The water was as dense with magnesium as the famous hot springs of Caia’s home planet. She began to allow herself to relax. The girl’s gentle hands washing her hair were as soothing as the water, but the biggest relief of all was being out of the presence of Lord Mrithax. At least until the bath was over, there was no point in wasting her energy on wariness. She began to feel hopeful. Of course her ragtag band of allies could prevail. They were on the side of good.

The girl draped a steamed towel over Caia’s face, scented with some alien botanical. She breathed it in. Then she couldn’t. There was a pressure around her neck--her hands scrabbled to loosen it--but the other girl’s hands, so gentle til now, were suddenly, unexpectedly strong--Caia fought back blindly, thrashing in the water--

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A minute later she was gasping for breath as two of the eunuch guards pinned the slavegirl to the floor, a knee on her back, a weapon pressed against her temple. For maybe the first time, Caia focuses on the other woman. She couldn’t see her face through the long, curling silver hair spread across the tile. The hair only told Caia that her attempted assassin is a member of an oppressed ethnic minority, from a planet that the Beilix empire has raided for centuries. But most of the harem women were.

Lord Mrithax swept in and asks exactly the question that Caia would ask if she could catch her breath: “What the hell is going on?”

One of the guards held up a piece of tissue paper. Written on it, in kohl eyeliner and unfamiliar handwriting: “I prefer my virtue to my life.”

Lord Mrithax scanned it and turned to the slave girl. “Did the captive bribe you to help her die? But she fought back--who put you up to this?”

One cheek still pressed against the floor, the slavegirl looked up at Mrithax beseechingly, but silently.

He asked again: “Who are you doing this for?”

Pinioned like this, she can barely get the words out. “For my child.”

At a gesture from Lord Mrithax, the eunuchs loosened their grip. The girl remained prostrate, only sliding one hand to cradle her belly, snaking the other forward to touch Mrithax’s foot. Though the guards still had their weapons trained on her, there’s no fear on her face, only calm jubilation. Even when he had fucked her, the emperor had never paid this much attention to her before. Lord Mrithax removed the black mask which had been a mark of imperial office since time immemorial. His long, narrow face was damp with the steam of the baths. Very few people had seen this face--and even fewer had seen it as it looked now, perplexed, off-kilter, not totally in command of the situation. Caia noted with unwarranted surprise that the emperor shared the slavegirl’s silver hair and sharp features. Millennia of breeding with captive concubines will do that to a dynasty.

“My lord,” said the bath-attendant. “I know you have killed people for less. But in recompense for any comfort you may have received from the many times I bathed you, I beg of you two boons. First, take this child from me and plant it in a surrogate, rear him up & let him fight in the brother wars for the inheritance of this empire--for I know he will be a son, and I know he will be as ruthless as you. Then, when you do kill me, let it be by your own hands.”

“He will be ruthless indeed, with such a mother,” said Lord Mrithax. He sounded impressed. “Yet also reckless. Did you not expect to be caught?”

“You never caught me before,” said the girl.

Mrithax turned to the eunuchs. He wanted records. Any harem deaths since this girl had entered the harem. Suicides especially. With video.

“The harem girls were mere toys,” he said. “I hardly notice losing one. But this woman, this rebel--” He gestured at Caia, without looking at her. “Her information matters to my plans. Your jealousy could easily have undone me.”

“Then interrogate her, but don’t fuck her.” The bath-attendant had slowly crept up into the traditional position of supplication, one hand on his knee, the other grasping the front of his robe. Rarely had the posture expressed such a sense of slowly growing triumph; Caia noticed that the girl was boldly asking for more and more, and the emperor, intriqued, seemed more and more inclined to listen. “Or if you must fuck her, kill her after. Don’t give other women sons. That is the only thing you could do that I will oppose you in.”

The Emperor laughed. “I like your ways very much,” he said. “But I like variety.”

“Then you had better take me from these quarters and install me in your own chambers. I don’t need to stay here and be guarded--the last thing I want to do is leave you. Your other women need to be guarded from me.”

The emperor and the slavegirl had their burning gazes locked together. At this point the guards thought it was best that they and Caia discreetly withdraw. Their timing was good--they softly shut the doors on Mrithax drawing his concubine up into a kiss.

It’s pretty classic for an evil emperor who has captured the beautiful rebel to be distracted by planning a sumptuous wedding. Caia had just kind of expected it to be about her. It was a little deflating, but it certainly made things easier. In her cell that night, Caia woke up to a soft noise and saw that the door to her cell was open. She rejoined her allies. The fight continued.

Caia never did learn what the slavegirl had been named. But soon everyone knew her new name: Maharega, first empress of the Beilix Empire.

And last empress. Yes, Caia’s side wins in the end. The Beilix Empire had been stable for millennia with its system of emperors ruling alone, begetting sons with the harem of slaves, and letting the sons fight for supremacy during bloody interregnums. Obviously the “one and only one legitimate wife producing the only legitimate heirs” thing can also work for a monarchy. Mrithax wasn’t really doing either system. He was willing to change the structure of the empire for her, but not willing to control himself. This introduced a single area of misalignment between Mrithax and Maharega.

If only Maharega had been just a little hotter. I mean, she was hot. She was seductive. But....it wasn’t her comparative advantage. She was just not a standout in the harem, sexually speaking. Her comparative advantage was psychopathy. Mrithax clearly liked her will to power and Machiavellianism, he wanted sons like her. But he just wasn’t viscerally attracted to her Machiavellianism the way that she was to his.

Tragic! If Maharega could have trusted him around other women, she would not have, for instance, let Caia get away, rejoin the rebels, and get back into gear as a classic trope-y space opera where the good guys inevitably win.

Middlemarch is a) the greatest English novel and b) about a young woman who wants to do the most good that she can, but whose idealism is often hampered by her failure to understand social norms and the people around her.1 So if you’re reading this blog you’d probably like it.

I don’t think “spoilers” are a coherent idea when it comes to classic literature. These books are better on a second (and third, and dozenth…) reading; “spoilers” make the first reading easier to follow, more like a second reading. But if you care about spoilers, stop here.

A lot of readers see Middlemarch as a love triangle between Dorothea (the idealistic young woman) and two men: Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious doctor who plans to change the world with medical research and reform, and Will Ladislaw—basically a charming kid with a lot of taste and not much else, who when the novel begins has spent his time flitting between different artistic careers and experimenting with opium.

Dorothea ends up with Will, who goes into politics and becomes a member of parliament, fighting for sociopolitical reform (basically a Charles Grey type—reform in that time and place meant stuff like slavery abolition). Lydgate marries the beautiful Rosamond Vincy2 and goes into severe consumer debt, giving up his ambitions of reform & research to become a fashionable and successful doctor to the rich.

A lot of Middlemarch fans ship Dorothea and Tertius, and find the Dorothea/Ladislaw endgame disappointing and unrealistic. Now I’m personally Team Ladislaw. I think Ladislaw is the victim of readers pattern-matching him with fuckboys they know, because Ladislaw actually is the kind of guy that fuckboys pretend to be. We could argue about Ladislaw—whether the text supports my interpretation over theirs (it does), whether “the type of guy fuckboys pretend to be” ever exists instantiated as a real dude or only exists as a mask for fuckboys (the answer to this is much less clear)—but I want to argue about Lydgate.

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When people defend Lydgate, they defend him on the basis of his research and reform. But….he never actually does any of that! Lydgate fans give Lydgate way too much credit, which, given his financial habits, is the last thing he needs. They tend to blame Rosamond for Lydgate’s downfall. Adelle Waldman expresses this view clearly:

In the end, Lydgate and Rosamond’s marriage is far less happy than Levin and Kitty’s, in large part because Lydgate is not as rich as Levin. That is, while Levin can afford to indulge Kitty’s material desires without penalty to his own projects, Lydgate is ultimately worn down by Rosamond’s complaints. He puts aside his aspirations in favor of more lucrative work in order to provide her with the material things she deems necessary.

One reason it’s easy to think this is because Lydgate seems to think this, at least when he’s mad: “Tertius, whose temper never became faultless…to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance.” But “Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. Why then had he chosen her?” And she’s right! It’s not like this is an arranged marriage. Their marriage doesn’t cause him to get into debt: it’s the first external sign of his debt-based psychology. Eliot is very clear about this, from the beginning of their courtship:

Lydgate’s spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known (without his telling) that he was better born than other country surgeons. He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but whenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.

I had a big Financial Audit phase. Even if you haven’t listened to a full episode, you’ve almost definitely seen the clips. It’s better than Maury. It’s worse than Maury. Hammer sniffs out the cope-y-est, least self-aware broke people he can find, who are all too happy to go on his show, and goes through their budgets. If you’re trying to break the modern literary taboo against money plots, you can find a lot of material here.3 But for the purposes of this essay, the most intriguing cope or justification on the Financial Audit bingo card is justifying present spending by future ambition. “I’m applying to law school!” or “The army will pay for my degree!” To which Caleb Hammer reasonably responds: “Okay, sure, maybe you’ll get into law school, and lawyers can often afford Bottega Veneta bags or whatever, but how can you get through law school when you’re spending like this?”

The Last Psychiatrist touches on this:

[T]he problem here is debt. Not credit card debt, though I suspect that’s substantial too, but self-esteem debt. They’re borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they’ll be able to pay it back.

In all but social class, Lydgate is absolutely typical of Caleb Hammer’s guests. Maybe an established medical researcher/reformer could be excused for choosing a wife as an adornment for his leisure hours, “reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven,” and maybe unavoidably with these criteria, picking a wife who is somewhat shallow and frivolous. But Lydgate isn’t a researcher or reformer yet! He just believes that those are things he cares about, meanwhile consistently acting in ways that foreclose research and reform as possibilities.

