person is itself violent. It's very sad that that confusion has arisen; it should be possible to want someone without dehumanizing them. But we have apparently created a world where it is incredibly difficult for a man to desire a woman and treat her as a human being at the same time.

So no, we are not trying to outlaw sexuality. We are trying to liberate it. You ask how the species is going to survive if we have to constantly check for consent before we get to the means of reproduction, but I promise you that the species has more pressing problems than that.

* * *

The biggest missing piece of this picture is women's desire. If femme and female citizens were allowed to actually articulate our own desires then we could skip a few lessons and move straight to the advanced level of learning-to-treat-women-as-people, the one where we talk about managing our feelings like grown-ups.

Some men I speak to are worried, now, that "having to ask" will mean more rejection. I would draw attention to the fact that even as women everywhere are confessing to crimes others have committed against them, describing lifetimes of humiliation and hurt, still the second or third thought on some men's minds is anxiety about whether this will affect their chances of getting laid.

I understand that you are terrified of rejection. Join the club. Rejection is the worst. So awful that an entire architecture of quiet violence, shame, and blame has been built up to help men avoid it. If women's desire is absent from this conversation - if women are not thought of as desiring beings, if female desire is so terrifying we can barely speak of it without nervous laughter - then yes, we are going to remain confused about the difference between seduction and assault. That confusion is not human nature. Human nature is a lazy excuse for not doing the work of change here, and I'm sick of hearing it.

Men who believe they cannot change are already being shown up every day by the growing number of their fellow male humans who have changed, who are changing. We can rewrite the sexual script of humanity. We've done it before.

Unfortunately, we are in one of those rare and curious moments where we have to do something unfair and hurtful in order to answer decades of pain and injustice. We didn't want to have to make an example of anyone. We tried to ask nicely for our humanity and dignity. We tried to put it gently. Nobody gave a shit. Now that there are consequences, now that there is finally, for once, some sort of price to pay for treating women like interchangeable pieces of flesh and calling it romance, you're paying attention.

This is what happens when women actively place their own needs first. The whole damn world freaks out. I don't blame you for freaking out right now. I'm freaking out. I didn't expect this to happen so fast.

We didn't want to have to make an example of anyone. We tried to ask nicely for our humanity and dignity. We tried to put it gently. Nobody gave a shit.

You were led to believe that when it came to sex - and it somehow always came to sex - women weren't people in quite the same way as you. You were taught that sex was a commodity you could acquire by bargaining, badgering, pestering, or force. You were never told that is was wrong to do these things. Well, you were told, but not often, or not by anyone who mattered.

That all feels unfair to you, though it was far less fair - and a lot more dangerous - to us.

It also feels unfair that some men who have hurt women will be made examples of in their communities and workplaces while others who have done the same will escape, for now. It feels unfair that the cost of mistakes you made in your youth may well be professional respect, job security, money, and power. But it has been a lot less fair for a lot longer for people who were hurt and humiliated, disrespected and degraded, and who were expected to choose between shameful silence and blowing up their careers or communities by speaking out.

For so long, women have been confessing to crimes men have committed and being punished accordingly. That, I think you'll agree, is truly unfair.

* * *

You are wondering if forgiveness is possible. If amnesty is on the horizon. If you fish your crimes out of the past and lay them dripping to dry in front of us will we accept you, forgive you, let you back into the loving female place you've been told is the only respite you're allowed from the awfulness of the world?

The answer will eventually be yes. Well, my answer will eventually be yes. I can't speak for everyone, ever, and particularly not in this case, as I'm pathologically forgiving and have often been told by people who care about my wellbeing that my life would be better if I didn't let the men in it get away with quite so much bullshit because I expect no better. Still, my answer will always eventually be yes, yes, you are forgiven. But I'm just one person, and I'm not always a wise one, and even I can tell you that this is a bad fucking time to ask for forgiveness. Give it a while.

There will be time for apologies. We have the rest of our lives to do this differently. There will be time to reach out to those you may have wronged and say that you were a younger and different person, you are sorry, you didn't know, you tried not to know, you know now. There will be time to make it right, but it will take precisely that. It will take time.

We want a flavor of equality that none of us have tasted before.

What women like me want in the long term is for you to stop this shit and treat us like people. We want you to accept that you have done bad things, so that in the future you can do better. We want a flavor of equality that none of us have tasted before. We want to share it with you. We want a world where love and violence are not so easily confused. We want a species of sexuality that isn't a game where we're the prey to be hung bleeding on your bedroom wall.

Right now, we also want to rage. We are not done describing all the ways this shit isn't okay and hasn't been okay for longer than you can believe. We want you to make space for our pain and anger before you start telling us how you've suffered, too, no, really you have. We are angry, and we are disappointed.

Because you made everything precious in our lives conditional on not making a fuss.

Because you behaved as if your right never to have to deal with anyone else's emotions or learn the shape of your own was more important than our very humanity.

Because you made us carry the weight of all the hurt that had ever been done to you, and then you praised us for being so strong.

Because we tried for so long to believe the best of you, because it felt like we had no other option.

I promise you will survive our rage. We have lived in fear of yours for so long.

Stay here, in this difficult place. Stay here actively. Breathe through the discomfort and pay attention to what it's telling you. Listen to women. Believe women. There will be a lot to learn, and a lot more to unlearn.

Sure, we can draw up a list of rules, and in the short term it might even help. Don't make someone's job conditional on allowing you to grab and hassle her when you're drunk. Don't fuck people who are unconscious. Don't assume that any woman who's made the barest effort with her hair and makeup has thereby given anyone within ass-patting distance an invitation. I can go on. I wish I didn't have to.

You've just arrived in this strange new country where women are human beings whose lives and feelings matter and while you find your way around, yes, it's useful to memorise a few key phrases. May I kiss you? Ok, that's fine. Do you like this? Do you want me? Here's what I want; what do you want? You can sound out the shapes of these sentences, but teaching you is a lot of effort, and frankly in the long run it'd be much less work for everyone involved if you'd just learn the language yourselves. Just think of the interesting conversations we could have in a rhetoric of mutual humanity.

Think on that, and be brave. Have the goddamn courage to admit that you got it wrong, so that you can start getting it right. There's a train leaving soon. It makes a few stops on the way to a less monstrous future, and I advise you to be on it.

Previously:
The Horizon of Desire
We're All Mad Here: Weinstein, Women, and the Language of Lunacy

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.
Editor: Michelle Weber

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I'm sick of being asked to suffer so a man can grow." - Alexandra Petri "Everyone. Fucking. Knew." - Scott Rosenberg This is actually happening. The so-called "revelations" about endemic male sexual aggression in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, in the tech world, and in communities large and small have not stopped, despite every conceivable effort to dismiss, discredit, shame, and belittle the survivors coming forward to demand a different world.

# data[].attributes.body
Jacky Fleming