Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

by Rax King

but in retrospect, I think he was acting out of duty rather than feeling when he proposed that we kiss. Tasked with the eventual kissing of girls, he figured he might as well practice and found a low-risk partner for his venture.

Thus did I love Scott Stapp: with a fervent, angry desperation to kiss him, scream at him, swallow him whole.

My nascent sexual urges had already tethered themselves to my fascination with emotional agony: I wanted a sensitive man to be sensitive with me.

I was becoming the sort of lover that I was maybe always cursed to become. Earnest, gentle, despicable.

Squint at it from a certain angle, and the era’s critics become the embattled soldiers at Thermopylae huddled together against Creed’s unstoppable Persian army.

Of course the world is dogshit and should be sung about as such. What ten-year-old doesn’t feel that way? Actually, what thirty-year-old doesn’t feel that way? Just because we’ve built protective insulation over the rawness of those baby nerves doesn’t mean they’re not still there.

It’s saddening to me that if I’m going to feel earnest and sincere rage at the state of the world, I have to either wink and sneer at myself preemptively, or I have to be comfortable mounting a soapbox and opening myself to mockery. Honest, pointed sincerity lacks style. It isn’t chic.

I realized that unblunted anguish was unattractive to the people that I very much wanted to attract.

When I was a teenager, my peers’ approval could not have mattered to me more, to the point that I was willing to learn how to sneer, how to mock, how to experience emotions almost sarcastically; if I dared to cry about pain that I was experiencing, I needed to then laugh at myself, apologize for my embarrassing behavior.

In retrospect, it was a shame that we learned to blunt ourselves before we learned to be kind, but I get why we had to do it in that order. The hugeness of adolescent emotions would have crushed us if we hadn’t learned to at least act like our feelings didn’t matter.

I’d like to groan, and wail, and squeeze my eyes shut when I sing a particularly meaningful chorus. And I’d like to do all those things without worrying that people are making fun of me for it, even though they will be.

We have so little time to engage with the art that our fellow humans have created, and of course nobody is obligated to like all of it. But to decide that someone’s work has no merit because that person is drunk, or sick, or unhappy, that is a judgment call that none of us should feel qualified to make.

And yet we were changing, and we knew it, and we could look at our mothers and sisters and think, That’s coming for me, too.

That was the game: to feel womanly. To put on all the same ridiculous feather boas and fascinator hats that had always filled our dress-up trunks, but have them look real on us.

We painted our eyelids blue and our mouths pink. We stuffed our training bras with tissues and socks. Unable to be women yet, we built woman-golems from ourselves, fearsome and ugly.

I am tempted, constantly, by dessert, which does little to sustain my body but does wonders for my soul.

I imagine men receiving a menu with me on it, and shutting that menu after the most cursory glance: No, thank you, it’s very tempting, but I couldn’t possibly.

I was content to let my skin be dessert because I hadn’t yet learned about the ways a woman might torch the crème brûlée of her psyche until she was barely recognizable as human.

I’m not going to be an intoxicating beauty in fifteen years. Other women have the patience for that sort of upkeep, but I freely admit that my plan is to let it all go to hell. Where will it go when it’s gone? What will this body be when the last licks of caramelized sugar have been swallowed off its surface?

I believed I’d outgrown dessert and didn’t yet realize that as a woman, my ideal role was to be dessert forever, unnecessary but so delicious that one couldn’t help but desire it.

I remember all the men who have ever appreciated my body and, more pointedly, all the men who have failed to,

I don’t want to work so hard for an only occasionally appreciative audience, especially when that audience comprises men I’m attracted to—a demographic that is historically not worth making any special effort for.

When my first boyfriend dumped me, I figured I’d learned how to keep the next one around forever. And I figured it after every instance of a man’s cruelty or disrespect: that I’d learned what to do differently.

Now I am grown myself, no longer enough of a fool to believe that I’m done becoming, but enough of a fool to believe that the worst is over.

men remind me that they will always think of me as the dessert they consume when they’re really too stuffed to eat another bite.

now that I am no tea cake at all but something heavier and more sinister, something with Valrhona and no flour.