Why do I call this emotional consumer debt? Obviously, financial debt is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it allows people to do useful things they couldn’t have done otherwise. I think the same applies to self-esteem debt. TLP agrees: “Melinda’s 26, at that age some self-esteem debt is reasonable as long as you use it to hustle.” To a certain degree, embarking on major projects requires a little self-esteem debt. Law school is hard, maybe to get through it, you need to think of yourself as a future lawyer. And I wouldn’t object to Lydgate’s image of himself as the lifesaving researcher if he were just using that self-image as fuel for late nights studying (emotional commercial debt). I don’t even object to declaring self-esteem bankruptcy: hyping yourself up to take a huge risk, failing, and then moving on. I’ve read, wish I could remember where, that one reason American economic development and social mobility outpaced other countries is the comparative ease of bankruptcy here, I think that’s probably a good thing, to let people fail and fail and try again and win. But Lydgate is using his big dreams to justify doing things that couldn’t possibly help him fulfil his big dreams…like marrying Rosamond! It’s emotional consumer debt because he can’t possibly use it to build anything that would justify taking on the debt. It’s not like he’s brokely marrying Dorothea or (possibly even better) Mary Garth, someone who could help him fulfil the goals that would allow him to deserve her.

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You know how sometimes people praise an author by saying their depiction of a character is “convincing?” Usually that basically means the character is realistic—which Lydgate absolutely is, you can visit any bar a block from a hospital and meet a doctor who totally would have cured cancer if it weren’t for his greedy bitch wife. But Lydgate is convincing in the sense that he convinces us of his copes. I think most Middlemarch readers are smart enough to see through this in real life. We don’t necessarily believe the doctor at the bar, or the Ivy League grad who’s gonna go into political organizing as soon as he’s done with a couple of years in consulting, or the hardcore partier who believes they’re going to be a great parent, etc etc etc. Why are we more convinced by Lydgate than we are by the real-life drunk doctor?

Partly it’s just because George Eliot is a genius and better at dreaming up convincing copes than most people are. And also—we need to believe Lydgate actually could do it or the tragedy doesn’t land. But….I think it’s unfortunately an unavoidable structural issue with trying to write about this emotional-debt personality structure in a fictional narrative. When we hear someone’s dreams and copes in real life, it’s pretty easy to distinguish between the real-life stuff they’ve actually done and the stories they’re telling themselves and us. But Lydgate exists entirely in a story. The stuff he “actually does” exists as prose; his dreams exist as prose; in the same medium, it’s hard for one to feel more real than the other. I keep trying to imagine how you could possibly solve this problem with dramatizing emotional consumer debt. Maybe it would work better in a movie, where you see what Lydgate does and hear how he talks and the distinction is clearer? But he’s not really the blustery, boastful type, it’s mostly happening internally. Voiceovers???? Could you write a novel where all the things that actually happen are in prose and all the characters’ wishes and dreams and hypotheticals are, like, in verse…..? Not sure I’ve ever had a worse idea.

When Ladislaw loses the Lydgate-Ladislaw comparison in readers’ minds, I imagine that they’re thinking something like, '“Ladislaw is just a dilettante, Lydgate is a great doctor.” I think that this is punishing Ladislaw for his virtues. Will tries various stuff, fails at it, tries other stuff, eventually succeeds. He never tells anyone else that he’s a great artist or writer or whatever. He never tells himself that he’s a great artist or writer or whatever! He certainly doesn’t depend on his self-image as a great artist or writer or whatever to justify questionable choices. He gets a lot of shit from modern readers for taking money from Casaubon. But…he stops taking money from Casaubon and gets a job that can support him. Meanwhile, Lydgate is in deepening debt to merchants, to Bulstrode, eventually to Casaubon too. As a Ladislaw fan, I like his realism about himself, his internal locus of control, his discipline about not blaming others for his problems. But his relative self-awareness makes it much easier to judge him than Lydgate, whose self-protective fantasies are well-written enough to be all too convincing to readers.

Take, for example, Simon the Zealot. I can safely say I never thought about him (more than memorizing his name) until last weekend. He is just a type of guy that doesn’t mean anything to kids, and also he gets very little airtime. But last Friday I realized I had very little understanding of who all those guys at that dinner party were supposed to be, so I did some very cursory research, and found myself especially obsessed with Simon the Zealot.

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What does that mean--the Zealot? Well, it could mean that he was just really enthusiastic. Or, due to some homophones in Hebrew, it might have meant he was from Cana. But it probably meant that he had previously been part of a religious/political group called the Zealots--political agitators whose goal was to foment rebellion against the Roman occupiers. Well, I guess technically their goal was to win a rebellion against the Roman occupiers. They eventually succeeded at the fomenting. But not the winning.

I totally know this type of guy. I’ve been on twitter and in San Francisco. I’ve listened to Red Scare and watched One Battle After Another. The political-agitator-turned-spiritual, the eternal convert, pivoting from one extremist position to another. With this context, I can imagine that this Simon was pretty helpful. Unlike the rest of them, he had some background as an organizer. Dealing with previously politically inactive fishermen must have taken serious patience and humility--not to mention that Quisling tax collector, Matthew.

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Moses is also, I’m realizing, a weirdly modern type of guy: although he’s from a group that suffers a lot, he himself is raised in the heights of privilege before turning to political activism. Obviously, a lot of activists are going to be more privileged than the average person in the group they’re activating for, it’s just easier to do stuff if you’re privileged. But also…you’ve seen how people lash out at this type of guy, both the upper-class people they were raised around, and the less-privileged people who may feel spoken over and misunderstood. “What’s your problem, you never had to build the pyramids!”/”How can you claim to speak for us, you never had to build the pyramids!”

I also can’t help thinking about the situation of the young Hebrew women. Imagine a situation where literally every male in your age group has been murdered. It’s obviously worse for the murdered baby boys than for the surviving women, I’m not trying to pull a Hillary Clinton here. Still, these girls are in a pretty bad situation. They will face great difficulties marrying, they may only ever have sex with their oppressors, who are not likely to be super invested in the children they produce. Then they find out that actually, one boy did survive. And he was brought up as a prince (hot) and then he murdered an Egyptian overseer (also kind of hot), and now he’s coming back as a great leader. I would get my hopes up. And then....you find out he’s married to a Midianite woman. It’s hardly the most important part of the story, but I would be annoyed!

Once upon a time--just long enough ago for a life story to play out from start to finish--there was a young man of exactly the character that I like the most: incredibly intelligent, incredibly driven, taking no assumptions or institutions for granted, and rising above what was expected from him. Even though this is exactly the character type I like the most, I acknowledge that each character type tends towards its own set of flaws, and that he had exactly the flaws that you would expect: he was stubborn, argumentative, and not easy to get along with, and his rare excellences made it very rare for him to find a real connection.

Analytical, driven, stubborn, argumentative: let’s say he was a lawyer. Let’s zoom in on a specific time and meet him in law school. He was first in his family to attend college, where he identified his specific talents and the quickest path to use them; he left college three years later, without a degree, for law school. Institutions were starting to be stricter about degree requirements by then, so as a first-generation-of-college dropout from a working class family, he stood out on campus. He was very proud of standing out.

One of the people he stood out to was a young lady who was very different from him. She came from a good family, and so she had less reason to question institutions, and more reason to expect she would do well by doing what people expected, and what she had seen other people do. Her family didn’t expect her to go to law school, any more than his family had--and thank goodness they hadn’t, because if they had expected it she would have tried her best, and failed. But they did expect that she would get a man, and keep him.

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These expectations gave her an investor’s mindset. A lawyer was a good prospect for a husband, because lawyers are smart and hardworking. A lawyer who had overcome obstacles would be even smarter, work even harder. If he had exceeded expectations so far, you could expect him to keep exceeding expectations. She didn’t think this through word for word. But when her high school sweetheart took her to the Barrister’s Ball, our hero found himself asking her to dance, and thinking that the dance was his idea.

She was so pretty, so genteel, so graciously accepting of his stubbornness, his prickliness. He had been a lonely kid, a lonely teenager. His first real friendships were in college. Staying up all night to discuss books and ideas, a meeting of the minds, was a revelation. He didn’t want to go to sleep when he was with her either. He knew it was different with her than it was with his friends. But he was inexperienced enough to think the difference was just that he had something more with her.

You would not be jealous of their marriage. He took a Mr. Bennet attitude to anything silly or thoughtless or inconsistent in her--the kind of wit that wins over audiences, but doesn’t look quite as good to acquaintances. She was not a Mrs. Bennet, though, because she did not complain. If she married him with more of an investor’s mindset than he would have preferred, at least she did not objectify him as an income producing asset. When he whisked the family off to his small southern hometown to do Atticus Finch things, she never said a thing to imply that she had expected, or would prefer, a white-shoe law firm in her own gracious city. And their differences did not prevent the steady accumulation of a large family of children, who came out better than you’d expect from the Mendelian charts of a gracious, lovely, traditional, religious, & otherwise unexceptional mother--& a father who was ungracious, unlovely, untraditional, unreligious, & exceptional.

He had a sense of justice. He felt it was wrong for him to make her a single mother, or to reduce her standard of living. But he did not think he owed it to her to stay with her. He knew that more happiness was possible. He compared their marriage to his friendships, or even to teaching their children. His love language was precision, he loved arguing, even with his children; he told them that (except at work) he would rather lose an argument than win one, because that meant he had learned something new. But when he called his wife out on some illogical thing she did, she would meekly change her ways, or, more often than he knew, meekly continue what she was already doing. He didn’t care which, you can believe this or not but he just wanted to understand her, and arguing was how he understood. But when she did try to argue once or twice, he tore her words to shreds, as well he could, and neither of them came away better satisfied. He read about Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire, or Heloise and Abelard. He felt that what he wanted was a love between equals. He could not believe that he owed her his life at the expense of looking for that happiness. Shortly after their youngest child received his doctorate, our hero divorced his wife, leaving her everything.

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But it’s not like they’d had an arranged marriage. He picked her! And it’s not like naively picking a wife who’s a little bit of a gold-digger is a sin that should bar you from the chance of true love, or a crime for which a jury of your peers would condemn you to the loss of true love. I can’t say that, in either of those two senses, he didn’t fully deserve true love, an intellectual match. But the fact was that he had a bad track record at achieving it.

He picks a woman who is pretty and makes him feel good egoically. Again. Like he did the first time. Only she’s somewhat worse, because at his age, with his kids, he’s a worse prospect, at least for any woman with a low time preference. Eventually he leaves this woman, leaves her everything he has, like he did the first time, only it’s a somewhat worse everything-he-has than last time, because he’s had less time. He does it because that’s what he’s used to. Even though that makes a lot less sense with a woman he’s been with for a few years who’s not the mother of his children. And then he does the whole thing again. Again.

