shoulda put a ring on it, shoulda signed a contract, shoulda just kept your head down and worked, etc.

I had an idea of turning this blog around, as it were, come 2015 — it would be the diary of the angry Tamil spinster, or something. Her eternal disquiet. 2015 came and I spent a lot of time of twitter, faving tweets, retweeting tweets, wondering why bother to write anything. Thus far, I’m still wondering: why bother to write? And have not yet found an answer that is sufficient to make it worthwhile (not for myself, but for others.) Related: why should others read me, or how does my writing contribute to anything, if at all? More important than “why bother to write”.

I’ve started to identify so much as “spinster” in my head, first as a joke, but now as reality, because I think back to how we were made to be afraid of being the unmarried 30-something woman taking care of her elderly mother when were in our teens, and thus encouraged to study hard and look pretty to avert this fate, and how I have arrived at this fate not through conscious choice but a series of decisions based on facts of my life that were beyond my immediate control. Is this what they call agency? Surely the spinster, being in the position she is, should be the most anti-capitalist of them all.

I read Kate Bolick’s Spinster expecting to feel some kinship with it, moments where the writer stares into the abyss of utter aloneness and I stare along with her. Instead, it’s about a pretty woman who is plenty sought-after by men and attends lots of literary parties and can never walk down the street without seeming like she winds up on a date. (This woman is Bolick, to be clear.) There are bits in-between about women from her past who have acted as her awakeners; all of them white, most of them pretty and sought-after by men in the same way, and in a creepy way, all very pale-skinned and eroticised because of this white skin (her descriptions of how Edna St. Vincent Millay was desired by men, for example, works in this creepy way … creepy because desire-for-white-women is always taken for granted.)

This book, as Jessa Crispin writes, also vexed me. At one point, when tracing the life of one of her awakeners, Maeve Brennan, and noting that she did actually end up living the spinster nightmare — that of a “bag lady” — Bolick wonders, “What did it mean that this was the woman I’d aspired to be?” Maybe some spinsters end up as “bag ladies” because of their position in society, alienated, precarious, and unwanted — how are they to thrive under the brutal conditions of capitalism? But in case the cover of Spinster wasn’t already a clue, Bolick’s book is for the shiny and striving. In identifying with Brennan but cringing at the bag lady, Bolick can’t see what she won’t see. All you need to do is awaken the neoliberal soul and be productively employed. Bonus: if you’re pretty and can get a lot of dates, you can only worry about your strange desire to be alone without actually living the alienation that aloneness prescribes in a capitalist society.

The face of the new spinster movement or whatever, as determined by the Publishing World (i.e. New York), is pretty and white, so the rest of us will have to gather under a different banner, I guess. Hag? Bag lady? Take your pick. Like wage labour, the ability to make a choice between being undesirable and unproductive, or being desirable and productive, is a sign of agency. The choice is yours ladies! Will you work to improve your look, lean in, and make an effort? If you do, you deserve to exist.

An excerpt from Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety

Excerpt from Kate Bolick’s Spinster