I'm finishing school... reflections

lore dump and a beginning of an essay about the best books i read over 6 years of 3 different schools

I was a veryyyyyyyy begrudging college student but now I graduate in a couple weeks (???!!!!). I’m going to try to write some essays outlining what I learned in my classes and how they changed how I view the world. No guarantees anything mentioned is perfect (academia is often flawed), its just a roundup of how I learned what I did. Think of it as syllabus highlights and passing the good stuff on, because our academic system is a mess

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SCHOOL 1: THE IOWA YEARS

SO, I really did not want to go to college at all. High school was the worst, I was deeeeeppppp into it girlbossing in NY and I wanted to stay. I’d just finished filming the Vice show, I had a million connections, and I could’ve stayed and gotten really influential in the weird new capitalist “feminist activist” (ha) world. That’s just a fact — all the girls I’d hung out with at the time are now big names, and we were dreaming up book proposals and other types of projects. I had literally no desire to leave. In fact, I was absolutely opposed to it. But my parents were begging me to apply, and decided to send the application I’d already written to a rural school in Iowa. I dismissed it, then got offered a big scholarship. Damn. Hard to resist, but even so, I was furious to leave the city for even a couple days. I think I was like, what if I miss a partyyyyyyy. BUT on my tour there were three things that convinced me this was a perfect school: a buzzing chemistry with a six foot tall Chicagoan with very blue eyes, the fact that the social justice tour had to be re-located three times because so many people wanted to attend, and the fact that the freshman dorm had a sex shop called SHIC (Sexual Health Information Center) with $20 plan B and subsidized sex toys. Even Bluestockings, where I was volunteering circa 2018-19, didn’t have those resources. So I finished my magazine internship and headed to a place an hour away from Des Moines and an hour from Iowa City. All my friends were shocked that I was pausing my life to go somewhere remote. I was too. I mean, I hadn’t left NY for more than a couple weeks at this point. I landed in Des Moines an hour before Norman Fucking Rockwell came out, and I remember crying in the taxi listening to Venice Bitch on repeat, wondering what I got myself into. But that school was really good for me. I was totally embarrassingly wild in the beginning because there was absolutely no clout culture there, no brand launches, no Wing memberships (thank god lol). It was sort of freshly post pubescent. There were unleashed, veryyyy messy romances and friendships, as any first year should have in abundance. It’s good to make some mistakes.

Now, I’m an NYC bitch for life, but transferring to a place without access and lib/dem politics was eye-opening. SHIC was awesome, with a bunch of cool seniors who intimidated the hell out of me. Every week, I parked myself on the couch and talked to anyone who came in our dimly lit, overheated “office”: I got to teach about Tenga Eggs, lube, and healthy relationships. It was very up my alley. What I remember most from my SHIC experience was how important our subsidized Plan B was. Very few students (especially firstyears) had a car, very rarely did people leave campus. Outside of SHIC, the nearest Plan B was locked in a shelf at a Walmart that was probably 20something minutes away. If I remember correctly, it cost $65, and the minimum wage (aka campus job rate) was a lovely $7.25 an hour. But at SHIC, no one needed to worry about hitching a ride, no one needed to worry about judgement, interrogation, or intimidation, no one needed to worry about the cost. I think I gave it away for free once or twice, TBH. It was cool to genuinely make a tangible impact instead of making an infographic online. I remember once, in the school’s basement theater, the SHIC leaders organized a lecture from an Iowan lady who kept her name and identity secret. She told us about her kink lifestyle, and gave us all a free first aid kit with all the BDSM beginner tools. Nothing good could last apparently, because at the end of the semester, our center was threatened with a total shutdown. The admin was concerned it was a ““health liability”” for us to be giving out those resources outside of a medical practice. But let me tell you this: the school brought out people’s loneliness and horniness. And the student body, especially 18 year olds in their first semester of school were nottttt practicing ‘safe’ sex. The absence of Plan B was felt. People were distraught. After a lot of student pressure, SHIC was reinstated, but it was constantly under threat and surveillance.

Somehow the only picture I have of the Sexual Health Information Center — cropped out my crush for obvious reasons. Look at those prices!!!!