It was an easy mistake to make and remake for someone like him. When you are weird in a way that makes you useful, it’s easier to find users than matches. Until you’re not useful anymore.

Thank god for all the first-round kids; by the time he can’t work any more, his chivalry and magnanimity to his exes has made his children the only retirement plan he has. Irritable, broke, and single, grating against his dependence, he is not an easy man to care for through decline, especially because he is still somewhat difficult towards his first wife, who needs her children’s care as well. Fortunately, she needs it less. What he left her when he left her probably wouldn’t have seen both of them through retirement, but she’s tended it carefully, and she can make it last.

We can infer what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were like from the behaviors of hunter-gatherers today. Most hunter-gatherers today trade with industrialized cultures. Therefore, our hunter-gatherer ancestors traded with industrialized cultures. But industrialization hadn’t happened yet. Therefore, our ancestors’ industrialized trading partners must have been time travelers from the future. This places humanity in a causality-defying time loop. Troubling.

Historic Evidence of Time Travel

What would we expect to see in the historical record if humanity is looking forward to the development of time travel? We would expect to see records of otherwise inexplicable people showing up at historical events. Do we in fact see this?

Ancient historians often record battles where the armies seem bigger than the warring countries’ respective populations could possibly support. Uncharitably, we call these numbers “inflated” or patronizingly say that ancient historians had different conceptions of accuracy. The much more charitable explanation is that most of these soldiers were time travelers, larping extravagantly. You know perfectly well that war larpers would be time travel companies’ bread and butter, paying millions to play Greeks and Persians under the command of the real Xerxes.

We also see evidence of heavy Christmas tourism at Bethlehem hotels.

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Contemporary Evidence of Time Travel

Where, today, do we see evidence of otherwise inexplicable people?

An obvious answer: dating apps. Who are all these people? Why do you never see them around?

The most parsimonious explanation is that the randos we see on dating apps, are sex tourists from the future.

This raises troubling questions about the future of humanity. It seems obvious to me that if these wealthy sex tourists are coming to our time (well, probably most of them are going to early tinder, but around our time), then they are doing so for a brief escape from a future sexual dystopia. What went wrong?

One possibility is that the future is plagued by an STD that destroys the prospect of casual sex, so that safe casual sex is only available for people who can afford time travel sex vacations. I’m sure that the time travel companies are being strict with testing—but it only takes one false negative (or large bribe….) for an infected time travel sex tourist to come back and spread an acausal STD that will destroy contemporary dating (even more than it’s actually been destroyed, I guess).

Another possibility is that the future sex tourists aren’t here for fun—they’re here for sperm. If sperm counts keep declining the way they have been, we are in a race against infertility to create a time travel machine that will allow the humanity of the future to use previous generations as breeding studs. I hope they’re keeping careful track of pedigrees, because avoiding inbreeding will get harder and harder.

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Future Evidence of Time Travel

We should expect to be in a relative drought of time travellers. We are currently coming to the end of an era where documentary evidence is unusually historically trustworthy. People trusted photographs, maybe more than they should. Time travelling into an era where you’re more likely to be caught is highly unwise.

Now that era is coing to an end. Soon we’ll trust photographs and videos as much as people in the past trusted paintings. If you saw what looked like an image of a 19th century painting that looked startlingly like your friend, would you suspect time travel? Wouldn’t you believe their explanation that it was an AI generated image?

Cotra points out some implications1:

[T]he Gale-Shapley algorithm is always male-optimal. “Male optimal” doesn’t mean men on average get a better deal than women on average: it means all men simultaneously get the best possible wife they could have gotten in any possible stable arrangement….And at the same time, the algorithm is always female-pessimal: of all the possible valid stable marriages, every single woman gets her worst possible stable husband…

Ask for what you want

As a woke feminist lib myself, I don’t see the algorithm here as fundamentally “male”-optimal and “female”-pessimal: it is asker-optimal and askee-pessimal. The problem rewards agency and punishes passivity, to an astonishingly strong degree.

So if the Gale-Shapley algorithm is asker-optimal, why don’t women ask men out? Are women just stupid? Lazy? Cowardly? Conformist? Unagentic?2 Or is the real world less asker-optimal for women?

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How is the actual marriage market different from the stable matching problem?

Life is very complicated (you heard it here first) so we could go on more or less forever in answering this question. So I will try to stick to the most salient points here. This means I will be ignoring, for instance, the fact that not everyone is straight and after the kids/marriage package; I’m also ignoring people who do want the “kids and(straight) marriage” package but who for whatever reason have very different biological clocks. Sorry! Believe me, y’all didn’t want to be in this discourse anyway.

In the stable matching problem, everyone starts the game at the same time and everyone ends the game at the same time; everyone has the same number of rounds. Everyone’s ranked partner preferences stay stable over time. Everyone is there because they want to get married; there’s a sort of “dating” period between the first and final rounds, but no one wants to date a partner that they don’t want to marry. The real marriage market is not like this.

The role of time in dating is one of the major differences between real life and the stable matching problem. In the stable matching problem, time is just kind of an inert matrix. In real life, time is an active ingredient, and time effects women and men differently.

• In real life, new people enter into their dating lives on a rolling basis, and exit on a rolling basis—and the exits may not be as permanent as one hopes. People don’t date in a closed, stable cohort. There’s no agreed-upon end point where everyone stops dating. Partners have to decide, together, when they’re done playing, and one partner can later defect. This uncertainty obviously affects both men and women. But…

• In real life, women get to play fewer rounds than men do. Yeah, yeah, women don’t like their men that much older. But even a small preferred age gap can really effect people’s options. When you get to play even one fewer round than your partner in the matching game, the strength of your partner’s preference for you obviously matters much more.

• In real life, how much a given person prefers a given partner changes over time, and men’s preference to match with a given woman lowers more over time than women’s preference to match with a given man. Men prefer youth when matching with a woman more than women prefer youth when matching with a man. Another reason that a round spent matching with/dating someone that doesn’t end in a marriage, is more costly for a woman than a man.

BUT! EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY! In the stable matching problem, everybody only cares about one thing, and it’s fucking disgusting marriage. This means that being asked out (or accepting) has a pretty unambiguous meaning. But:

• In real life, sometimes people want to date3 partners that they don’t want to marry.

• Men are more likely to want to date4 partners that they don’t want to marry than women are. Again, the differences don’t have to be huge for them to really matter in aggregate. Because of these aggregate differences, men can expect to achieve their preferences by focusing more of their effort on getting nonmarital partners than you would expect from the raw ratio of how much they want nonmarital partners to how much they want a wife; women can expect to achieve their preferences by focusing more of their effort on getting married than you would expect from the raw ratio of how much they want nonmarital partners to how much they want a husband. This really, really sucks.

• The current rules of the game are that you kind of aren’t allowed to decide that you want to marry someone without dating them first—and it’s unpredictable at the outset how long . Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free…but why buy a foundation that you haven’t tried on? It is unpredictable how much time each partner will take to come to a conclusion; it’s considered reasonable to take years to decide. It’s negotiable…but someone who wants a relatively quick decision (especially a woman who wants a relatively quick decision) is in a bad negotiating position, because the alternative options also involve an unknown period of decision-making.

THIS ADDS UP TO MEAN THAT:

• In real life, when you ask someone out, or accept an offer, the thing that you are offering/accepting is ambiguous, and what looks like a reciprocal ask/acceptance match might not be as reciprocal as it looks.

A lot of this “should women ask men out” discourse is focused on rejection. People talk like fear of rejection is the main thing that women need to overcome to gain these asker-optimality benefits. “Women need to risk rejection just like men,” “Don’t worry, ladies, it’s scary to ask men out but they probably won’t reject you!” That’s true! A man probably won’t reject a woman who asks him out! THAT’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Information is a measure of surprise. When a woman asks a man out and he accepts, she has very little additional information about how much he likes her compared to before she asked.

A man gets much more information from asking a woman out and being accepted, than a woman gets from asking a man out and being accepted. Steve Stewart-Williams discusses the Clark-Hatfield study and its replications (yes it replicates), which compares men’s and women’s receptivity to different sexual and romantic approaches (“wanna go on a date?”; “wanna come up to my apartment later?”; “wanna fuck later?”). Sascha Kunz and Tobias Greitemeyer performed two naturalistic replication studies in 2021; that’s recent enough to be especially applicable to today’s dating environment. Look at these tables from their study.

Compared to the stable matching problem, the real marriage market has two basic gender asymmetries which mean that asking men out benefits women much less than asking women out benefits men. One asymmetry is that women get much less information from asking men out than men get from asking women out. The other asymmetry is that “time spent uncertain of whether your partner prefers you enough to marry you” costs much more for women than for men.

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Some Things You’ll Notice I Didn’t Say

I didn’t say that asking a man out will make him like you less. Asking a man out will make him like you more! Asking a man out will probably work for making a man who did not want to go on a date with you, want to go on a date with you. It may make him like you more than that. But that date will have a much higher opportunity cost for you than it does for him. Wait…who’s paying for dinner?

I also didn’t say that a man who doesn’t ask women out is less attractive to women—or that a man who doesn’t ask a particular woman out is less attractive to that particular woman. It’s generally true! But even when it isn’t true, when the woman doesn’t dislike (or even prefers) that kind of reticence, she should still expect that asking men out will give her less information and have higher opportunity cost.

I also also didn’t say that if a man asks you out, that means he really likes you. Obviously, men who ask a lot of women out, will be overrepresented in the group of men asking you out, compared to men who only ask women out in touching Kdrama-like confession scenes, compared to each type of guy’s incidence in the population. If only there was some way to figure out the probability that a specific man really likes you given that he’s asked you out, based on your prior probability that he really likes you, the probability that he asks a woman out given that he really likes her, and the probability that he asks a woman out given that he doesn’t really like her. We could call it girl math.

I also also also didn’t say that asking a man out will never work. Another big difference between the real world and the stable matching problem is that men and women aren’t each locked into a gender cartel strategy. You can use whatever strategy you think is best at a given time, with a given person. You can ask some men out; you can wait for other men to ask you out.