I pass through men’s lives like the taste of cherry kirsch syrup down the throat. What would I do if I were something meaty and substantive? Grow old with somebody I met in high school, like I once believed I would? Miss out on all this? I’d sooner miss out on the sun.

It’s amazing to look back on my girlhood and remember how tormented I was over my inability to fit in.

I must have understood on some level that I couldn’t change the behavior of the girls who despised me for my glasses and braces and asthmatic wheeze and, it must be said, pronounced teacher’s pet tendencies. But changing what I wore while they mocked me, that was easy.

I thought about listening to the CD, nodding my head to the music, and when someone inevitably asked me what I was listening to, I would say, “The Sex Pistols. My friend Big Joe burned it for me.”

If you shop at Hot Topic, it has to be because you love the punk music, not because you want to look cool and stylish. And if you love the music, the cool stylishness will follow, whereas if you buy seventy-five-dollar rockabilly dresses like a tryhard bimbo, that’s all you’ll ever be.

You’d think that my own lifelong torment at the hands of judgmental jerks would have softened me, but I was perhaps the most judgmental jerk of all once I learned the rules. My years as a victim were like a stay in the stocks. I emerged, rubbed my wrists, cracked my neck, and learned nothing (except, of course, about how to victimize others in the same way).

The first few months of college were as refreshing for me as for any teenager whose libido and liver are strong.

We are all equally people, crammed full of the same wretchedness and chugging the same daily poison.

I remember the man my father was before he realized that his life was really over, after all his decades of wrecking himself in the hopes that he could make his life be over.

It’s an unfashionable thing to believe, out of touch, too romantic, but I still think that you know it right away when you meet the love of your life. A curtain lifts and floods your dim brain with daylight; something simply changes.

I challenge anybody to continue deifying women after even one episode of America’s Next Top Model.

They were life, in all its pain and ugliness and joy.

For all the tiresome gender essentialism that leads people to mock girls for the obnoxious way they scream, nobody seems to acknowledge that a screaming girl knows exactly how annoying she’s being.

For a girl, a scream is a potent reclamation of space that cannot be claimed any other way. Everybody wants to sidle up to a pretty young girl all the time unless she’s screaming.

We still make each other laugh until tears stream out of our eyes. We still share clothes and jewelry. When we’re out together, strangers still ask if we’re sisters, responding less to our vague physical resemblance than to the absolute sameness of our behavior. And we still blink up at them with our identical fishbowl eyes like we’ve always done and tell them yes, we are sisters, good catch.

I’m a simple woman, and if I see a backless dress or a cobra armband squeezing an arm of tan velvet, I’ll follow it to the ends of the earth.

you could tell just by looking at him that he’d already had a DUI. He had the same bags under his eyes that my father had only just begun to develop after forty years of heavy smoking. He was, in a word, perfect.

More thrilling than the sex itself was the act of molding myself into a sex object for him, which was a pleasure that I could drag out all day, unlike our frantic scrabbling in closets and on vacant, overgrown lots. I could turn myself into a perfect sex object.

whether art or sex: sometimes, if you can’t force a deeper meaning onto the thing, it means there simply isn’t one available. A bad movie can be just bad. An unkind lover can be just unkind.

I still loved Luis, in my way, and he still loved me; he remembered every detail of me, for me, because I’d lost so many of them myself.

Doomed love is always closely attended by hope.

Years later, I still prefer to look back on my marriage as a period of evil that descended upon me, to look at my husband as a hypercontrolling puppet master.

People are generally uneasy around their own emotions, and writers in particular cope with this by introducing a level of intellectual distance that actually makes feelings uneasier—squirmier, crueler, never allowed to just exist but always analyzed and turned into content.

And if you can’t love the poetics of loving, failing, itching, abjection, yearning, beating your chest, kissing your girlfriend, starving, fleeing, bawling, Motorcycle—if you can’t love every open wound on the skin of humanity—then, my God, what do you love?