I fell into sociology and gender studies by the first week or two, and was like, where has this been all my life! Both my professors were totally amazing: one was a very kind hardass who wore business-profesh every day, the other, a disinterested genius in a Kate Bush T-shirt (I can’t remember if it was Hounds of Love or The Dreaming). I honestly can’t remember almost any of the pivotal sociology theory I read that year by name, though obviously it was exciting enough for me to completely devote myself to the major. But I remember that Gender Studies was incredible, because all the DIY research I’d done to supplement my utter lack of education in school was now being filled in with the foundational text I missed. The most memorable thing I read that year was Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. I’m going to revisit how she writes about pornography in it, because I forgot about that til now. But it was utterly life-changing to read someone extol the power of sensuality. Highly recommend. Also really powerful at that time was Emily Quinn’s work around intersexuality: specifically this TED talk — The way we think about biological sex is wrong. We discussed it in class alongside sections from Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and it really liberated me to realize how much white supremacy + medical racism/sexism/transphobia have completely shaped the myth of gender. Also beyond huge in gender studies 101: The Combahee River Collective, Kimberlee Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, Judith Butler, all the good stuff.

Around this point, before I’d left the city, The Ethical Slut was being mentioned alot. (Did I mention I was spending all my time at bluestockings? Yes? I’m doing it again then. RIP.) I don’t know if I read it my first semester or a bit later but it definitely colored how I’d been viewing relationships. I’d also been irrevocably, beautifully, influenced and radicalized around SWer rights a year prior to Iowa. After attending Jacq the Stripper’s NUYC protest contingent in 2018, I met the amazing Red and Gizelle Marie: Red was doing work with Support Ho(s)e around Alisha Walker’s incarceration and Gizelle Marie was organizing Stripper Strike. Their work influenced my politics to this day, alongside obviously, most influential of all, all the SESTA/Fosta protests — if you don’t know Hacking/Hustling you need to get into that. Also Decrim NY. I’d also read, reread, read again the BRILLIANT Charlotte Shane (https://meantforyou.beehiiv.com)’s book Prostitute Laundry, and sent her a long, overshare-y DM about how much it meant to me, which she gracefully and kindly responded to (I am still grateful, Charlotte!) I’d also seen her talk at Bluestockings with Stoya, who wrote the amazing Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn. Her book influenced me as a writer/essayist and at that time, a fulltime sexuality pro. My fave essay in that book is the road trip one, btw, and the soho house one and nudie girls one are both memorable too. Going into my first semester, I thought sex work, polyamory, and kink were the norm and …. boy did rural Iowa prove me wrong. I’m grateful for that now because I learned how to translate my ideas about sexuality to a non-super-in the know NYC audience, and I also learned there was a difference between being intolerant (what I expected, thanks to high school horrors), and curious but just not yet educated.

Iowa got really crazy after that. I hung out with the stoners everyday around then, so there are some big holes in my memory. I got on the Teen Vogue 21 under 21 list in the middle of a schoolday, went to the cafeteria overjoyed, and people were like, damn, that’s great and exciting, will you pass the salt? I also became lactose intolerant one day thanks to an ill-fated trip to Culvers, which, sorry midwesterners, I’ll resent forever. I don’t super remember my second semester, because the pandemic struck a month in and everything changed completely. We all had to leave campus in a couple days. Hot mess. It was then time for Zoom school. The next chapter of this, when I can muster it, I’ll talk about the horizontalist, wonderful mutual aid course from my prof, and how it shaped my politics around Transf. Justice, anti carcerality, neoliberalism, etc. Specifically the work of Madonna Thunder Hawk. I should also note that in that ‘lost semester’, during zoom school, a professor knew I was having a hard time, and let me do an oral presentation instead of handing in my late essay, which meant alot: she just said I could explain all my ideas and she’d ask questions. It taught me that school didn’t have to be punitive. In the month before COVID had hit campus, she’d let us sit on the floor and stretch, gave us somatic warmups, never cared if we ate during class. It was natural for her that her curriculum was just as much about education as it was emotional wellness. The way she conducted her classroom and her Black Feminist politics kept me in school when I wanted to go home. She’s getting a long thank you email soon.

When I got back to school, campus was nice, then it was different. Academically, it was still amazing. I was head over heels into sociology theory: Bourdieu (Bureaucracy) and Goffman (Total Institutions) are the names/works I remember being gamechangers. There were high-stakes projects we were working on around the Cops off Campus movement, and it was so important and sooo challenging to rally people after the global isolation depression slump. It was hard to move the needle. Iowa kind of ended on a depressing note though. My final semester was heavy. My grandfather, who played a massive part in raising me, developing all my creative pursuits, and just meant the world to me, passed away very suddenly. I was reeling with grief. I couldn’t sit through class, I couldn’t eat, I cried for hours every day. I needed to go HOME. I transferred out, halfway through my thesis on social media, teen girl’s activism, and neoliberalism, and the next chapter began. That was that!

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Some retro pics from school, 2018-2019 baddie stuff, etc below. Bye for now XXXXX