When should you expect asking men out to work?

If it’s already working for you! Maybe this goes without saying. But like. I’m writing partly to an audience of women who might have changed their life strategy in response to learning about a math problem. If you’ve changed what you do in response to abstract information once, you might do it again. This is not always a good thing.

You should expect asking a man out to be more likely to work in situations where asymmetries between the genders are muted, absent, or suppressed. If you want more nonmarital partners than the average man does, if you reasonably expect to have a much longer span of dating than most women, if you do not want a particularly masculine or high-agency partner, if sex is like pizza (“even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good!”) instead of a very fat-tailed range of valence in experiences, etc. Or if you’re in a situation where men doing stuff like “seeking nonmarital partners” and “taking a long time to decide whether to marry a partner” are suppressed or punished—in religious social groups that take chastity seriously, there’s a lot less asymmetric downside to asking a man out.

You should expect asking a man out to be more likely to work if you rarely feel surprised by men you’re dating, if you find that dating is less confusing for you than it is for most women—if you understand people (or at least the kind of people you date) well enough to kind of “eat” the ambiguity in a man accepting your offer of a date.

You should expect asking a man out to be more likely to work if you have lower transaction costs: if it’s easier for you to date multiple people at once, easier for you to break up with people, if you rarely get hung up on a man.

You should expect asking a man out to be more likely to work if there’s an obvious reason he’s not asking you out and that reason doesn’t bother you. Maybe he’s shy and doesn’t ask people out at all.

If there is a reason that you would expect him to be more likely to reject you if he doesn’t like you than the average man getting asked on a random date, then you will get more information by asking him out. Like. Say he’s your boss. Horrible example, dating your boss is not a good idea even if it’s your idea. But if it’s risky for him to accept you, he’s less likely to just go along with it if he’s not particularly into you. But don’t date your boss. But you see what I mean. Higher chance of rejection = more information.

You might as well ask a man out if you’re young and have time to spare and you really feel like it.

You should expect asking people out to work better if you fit one of the exceptions I explicitly named earlier.

Asking a man out also works if you don’t care how much he likes you. Like if you genuinely just want to have sex with him. Or if you’re hoping to rob him, blackmail him, spy on him, or otherwise use or harm him. Asking men out works really well as a way to get into their houses when they shouldn’t let people into their houses. If your situation has a lot in common with the Book of Judith, asking him out is likely to work.

What else can you do besides ask a man out?

The stable matching problem elides a lot of options for agency that exist in the real world. You can change how much men like you—we’re not going into depth on this, this topic is better covered by the whole rest of the internet. You can also do the navigation-by-moonlight thing of subtly steering the situation, yadda yadda yadda. But the most important thing you can do is GO BE PART OF A DIFFERENT MATCHING PROBLEM!!!!!! MOVE! MOVE!!!!!!!!!!!! Go visit every friend you have in every major city. Make them throw a party for you. Move to the city with the best options! Move!!!!!

The age penalty for women is a lot less serious in major cities than in smaller cities or towns, because it takes everyone longer to match up. But the dating market is rougher in like basically every other way…unless you are strange enough that smaller cities/towns don’t have anyone for you. Is this tradeoff worth it to you? THEN MOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What is the point of all this

Cotra’s piece is largely about asking for things you want in general. The subtitle: “Or, ask for things.” The “Ask for what you want” subheading. The last two sentences: “If you only ever pick from offers you get, you never try anything unless someone out there already knew you and liked you enough that they took the trouble of coming to you. If you ask for stuff, you get to pick from among the entire universe of potential options theoretically available to you — and who knows, it might work out.” I agree with this! In general! But I don’t think it works for women asking out men. In fact, I suspect that the reason that women have a hard time asking for things in general is specifically because asking men out works so poorly.

I basically disagree that asking men out works, but I agree that more asking-for-things-in-general is great. My feminism-inspired forays at asking men out were bad ideas, but I had figured out that I shouldn’t do that by my early 20’s. I figured that even though it didn’t work for me, and wouldn’t work for most women, maybe it was the kind of advice that would mostly be seen and followed by women that it would work for. But when I read Cyn’s great piece about asking men out, and stopping asking men out, I was like, okay, I am not literally the only woman in the world who has tried this strategy and found it wanting, maybe this is worth talking about.

I’m not even saying you shouldn’t ask men out. But if you’re asking men out because you read about the Gale-Shapley algorithm & thought asking men out was like a $20 bill on the ground—and then it turns out there are no $20 bills on the ground, or the $20 bill you picked up was covering a pile of street shit & that’s why no one else took it, or whatever—I don’t want you to think, “Jesus, I’m using a better braver more agentic more optimal dating strategy than most women are and things are still going poorly for me….do I just suck?” Asking men out is definitely the narratively high-agency choice. You can just do things. But if doing the thing doesn’t work, then do something else.

INGREDIENTS:
NECESSARY:
The lamb shanks themselves--12-16 oz of lamb shank per person you wish to feed
Salt
Butter (Kerrygold, to go along with the Irish theme?)
About half a chopped onion (white, yellow, or shallots--but not red imo)  per serving. Feel free to use the pre chopped onions that come in little plastic containers in the fresh produce section of the grocery store
Half a cup of Guinness per serving
Half a cup of chicken stock per serving.
Dijon mustard--maybe two tbsp per serving.

DELIGHTFUL BUT UNNECESSARY: any combination of:
A little dash of nutmeg
A little dash of clove
A bay leaf
A sprig of thyme
A sprig of rosemary
A sprig of sage
A square of bittersweet chocolate
A big pinch of instant espresso.
Worcestershire sauce
Fish sauce
Soy sauce.
Don't make a big fuss about these. Whatever you happen to have around, or need to buy anyway.

EQUIPMENT:
A pan and a slow cooker, or no pan and an instant pot. A spatula, some spoons, measuring cup. You need a knife & cutting board 

TIME: including prep:
About eight hours if you're using the slow cooker--maybe two if you're using the instant pot

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Rub the lamb shanks with salt. Brown them in butter in a hot pan, if you’re planning on using a slow cooker; if you’re using the instant pot, use its sautee function. Lamb shanks are a weird shape, and will not brown evenly all over. This is fine. Remove the lamb shanks from the pan and set in the bottom of a slow cooker—or from the instant pot, and set aside on a plate.

Without washing the pan/instant pot, add a little more butter. When it melts, add the onions and a pinch of salt, and fry the chopped onions until brownish. If the pan seems like it’s scorching at all, add a slug of guinness to prevent burning.

When the onions are noticeably brownish and don’t smell raw, turn off the heat and add the rest of the guiness. Stir in mustard.

If using, add ground nutmeg and clove very carefully--shake a little out into your hand and then add it to the sauce from there, so you don’t overdo it. If using, add a dash of worcestershire sauce, fish sauce, and/or soy sauce--seriously, use all three. Add the instant espresso if using. Taste for salt. If you’ve made stuff like this a few times, you’ll be able to fix it by taste; if you aren’t sure, err on the side of undersalting. Pour the sauce over the lamb shanks in the slow cooker. Add the herbs & the square of bittersweet chocolate if using.

If using a slow cooker, cook on low for at least seven hours. If using the instant pot, set it for an hour on high. It will take some extra time to pressurize and depressurize.

If you’re using a slow cooker, you will probably go to work and come back. A nice thing about cooking the shank in the morning is that now you can make mashed potatoes from scratch without having to fuss over the meat at the same time--or, better yet, you can take the Irish theme even further & make colcannon. Or can you? Did work take longer than expected and you’re exhausted? Pick up some premade mashed potatoes (or scalloped, or gratin, etc) on the way home, microwave, and serve your shank over that. The instant pot version also gives you a solid hour to put some sides together.

Enjoy!

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Let’s make it last
like jam. We need more sweetness
than comes natural to us,
but no added pectin--our rinds, our cores,
all that the careless eaters throw away,
contain enough to stabilize us.

A fresh vegetable holds a sum
of nourishment, some too tightly locked
in cellulose to meet the eater.
A long-pickled vegetable has unlocked cells.
Let’s make it last like that.

Freshness never stays, but it can ferment
into something more intoxicating.

Preserving comes
less natural than rot.
We don’t want love in a tin can.

But won’t we find more change
in fifty casks of one year’s wine
than as many seasons of fresh grapes?
(That is, as many seasons as we get
when the getting’s good.)

Oh, but we’re young.
Promises can’t know what’s coming,
and there’s special poison in
what you tried to preserve but didn’t.
Botulinum only keeps you young in a needle.

At least, I can make it last like last year’s flower:
pressed between the pages of a book.

Culture Study

You Don't Need To Get Married or Have a Kid To Have a Party

Many of the people who read this newsletter the most are those who haven’t yet converted to a paid subscription. Is that you? Do you keep thinking “I’ll do it next time”? If you have the means, consider paying for the things that have become important to you…

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3 years ago · 116 likes · 59 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

So. Number one. I agree that you don’t need to get married or have a kid to have a party. People don’t throw enough parties nowadays. I’m a big believer in the party thrower tax credit. 100% throw a party. Throw a birthday party, a graduation party, a book launch party, a housewarming party, a no-reason party. Go hard, make everyone wear black tie. And invite me. Like…I suggested the party…it would be weird if you didn’t invite me.

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But the piece isn’t just called “Have a Party,” it’s called “You Don’t Need to Get Married or Have a Kid to Have a Party” & the piece’s subhead is “The Case for the Non-Baby Baby Shower.” The framing is sort of that people who have weddings & baby showers are getting something unfairly.

And I guess that I—unmarried, childless, only saved from the “cat lady” sobriquet because I have not committed even to a cat—do think that people deserve extra from their friends & loved ones for getting married & for having a baby.

Peterson talks about how “we’ve organized our celebrations towards a very narrow slice of ‘achievement.’” Well, people probably do think of the wedding and the baby as achievements. But I think the reason weddings/baby-showers are more “socially validated” (also from the second paragraph) than graduation parties, housewarmings, etc., is not because getting married or having a kid is a special achievement, but because it’s a special obligation. You’re agreeing to (at least try to) do something very difficult for another person!

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Which is why the gifts make more sense at weddings and especially at baby showers than at other parties1—because the gifts aren’t just to commemorate an achievement, but to help you fulfil the continuing obligation you’re undertaking.

Why I don’t think online vulnerability works as well as people want it to:

—Vulnerable literally means hurtable. You’re giving people information about how to hurt you. Sometimes they’ll do it!

—Taboo subjects, like sex and money, are taboo or a bunch of reasons, and one of the reasons is that they are extremely hard to check and easy to lie about. People are saying it’s valuable to talk about these things because otherwise we don’t know about them, people’s sex lives and financial situations are fairly private. For the same reason, it’s really hard to call bullshit on someone’s lying.

—People don’t have to be actively lying to convey false information! They can just be fooling themselves. Just as it’s easier for people to lie online, it’s easier for people to make identities based on fooling themselves online. It’s just harder to factcheck!

—Online dynamics mean that even if everyone is honest, surprising and controversial honesty (which will almost always be less representative honesty) will come to the top.

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That doesn’t mean that relationships formed online, or online content, can’t be valuable and emotionally deep. I think a better way to create this depth is to shrug off the vulnerability paradigm and embrace the here-and-now paradigm.

Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist known for his banger case studies. He’s also a really important theorist of group therapy, and one of the things he especially hammered home was the importance of a here-and-now orientation in group therapy.

To simplify a lot, there are two basic ways to think about therapy as a tool for helping people. You can think about therapy as a place where the patient brings in stuff from real life for the therapist to process (or to help the patient process). This paradigm has a few problems. The patient could be lying or wrong about what is happening in the outside world; it would be difficult for the therapist to check.

The other model is the here-and-now orientation. Therapy is a place where the patient will do the things they do outside of therapy. By focusing on what’s actually happening in therapy, and changing that, the patient changes their patterns in the outside world.

Group therapy was probably invented to save money on doctors. And if you think of therapy as a situation that primarily processes things that happened outside of therapy, group therapy is a scam. Everybody gets less time to tell the doctor their trauma!

But if you use a here-and-now orientation, then group therapy is great, because it offers the patients a lot more here-and-now to work with under the therapist’s supervision. There are group dynamics to play with!

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To the degree that someone wants to use online social interactions for therapeutic purposes, I think that on the margin, people might find more freedom in somewhat moving away from the vulnerability model of kind of pouring out the tough-to-talk-about things that have happened to them in their online life, and being more curious about how they’re existing in the here-and-now online.

Nursing home gossip has had so much time to ripen that it is often novelistic in character, especially in places like the one I spent a lot of time in last spring, where the residents mostly had their wits about them, and had known each other since they were very little girls. It’s always fun to tell a new person all the old rumors, and I also think these women were eager to give a young woman the benefit of their years. This is my favorite of the stories they told me.

It started with a love triangle. Two friends, when in their twenties, had competed over the same man. The love triangle had a “Jennifer and Angelina” vibe—the women telling me this story described it as “Debbie Reynolds and Liz Taylor”—one girl was a good girl and the man had started out as hers; the other was the vamp.

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I couldn’t get clear on exactly what the vamp had done to the ingenue’s man: did the vamp, what, sleep with him? Kiss him? Go out to dinner with him? Also, what exactly did it mean that he was the ingenue’s boyfriend? Other stories I heard in the nursing home made it clear that ideas about dating were very different then, in a certain sense more casual, more improvisational: a girl would get a proposal from a man that she hadn’t even been going steady with, and accept it. The old ladies couldn’t or wouldn’t clear up exactly what the vamp had done, and firmly insisted that whether or not you can tell if a man is your boyfriend, you should always know when a man is your friend’s boyfriend. (Which remains good advice today.) Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and he turned out to have been the ingenue’s man all along, because, reader, she married him. Good triumphed over evil, the ingenue got the boy they were fighting over, the vamp married a man a few years older than her after ten years of stringing him along, and the girls went their separate ways, a friendship of two decades broken.

So far, a story that (despite its period details) I’ve lived long enough to be pretty familiar with.

Until, after a decade of silence, after both women maybe had aged enough to not fit into the vamp & ingenue tropes quite so neatly, the ingenue called the vamp. Told her—the vamp was the very first person she told—“I want a divorce.”

And the vamp immediately responded, “He’s hitting you?”

You can guess how she knew.

The vamp moved the ingenue out of the hitter’s house and into the vamp’s house. The divorce went through; the ingenue was back on her feet and moved into her own apartment pretty quickly. The ingenue married again, and the vamp, against type and all predictions, had a long marriage to a wealthy man, who did not hit her, and the sins of her youth never came home to roost, except in a great deal of guilt and shame—guilt and shame which were obviously not fun to feel, but which made such a useful bridge to the ingenue, who didn’t have to grapple alone with the shame of the divorce, because she had the comfort of turning to the person she knew had the most reason to feel shame around her.

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And now they were both old ladies in the nursing home, having spent years taking their children on playdates and going to bridge parties and all other housewifely facts, having shed their vamp and ingenue personas, their golden and dark heads both having lightened to white, and looking much more like the old woman in the illusion than the young women.

I will probably never pass on such gossip. My generation is a pack of migratory birds. I wil not spend my final days in the nursing-home cafeteria with the same people I sat with in my elementary school cafeteria. The tradeoff seems worth it right now—I think my elementary school classmates and I are mutually glad not to have to deal with each other all the time. But I will spool out my final days in the company of old women who will never look young to me, whose pleasures and tragedies I will not know.

Warburton has taken himself out of the running as an endgame option for Isabel. He has allowed himself to be too degraded by Isabel’s marriage to be any help to her: to have an excuse to see her, he raises hopes that he will marry her stepdaughter, either lying to everyone around him or lying to himself, neither of which is great: “if his admiration for Pansy were a delusion this was scarcely better than its being an affectation.” Either way, Osmond tries to manipulate Isabel to manipulate Warburton, and Warburton consciously or unconsciously encourages it. He’s too involved in the most sordid aspect of their marriage to be a possible escape from it.

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Realistically, “single Isabel” is not an endgame option either. She spent the first half of the book telling everyone she’d rather be single than married, and then chose Osmond over that—when she didn’t need anything from him, when her family and friends (except Madame Merle) were telling her not to marry him. As she says herself, “I was perfectly free; it was impossible to do anything more deliberate.” Isabel is just a woman who needs a man, not for money or to conform to society or for any reason other than that she’s a person who needs to be linked to another person. There’s nothing wrong or degrading about that, or even particularly female: “It is not good for man to be alone.” And there’s even nothing wrong with her being wrong about it when she was twenty-two and then changing her mind. That’s just a pretty normal way people work. But it makes it seem pretty unlikely that she’s going to prefer being single to staying with Osmond.

I know this is insane, but I don’t get the impression that her marriage has taught her to prefer being alone. It’s taught her a lot of unhappiness, but I don’t think it’s taught her that she would be better off alone! And it would just be a structurally bad ending; it would take her back to who she was in the beginning, not in a “hero’s journey: return stage” way but in a sitcom way, where every episode teaches the characters not to change so that everything can be back to status quo for the start of the next episode.

So her best alternative to Osmond is Goodwood.

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But the 1908 revisions close up this possibility thoroughly. In the 1881 edition, Goodwood kisses her “like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.” In the 1908 edition Goodwood still kisses her like lightning, “a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.” Emphasis mine. You see the difference: in the 1881 edition, it’s ambiguous whether she is free from Goodwood’s kiss, or whether Goodwood’s kiss has freed her from Osmond, like a fairytale kiss saving her from an evil wizard. In the 1908 edition, it’s very clear that Isabel is free from Goodwood’s “possession.”

Then there’s the revised ending. In both editions, Goodwood tries to meet Isabel at Henrietta Stackpole’s house, but Isabel has already left for Rome. In both editions, Henrietta sees his disappointment and tries to comfort him:

Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. “Look here, Mr. Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!”

On which he looked up at her.

In the 1881 edition, that’s that. But the 1908 edition adds, “—but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.”

So, obviously in 1908 James wanted to close off Isabel’s options. He doesn’t do it tackily or tastelessly, he doesn’t end the book like “And Isabel stayed with Osmond. The End.” He doesn’t mar the book’s subtlety of style as he closes up its ambiguity of plot. But is the closure better? Does this fit Isabel?

The implausibility is diegetic. It’s not that Henry James is failing to make something clear; the confusion exists in the world of the book. Isabel can’t explain the match herself—as the reader sees over and over again, because the people closest to Isabel find the match weird enough that they ask her for explanations: “Do you think I could explain if I would?” she says, and “I don’t think it’s my duty to explain to you. Even if it were I shouldn’t be able.”

James disposes of half of the implausibility with very explicit explanation. Gilbert Osmond is a man whose exquisite good taste usually does not permit him to make any visible effort, especially any effort he might fail at. And Isabel is not exactly easy. How does Osmond get her? Well, James explains, someone else has done much of the work for him, behind the scenes.

But, obviously, it doesn’t take as much explanation to explain why Gilbert Osmond marries Isabel Archer, as it does to explain why Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond.

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She clearly wasn’t swept away by the force of sexual passion. Even when she remembers the peak of her love for him, he is only “[t]he finest…manly organism” with the qualifier “in the sense of being the subtlest.” It’s hard to imagine any woman feeling passionate about Osmond, who collects miniatures and “has a genius for upholstery.” I’m not just saying that to a modern reader, Gilbert Osmond seems as gay as Henry James. Obviously, a man can seem gay, or even be gay, and still have women falling for him; in the words of the bard, “Chicks dig guys that are queer/ guys that don’t dig chicks.” Osmond’s miniatures could be Warhammer miniatures; the issue is less that his interests are gay-coded, more that they’re all so petty.

She doesn’t marry him for his money; she has money, he doesn’t. She doesn’t marry him for his “bibelots.” She doesn’t marry him for lack of other options: she turns down proposals from an American industrialist and an English Lord, who, even after their respective rejections, both present themselves again and again as alternatives to Osmond.1 It’s not even that Osmond catches her at the right time, because he doesn’t; like the other two men, he proposes, she turns him down, he says the option remains open. Only after a year is she satisfied, even surfeited, with life experience and ready to settle down. Structurally, James sets up the situation to make it very clear that at this point, she has three options, and chooses Osmond. James methodically, structurally closes off any easy answer to the question of why she marries him. So what is the not-easy answer?

Here are a couple of lines of dialogue—Isabel and her aunt arguing about Osmond after Isabel announces her engagement—which made my stomach drop when I first read them:

“There’s nothing of him,” Mrs. Touchett explained.

“Then he can’t hurt me,” said Isabel.

Isabel answers very quickly, very cleverly, very wrongly. Nothing can hurt you. “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind…It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.” (Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters.)

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Isabel could have a strong, active husband. She could have a man who is not just an English peer, but a political radical; she could have an American industrialist who not only has the good fortune to inherit a cotton factory, but the “judgment and temper” to expand the business.2 I think she chooses Osmond not in spite of, but because, “there’s nothing of him.” Isabel cares a lot about her independence, her liberty; she’s afraid that Goodwood or Warburton would overpower her; that is not unreasonable. But it’s unreasonable for her to think that she can protect her independence in marriage by marrying someone who isn’t strong and active.

If I’m right, and this is how Isabel was weighing her decision, it’s a mistake you see men make much more often than women.3 And it’s not only a moral mistake but a practical mistake—it often doesn’t work! The most blatant and vulgar failure of this kind is the man who takes a mail-order bride because Latinas are feminine, or Slavs are trad, or Asians are submissive, or whatever—and then finds himself with a wife who sees marriage as much in terms of power-struggle as he does, and who is better at the power-struggle than he is.

I don’t think Isabel is as bad as those men. I think she’s more afraid of someone exerting power against her, than she is eager to use power against someone else (although maybe that’s also how the husbands of mail-order brides feel?). I think she chose Gilbert’s nothing only because she thought it meant he couldn’t hurt her, not out of any desire to hurt him.4 I don’t think Isabel deserved Gilbert Osmond.

But I do think she was trying to do something that just couldn’t possibly work. If you’re afraid of linking yourself to someone strong because you’re afraid of their power over you, you can’t save yourself from that by trying to link yourself from someone weak. The henpecking-mail-order-bride thing is one example of how it can go wrong, you can be wrong that the other person is weak. But even if you’re right, and the other person is weak, you are necessarily giving a weak person power over you. It can be worse to give a weak person power over you than to give it to a strong person! When a strong person wants something, they have a lot of options besides manipulating their partner; a weak person has fewer options.

If Isabel is trying to get away from Warburton’s power, from Goodwood’s power, by choosing Osmond, then one of the most tragic ironies of her marriage is that Osmond is weak enough to be obsequious to Warburton and Goodwood, to try to make his wife do the same. He wants things that they have the power to give him. He wants to use his power over Isabel to make her toady for favors from the men from whose power she’s tried so hard to be free. It’s impossible to imagine that if Isabel had accepted Warburton or Goodwood, they would have put her in such a degrading position. Why would they have needed to?

By the second chapter, I caught myself luxuriating in a sense of richness and naturalism that is maybe not in fashion today, thinking this is like a 19th century novel. Off by eleven years! On Beauty (2005) is a reworking of Forster’s 1910 Howards End, something which took me much too long to notice: the first epistolary chapter, the second chapter around the breakfast table, match beat-for-beat.

The obvious difference between the two books (besides the time setting) is racial. Both novels are about the relationships between two high-upper-middle-class families. But the two central families in Howards End are white, & the two central families in On Beauty are a black British family on the one hand, and on the other, a white British man and a black American woman with their biracial American children.1 Smith’s investigation into race and class feels experimental to me—not as in “experimental literature”2 but as in “experimental science,” carefully altering one variable at a time. How do the black upper-class characters interact with white upper-class characters, who share their class but not their race? How do the black upper-class characters interact with characters who share their race but not their class? How do the biracial characters interact with people who share their white background but not their black background, or characters who share their black background but not their white background? When are divides are unbridgeable, and where is it possible for the characters to connect? What about nationality, gender, physical beauty? The careful, thorough testing of every possible difference between the central characters and those around them, results in sharply observed scenes.

Obviously it’s basically impossible to talk about this book without comparing it to Howards End. So I will.

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I was underwhelmed by Howards End on my first, teenaged reading. I was just too young for it, I think—it’s an especially middle-aged story.3 Years later I watched the Merchant & Ivory adaptation, not really expecting anything more than pretty visuals, and was unexpectedly blown away by the perfect parallels and symmetries in the plot. I rushed to reread the book, which was—obviously—even better narratively structured than the movie. So, it was my fault I didn’t get Howards End the first time, but Merchant and Ivory have given me a permanent gift by making the novel more available to me. (I had a similar thing with Sense and Sensibility. I mean, I always loved the book—certainly more than I liked Howards End at first—but Colonel Brandon was just too milquetoast for me to be fully satisfied. But Alan Rickman did such a great Colonel Brandon that it permanently improved my enjoyment of the novel. And I’m really, really hoping I have the same thing with A Room with a View. I read it for the first time recently, and it was just too vague for me. Sometime soon I’ll watch the Merchant & Ivory in hopes that they open the novel up for me, as they did with Howards end. But…I did love On Beauty immediately. Immediately immersive. That’s probably partly because Forster cured me of some of my faults as a reader…but also, I think Forster is just consistently a little vaguer and less immersive than Smith.

But. Of the two books, Howards End is much more satisfyingly symmetrical. Nothing in On Beauty approaches—spoiler!—the almost slapstick perfection of Helen Schlegel condemning Henry Wilcox for the affair that ruined much-less-privileged Jacky Bast’s life, and then immediately sleeping with Jacky’s husband Leonard, which results in Leonard’s life being ruined far more thoroughly. And I think that structure matters more than surface style.

I doubt Smith would be very insulted by anyone pointing out that an acknowledged all-timer like Forster is better at narrative structure than she is. I’m sure she agrees! Her first novel White Teeth, published three years before On Beauty, is fun and genius and also kind of falls apart at the end. It shows wisdom, self-awareness, and taste for Smith to use a great master’s plot as scaffolding. Besides White Teeth and On Beauty, I’ve only read Smith’s essays and maybe a few short stories—I’m curious to read NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud, to see how her structural abilities have developed. I imagine that maybe it worked like espaliering a tree: that imitating Forster allowed her to train her narrative imagination on a kind of trellis, and that this temporary support allowed her narrative imagination to grow strong enough to stand free. But so far that sounds as if I’m only interested in reading Smith’s later novels to see if she learned her lesson—I want to read them because I expect to love them! I loved On Beauty and I expect her work to get better and better from an already excellent start.

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We’d all love a shortcut to writing success. It turns out that shrooms are not that shortcut. I’ve interviewed a writer about using psilocybin to write, and it turns out that writing on shrooms requires more focus and discipline than writing sober (which maybe should not be that surprising). My interviewee describes the benefits of psilocybin for creativity once you’ve developed enough concentration and sheer sitzfleisch to write through the experience.

I’ve anonymized the details, but I will say this is a mainstream litworld writer, not a self-published or Substack writer. Some of this psilocybin-aided fiction has been given the imprimatur of publishing gatekeepers. Since the interview is anonymous, and you can’t judge the fiction in question for yourself, I do think it matters for the ethos/credibility of this interview to note that the fiction has passed gatekeeper’s judgment.

I’d also like to thank the interviewee for teaching me about interviewing! When I was stymied in the interview process, or in writing up the interview, it was really nice to have an experienced interviewer, with full context for the piece, on hand to ask for advice. If you want to get better at interviewing, I really recommend trying this! I loved the collaboration.

What do mushrooms do for you?

This practice has really reinvigorated both my writing life and my writing career.

I've developed my work in a lot of new directions. I've gotten bolder and more confident in my writing. Mushrooms make it easy to immerse myself in the logic and rules of the world of a story. I enjoy writing more.

My career had kind of hit a plateau before this. Now—it’s not like most of your readers would have heard of me, but the work I've done like this has gotten published, it's gotten more critical attention and even acclaim. At this stage in my career, it's pretty exciting to be moving, and to be at the next level.

How'd you get into this?

So, mushrooms are decriminalized where I live now. You can buy them safely. But I did them a lot in college, when they were not decriminalized.

In college, I'd try to write on mushrooms, but I'd get distracted.

I got out of buying drugs from dealers. But when they were decriminalized, I decided to try again.

How much psilocybin do you do to write?

It took me a while to figure out. It was too much at first—doing them like in college. I'd take a normal trip amount, an eighth, 3.5 g. At a certain point, I started having this feeling of omnipotence every time. I thought, “I am God. I am choosing this fate, I could choose a different fate if I wanted to.” This doesn't work for writing. I'd start well, the situation would get out of hand, and I'd have to finish the story later. When I was myself, I'd think, “But okay, I've already chosen. I don't need to see God. That's just a distraction.” So I learned to just take less!

Not microdosing, though. Microdosing is not real. One time I took 20 microdose capsules at the same time and nothing happened.

1.5 g is the writing golden spot. (For me! It might be too much, or not enough, for others.)

How often?

About once a week, sometimes more.

Does it stop working if you try it more often?

Not really. You can do it Monday, Wednesday and Friday with a slight increase in the dosage on Wednesday and Friday and it will still work.

Have you tried anything else?

I tried DXM, which basically works really well, but it was making my heart hurt. And LSD, but then it's hard to sleep. The toll that LSD takes on your body--to me it feels like several multiples of the toll of mushrooms, because of being unable to sleep, and then kind of feeling depressed.

What's nice about mushrooms is that you can take them in the morning and still fall asleep at night.

What does this practice feel like, on the like, druggy level?

There's the body load. For the first half hour to an hour, my heart is racing, I'm kinda anxious, my skin is vibrating. I feel this sense of pressure, like I'm getting overwhelmed. But I learned that this goes away.

Mild hallucinations. The letters really pop, sometimes they move. I definitely couldn't drive.

What's your writing process like on shrooms?

I'm sure people will make fun of me for this, but it took me a while to learn to take them and plant myself behind the computer and treat it like any kind of writing session. Just take them and get started. As always in writing, the two most important things are starting and finishing.

I often already have first sentences in mind, very simple situations, like “Cynthia was late for work.”

I mentioned logic earlier. Writing is kind of like playing with legos: each sentence builds this world more, but it needs to click together and fit with the other sentences. Or like improv. You can write anything in the next sentence—but then you have to live with it and make it work. I've definitely learned it's possible to start going down a path early in the writing process that makes the story really hard to edit. It's easy to write stories that don't have any scenes or dialogue. If it's not firmly grounded in some kind of place and time, with a set protagonist, it can be very hard to untangle and make it all make sense. That's really the danger.

Trying to explore abstract ideas is a wrong path. It can be hard to think clearly when you're on mushrooms. The sentences are tangled. You know what you're trying to say, but you realize anyone else who reads this will have no idea.

It's good to establish to your mushroom brain (which is gonna work with whatever you give it) that this is a world of dialogue and scenes. It becomes really hard to introduce these things later.

Also, I almost always try to finish them. Now I've done it so many times that I also have techniques for cutting the stories short and moving on.

What kinds of techniques? I'm really curious about finishing, it's something I have trouble with.

I mean, that is the hard part. It's something being on mushrooms helps with, because it's basically the playing out of the story logic. When you start a story, there's a certain number of endings that can naturally occur from the situation. When you're writing, you start to understand which of those endings you're writing towards. But you want there to be a little misdirection. You learn to write like you're aiming for one ending, but actually you hit a different ending.

I've had to learn to start writing another story as soon as I finish one. Because I'm gonna be on this stuff all day.

I've started trying to do some editing even while I'm on mushrooms. You might as well, while you're still in the world.

It's such a Protestant way of looking at mushrooms. You gotta focus. You gotta drill. You gotta sit at your desk.

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Earlier you mentioned you had tried writing on shrooms when you were younger, but it didn't work. Why not? What changed?

It didn’t work because I would get distracted. Time dilation becomes so much that you're thinking faster than you can write.

But now I have muscle memory and habits and discipline. I've written hundreds of stories. It would be really hard to do this if you didn't have a lot of practice writing stories. That's why I'm hesitant to recommend it to people. In college, I remember wanting a shortcut myself, thinking, “If I take this and start writing, something will happen.”

This reminds me of what people say about MDMA. Couples who have been together a long time take it and feel like they fall in love again, like “our marital problems simply dissolved,”1 but couples who first fall in love with the aid of MDMA often have a lot of turbulence.

Yeah, it’s about remembering something authentic. It’s good to be able to reliably rediscover joy.

So you've tried writing on shrooms in kind of a naive way, and that didn't work. Then you developed discipline without chemical aid. What made you decide to add shrooms to this disciplined practice?

I'd gotten really burnt out on writing. I've written for a long time, written stories and novels without mushrooms. But after a while, it can be hard to find the magic. This industry really beats you down.

Before you get any attention at all for your writing, that's actually when you feel confident. You think, “If I make something good, people will like it.” Afterwards you know that even if something is good, people might not like it. I'd start writing and think, this is just another story that's gonna get rejected. I felt like I had permission to write, and then I lost it.

The first time I tried writing on shrooms again, it felt different. It felt like I was just playing around, seeing what I could do, inhabiting the story, letting it develop its own logic.

For me, the most important thing this practice does is give me permission to write. I take it and I'm like, “This is my time, when I'm writing. I have to do this.” It gives me some kind of confidence that something is happening.

Should I have that confidence? In a sense, no. When I reread them sober, most of these stories are no good—70%, 80%. Even in cases where I remember how into it I was when I was writing! But 70%, 80% of the stories I write sober are also no good. I've definitely written about five times as many stories as I've had published.

But when I'm sober, it's harder for me to give myself permission to write, so I write less. And with a 20% success rate, you definitely want to have 20% of more, not 20% of less. This practice cuts me off from getting in my own way.

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Has this practice changed how you write? Like, sober. Do you feel like you've learned things from writing on shrooms that you can take to sober writing?

You learn a lot through this process about human attention. Because your own mind is sped up so much, it's easy to become bored or distracted by what you're writing. So you learn on a very micro level where your eye goes when it's reading a page. Just: what kinds of things actually catch my attention, versus things I just say I think are interesting.

The major thing I've learned is that emotions are what matter the most. If I begin with a character who has some kind of conflict, then the story works. If I just start noodling and developing a scene or a setting, it doesn't work as well.

Stories should get to the point quickly. Early on in the story you should understand what the conflict is going to be. Who has the time to read several pages of a story before you figure out what it is you're reading?

So, your writing is really not shroom-y. Like, I wouldn’t have guessed. Which is great, by the way. But why not?

I think when I was in college especially, I would take mushrooms and decide I was gonna describe what it was like to be on mushrooms. Trying to describe the mushroom experience itself is a trap. There's no way of doing it. It never works. All you're writing down is words, but what's really happening is between and beyond the words, but all you can write down are the words.

But when I write a story, I don't feel like that at all. Because Cynthia is real! I can see how Cynthia works, her concerns. And whoever reads the story can see what I saw.

Trying to look at the experience does not work. Trying to look through the experience, at something else, does work. Everyone’s had this experience, you take mushrooms, it’s really great, you see something, but you come back and what did you really see? This way, I always come back with a story.

I've tried to be absurd like mushrooms would imply. “Cynthia was sad and then there was a purple elephant.” But that world is not fun to inhabit. The discipline--the experience of knowing what it's like when a story is working—let me know that the purple elephant stuff was not working.

So, you’re not doing anything you could get in trouble for. Why an anonymous interview?

I would definitely like people to know about this possibility of taking mushrooms to enhance their creativity.

I also think there's some safety concerns. I've definitely been surprised by the degree to which boosters in this community don't really acknowledge that there are some dangers to taking mushrooms. But drug-induced psychosis is not just made up by the feds. And that is real psychosis. It does go away, but mushrooms can trigger schizophrenia and permanent psychosis. People can get hurt while they're on mushrooms.

Something like this, anonymous, the harm is limited. I feel like readers will approach it with more caution.

Also...it's definitely occurred to me that there's a culture of people who are very interested in mushrooms and what they can do. If I were to write an essay that was like “I wrote this award-winning story while on mushrooms,” that culture of people would be excited and I would get a lot more attention.

There's some kind of writing guru role that I'm pretty confident I could do, I could make it work. But I would never really know, if that happened, if people like the work for what it is. It would be evaluated completely differently. People would come to it and basically their feelings about drugs would be the primary determinant of whether they enjoyed the work.

For me I feel like it would be a lot for me to carry for the rest of my life being the mushroom guru. It's just not a role I want to occupy.

With an anonymous interview, the message is, “Hey, you can use mushrooms to work better.” If I say it as myself, if it turns into my brand, my career, the message would instead be, “You can take mushrooms to make money. You can turn taking mushrooms into a job.”

You’ve said a lot of things I didn’t expect from an interview about writing on psilocybin. Discipline, logic, don’t write about the drug trip. Is there anything else that you think might go against what people would expect about writing on shrooms?

There’s nothing magical about this. You have to work, you have to learn. But that also means you get to keep what you learn. Whatever instrument you're using sober is the same instrument you use on mushrooms. It's still you.

The stories I post here matter more to me than anything else I write.1 I think fiction is just a better fit for the internet than nonfiction. With nonfiction, there’s always a gap between the piece and the reality behind it. That gap is distorted & widened2 by the dynamics of online virality. If ten totally honest essayists, who together make up a representative spread of experience on some axis, write ten totally honest essays about their experience on that axis, the invisible hand3 of internet market dynamics will raise up some of them and obscure others, with much more bias for virality than for representativeness, so that readers who get their world-picture from nonfiction could end up with pretty poor world pictures, despite the essayists’ honesty.

Stories are complete in and of themselves. When you post a story online, the whole thing is online. For me, as a writer, it’s much less easy for me to bullshit myself about my fiction than my nonfiction. When I’ve written nonfiction and people don’t agree with me, I can tell myself there’s a reality I’m referring to that they haven’t seen. When I write a story that people interpret differently than I do—well, often they just literally haven’t read what it says, that’s true for nonfiction too, but when they have actually read it, I don’t have privileged access to other information, the reader & the writer are both “on the same page.” At least, that’s how I feel. Also, stories are more straightforward about the type of truth they offer, if that makes sense.

Often people say that no one on Substack is interested in fiction. That is not what I find. Definitely my most popular posts are, like, advice, which I feel weird about. But I’m pretty happy with the response my stories have gotten (especially relative to how good the stories are, which is to say, not very). The readers who’ve been into my stories are surprisingly cool, tasteful, smart, considering that, again, my stories are not very good. I’ve had great conversations with them that matter a lot to me.

If you think stories are so great, you may well ask, then why do you mostly write stuff that is not stories? And the answer is that writing stories is really fucking hard. When I write a take, reality does a lot of the work for me (even if I’m wrong about my opinion, I at least don’t feel like I’m inventing stuff, if you see what I mean). Writing stories often feels scary for me. I never feel sure if I can make it happen, the way I know I can for a take.

I’ve tried to solve that problem by taking a lot of process notes. Then, when I start a new story, I can see what strategies I’ve used before, whether they worked or not. Here are my process notes for Cropped Red Hoodie, relatively unedited from Obsidian formatting. I don’t necessarily expect this to be of much interest to everyone, but if you’re paying for my Substack, you might be invested enough to be interested.

1/23/25

**plan:** try, for no more than 50 minutes, to tell a story, the way you did last lent. put it in the substack editor. try to take process notes extensively so as to be able to recreate.

**start time:** 10:19

**stage:** skillbuilding (prewriting)

**duration:** 50

**word count:** 711

**process:** okay. i feel like i often start these stories by asking questions about other fairy tales. bellflower the question was "when he climbs her hair, doesn't it hurt?" the little mermaid the question was "is this already a turn-around of other princess stories, & what happens if i turn it back around again?” so what fairy tales spring to mind and what questions do i have about them.

cinderella…will she be happy…bleh overdone

little red riding hood…..where’s grandpa….overdone

goldilocks…why’d she fuck up those bears’ life….overdone

IDK I feel drawn to little red riding hood? I have my little red riding hood. call it “cropped red hoodie”

what happens in little red riding hood?

you: riding hood

need: visit grandma?

go: into the woods

search: (road of trials) the big bad wolf

find: meet with your grandma—but it’s the wolf—eaten up

return: hunter saves her, she goes home

change: she’s more careful now????

got a question, got an image, trying to make a story structure out of it. distracted and looking for the hoodie

so the basic story is. she goes on an errand of mercy. along the way she meets a wolf, to whom she gives TOO MUCH INFORMATION. she tells him: ABOUT A VULNERABLE PERSON SHE WOULD CARE FOR, and she tells him HOW TO AVOID PEOPLE WHO COULD POSSIBLY STOP HIM.

the wolf pretends to be A PERSON WHO NEEDS HELP.

red riding hood notices the "red flags" but allows herself to be rationalized out of them--especially she rationalizes red flags by saying "her voice is hoarse because she's sick"--the red flag is explained away as being a result of the other person's vulnerability.

SHE GETS INTO BED WITH THE PRETENDER.

in perrault it's over for our girlboss.

in grimm, "coincidentally" a hunter passes by, notices red flags, and investigates. it turns out that he has been hunting the wolf a long time. he kills the wolf, saves the girl somewhat worse for wear, and the original vulnerable person.

i think this is do something withable.

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Normally, picking the art for a post is my favorite part; a way to reward myself for writing, or else cajole myself into it. That is not how I felt picking art for this post. Now I get why covers for Middlemarch are so universally bad, why they so often freak out and use Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: the White Girl, which, despite being a virtuosic performance of solving a difficult color problem, portrays:

• sleeves which are significantly “less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters”

• a cute little bow and pintucks which do seem to be there for “mere effect”

• Beautiful curly wavy little tendrils which create a lovely soft, detailed, gradient border around the model’s face—but which are totally at odds with “the simple lines of [Dorothea’s] dark-brown hair”

Covers for Middlemarch are so bad because painters like painting women in fashionable clothes. Or at least interestingly old-fashioned clothes! They don’t go around painting unfashionable “Quakerish” outfits like Dorothea’s. It’s ironic because in the book, artists want to paint her. But they don’t want to paint her in her “pelisse with sleeves hanging all out of the fashion,” they want to dress her up as a saint or a Roman.

Dorothea Brooke is obviously a classic. Classics become more beautiful the more you remove. Maybe she’s got a hint of natural, but not that much, and nothing from other style types.

(I sometimes wonder if Dorothea would be quite so good a woman if she wasn’t a classic. If Rosamund Vincy—whose “half nymph, half child” beauty makes me peg her as an Ethereal Ingenue—renounced her frills, she’d be giving up much more than Dorothea.)1

But….what is Dorothea’s color season????

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I’ve said before that there are color season rationalists and color season empiricists—people who believe you can figure out someone’s season from the qualities of their skin, hair, and eyes, and people who believe you actually have to see the subject in different colors to make the determination. I think we have enough information to satisfy both of them.

Dorothea has “dark-brown hair.” We also know that “there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness.” Dark hair, hazel eyes, and warm undertones are a classic Autumn lineup. But….I’m a color season empiricist, and I don’t really think Dorothea is an Autumn.

We see Dorothea wearing white, black, gray, and blue-gray. That by itself wouldn’t be enough information, people wear out-of-season colors all the time, but we also know that she looks really good in them: when we see her “glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth can glow,” she’s wearing a blue-gray pelisse. If she looks this good in cool colors, that kind of rules out warm seasons like Autumn and Spring. (I think when Eliot described the “warm red life” in Dorothea’s lips, she wasn’t using warm to modify red in terms of color theory, but just saying that the life was both warm and red.)

So she’s a cool season—but is she Summer2 or Winter? That depends on her level of contrast. Black and white are higher-contrast colors, classic Winter colors. Gray can go either way. But blue-gray is the quintessential summer color, and Eliot goes into her greatest raptures over Dorothea’s coloring when Dorothea is in the blue-gray. When she and Celia go through their mother’s jewel-box,3 Dorothea is indifferent to the “necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work” and the “pearl cross with five brilliants” (pearl and diamond being very Summer gems) but she’s moved by the emeralds—saturated, cool, bright, high-contrast, central examples of Winter color choices. So we consistently have her in cool colors, but varying contrast levels. She’s wavering between True Summer and True Winter for me.

Ultimately, I’m going to say she’s a True Winter, because “she looks handsomer than ever in her mourning.”

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But it’s strongly to Eliot’s credit that it’s even possible to make this argument. Russian novelists are always spending paragraphs cataloguing each feature of someone’s face and leaving me baffled at the end. I know that Aglaia looks like a healthy California volleyball player and Nastassia looks like Madame X, but I really had to work to picture them. Few novelists are as good at physical descriptions—possibly because few novelists have had lives as constrained by physical appearance as poor, lonely Eliot. And few novelists have ultimately married as happily as she did! Happy ending for the Mary Garth Vincies and the Mary Ann Leweses.

Maybe you would like to look nice. A lot of people do. Maybe you’re reading this thinking what the hell are color seasons. And maybe you are pretty bad at copying people, but you’re some combination of analytically minded and aesthetically sensitive. In which case you might be better off not reading this antinomian deconstruction of color seasons, and instead, reading about color seasons. I love the Truth is Beauty color analysis system.

I asked non-color-season-knowers what they thought color seasons were. “It’s fashion saying you should wear different colors in different seasons, so they can sell more clothes.” No, but put a pin in that. “Oh, I know this one, autumns should wear red and orange like autumn leaves. And springs should wear pink!” Also no, but this is the level at which color analysis functions in the general discourse: that there are specific colors, describable at a pretty low specification like “red” or “blue” or “orange,” that some people should wear and some people shouldn’t.

Also, from the “seasons” thing, you would guess there are four types. And that’s how things started. But now, you see systems with up to eighteen different seasons (Truth is Beauty posits a manageable twelve), and one analyst’s Soft Autumn is not necessarily another analyst’s Soft Autumn.

The basic, generally-agreed-upon-at-this-point idea:

• people differ with respect to which colors look natural on them, with regard to hue (cool or warm), value (light or dark), & chroma (soft or bright),

• people are sortable into defined-ish types called “seasons” based on these categories

• every color describable in a single word (“pink,” “orange,” “blue”) has variations in hue, value, and chroma, such that there can be a warm bright light red (which would look good on a certain type of spring) or a cool soft dark red (which would look best on a certain type of summer).

Anyway. I won’t explain everything, greater minds than mine have gotten into more depth on this. Also, you don’t have to stick to your seasonal palette to find seasonal analysis useful: if you want to dress goth but are cursed to look vibrant in black, you might be well-served by buying clothes in a dark Autumnal purple which washes you out; someone who wants to dress in a gyaru style but who looks natural in bubblegum pink, might want to hit neon green or bright aqua. Also, there are schisms, for instance some analysts are season rationalists who believe you can deduce someone’s season from their hair color, eye color, etc, whereas others such as myself are season empricists who think you need to see someone in a bunch of colors before you can type them (I think I’m getting rationalism vs empiricism slightly wrong & also this is absolutely not the terminology most color analysts would use here).

You can see how the sharp dividing lines and crisp aesthetic rules would be really appealing if you were, for instance, a recently homeschooled kid, wearing a scarf you knit out of some garish eyelash yarn, watching groups of girls go by in coordinating outfits, wondering who copied who, and how they knew what to copy, how they knew it was the sperries that were salient and not, say, the color of the shirt.

But there’s something that almost every color-season-believer agrees on, a principle which is almost foundational to the color season ideology, and in which I am increasingly coming to lose faith: the idea that color seasons are immutable, that once you’ve found your true season, you’re set for life.

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People are always trying to change their season. A lot of people try to change their season by dying their hair or wearing makeup, and this straight up just doesn’t work. (When people say they can “always tell” dyed hair or makeup, they are wrong, airplane dot emoji, but imo what they’re actually noticing is off-season palettes.1 Visibly “heavy” makeup, in my opinion, has much less to do with the actual amount of pigment you’re putting on, much more to do with picking off-palette colors.2) And color season believers rightly tell them, hey, it doesn’t work that way.

But then, for whatever reason, color season believers will say that tanning can’t change your season. Some of them will reluctantly admit that aging might change your season, but many others will insist that aging just pushes you to another part of your seasonal palette. Often, people get a little mystical with it, talking about skin color in terms of “overtones,” which are visible and subject to change, and “undertones” which are unchanging and invisible to the naked eye.

I tried to believe it. But it just doesn’t stand to reason. There is no eternal undertone. There is only tone, ever-shifting in response to conditions. Tanning changes your season, changing the melanin levels in your skin. Your shifting cardiovascular health changes your season, changing the redness of your skin. Your diet changes your season, changing the levels of yellow beta-carotene and red lycopene in your skin.

Which doesn’t mean that people don’t have different complexions. But it’s probably a better approximation of the world, a better use of color season theory, to think of people as inhabiting a specific range of color seasons, responding differently to changes in melanin, hemoglobin, beta-carotene, and lycopene. Maybe someone can carry high chroma in the winter, but tanning mutes that. Maybe someone else’s coloring is so muted naturally that a tan lets them carry more chroma. I took a workout class led by a friend who’s a spring, maybe a Bright Spring; we both flushed from our hearts working harder, but she looked in some sense “the same as usual,” on an axis where I looked “different from usual.” (Athletic wear is usually brighter than, like, officewear; maybe it’s literally because people’s skin has more pigment during a workout???)

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Anyway. I got a little tan recently, and I was emboldened to buy a golden-brown romper with off-white flowers, solidly outside the range of colors prescribed by my Winter self-diagnosis in high school. I know empirically that I would look like trash in this color without a tan. But when the hell am I going to be wearing a thin cotton romper with fluttery little shorts and not have a tan???? So now we’re back to “color seasons are the colors you wear in different seasons.” I think I’m a summer in the winter and an autumn in the summer, confusingly enough. The three identical wrap dresses I wear almost constantly, like a cartoon character, are a sagey-minty green that works for both.

I don’t know if this is the kind of content you’re here for, but it’s what I’m thinking about, so it’s what you’re getting. Sorry to everyone who would prefer for seasonal analysis to be less fuzzy-logic, I too wish I could believe in the firm lines like I used to.