What She's Looking For

First Thoughts

There's a kind of a homophobic, misogynistic stereotype I'm used to seeing in media that nobility or elites or what-have-you are inherently effete, unmanly (derogatory), etc. Another version of it is the Lavender Scare. Another would be Article 121 in the USSR targeting "deviant behavior" and "Western Degeneracy." I'm having a hard time grasping at specific artistic incidences that don't involve vampires, so hopefully this doen't seem like lunacy.

A few examples that do come to mind for me include Interview with a Vampire, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a lot of what's been written about the Bloomsbury Group (I love The Price of Peace and Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, but there's a sort of a historical voyeurism, it seems like, in those books. Maybe one born out of the overlap between a modern setting and a view on queer acts that isn't as culturally tied to the US Equal Protection Clause -- a lot of the romanticism of upper-class old-timey queer Brits seems like it has more to do with what legal strategies needed to do in America later to pry rights out of an obviously disinterested-or-opposed Constitutional order), and a lot of the casual discourse around union members. That last is more of a photonegative of the attitudes on aristocrats though.

Actual union members (in the USA) are likely to be in the Northeast, likely to be urbanites, fairly likely to be in the SEIU (service employees) or the CWA (communications) or the CWG (campaign workers; a small but naturally vocal union) or the OPEIU (office workers). The union members in people's heads are Shawn O'Brien at worst, Sean Fain at best. Actual union members are slightly more likely to be men, but only slightly and it varies union by union, naturally. Broaden that to the wider working class and, well, plenty of working class people are women. Maybe even most, I couldn't say.

What I'm getting at is, Dorley presents a more interesting inversion than the vaguely red-brown impression you get even in left-leaning circles of the working class. It's aristocrats who are in some sense providing the unhealthy background-radiation that Bea mentioned back in "The Sense God Gave Her." And to whom Stef and Aaron are self-consciously opposed. Aristocrats are the ones pushing curdled masculinity on young men and preventing them from being women. That comes out of, I suppose, the idea that a revolution in roles is a prerequisite for a broader revolution. It all hangs together with the novelty of a Soviet hotel worker offering you a cigarette in the 1920s, to almost-attribute a Vincent Sheean story I can't dig up currently.

As I read this, perhaps because Stef is as close to an audience proxy as I have, it's clear that this is a book almost as much, and as consciously, about solidarity and class as it is gender. Which is a real breath of fresh air to be honest, because a lot of contemporary stories that express this kind of stuff (cough Radium Girls cough) are so ham-fisted that it makes me want to join the Pinkertons.

I don't know that Greaves is doing anything entirely novel, per se, but she's sketching out a kind of compelling implicit gender-class narrative as a tool of political persuasion. People who bump into me on Bluesky have probably seen me mention e.g. women in Ireland and the impact of the water pump on their freedoms. I just wouldn't have thought of Sive (audio recording) as having much to do with Dorley, when maybe it really does.

Anyway, we're in Book 2 of Dorley now, with "What She's Looking For".

Recap

Back to Normal

We get some early introspection by Stef. She's slowly coming to terms with being out around and perceived by so many women. It's also clearer and clearer that Christine isn't that far ahead of Stef in becoming; she's taking up as little space as possible with "You don't need me anymore." And she's still so hesitant to do girly stuff, I think still largely because she's afraid she'll fail, not because she doesn't want to.

Aaron is pretty quickly reforming, it seems like to me, to be honest. Good job, Stef. Anyway, Aaron's showing a lot of care for Stef, and it's heartwarming to see this little dick-gremlin learn to be a human being alongside Stef learning not to be a shell of a person.

I think they hunt us for sport, dude.

Aaron's not making that wild an assertion here. And then Stef makes the immediate (to my eyes) misstep of telling Aaron that some of the wardens were inmates. When Aaron starts getting tits in earnest, is he not going to lose his mind even more? Maybe not, maybe Stef's just easing the path, but it certainly seems like a complication down the road.

The Water Kissing your Skin

Getting out over my skis for a minute, I suspect that Aaron's physical delight here is very much coming from a transfeminine perspective? Like, if the "right music" were playing, to use Stef's metaphor from a prior chapter I think. So, I don't know. There's definitely a strand of "womanhood is a cure for manhood" in this story. And that's fine so far as it goes; I'm a little bit skeptical that Aaron would feel better with a different chemical makeup than he's used to. That's me being a boring buzz-kill though, it's not really what that shower is about.

Aaron's arm injury, and telling Stef about it, takes both of them learning to be more vulnerable. Aaron has to be honest enough to be taken honestly, and to reveal an actual physical injury. Stef has to be vulnerable to take Aaron honestly.

And, in addition, we're getting to see the flip-side of Stef's self-harm in the showers from last book. Water can hurt, water can soothe. It's surprising to see that Stef, a woman, was getting hurt by water and that Aaron, someone currently being coercively reassigned, is now getting soothed by it.

I wear Short Skirts / She wears T-Shirts

That's cute. Paige and Christine are still going strong, thankfully.

A woman she’ll never deserve. Best start trying harder, then.

Maybe it's less-so for women, but this attitude is, ah, bad for men to hold in my experience. I hope Christine can stop putting Paige on a pedestal and just ease into being a person over time; she's been through a really stressful period, and it seems like she's almost more interested in her own managed self-destruction at times than in getting better. Indira and Abby seem to be managing her though, and I'm glad they are; she needs it.

Anyway, we see some more of the older sisters get informed about Stef's special circumstances; more tablesetting, leavened by the soft domestic comedy of the core group of sisters we're used to seeing in the book.

Turned into Burger Meat

We learn that Declan isn't dead (at least not officially.) So, let's think.

Bea's whole speech about forcing the objectification on curdled men so that they could be given insight into the human condition implies that being washed out is nothing pleasant, but probably something that can at least be conceived of as reform.

Alternately, we know that Bea is still somewhat in-hoc to a shadowy coterie of fish-fucking aristocrats who get off on torturing people. So maybe Declan is just a plaything for near-total moral sinkholes now. Declan might be getting the Dorley Classic(tm) path currently. I still have a hard time seeing Bea go for that though, given her life to date.

Honestly I'm leaning either Ludovico Technique or human traficking currently, with "still-alive organ donor out of The Mummy" as a near third.

Quick Question

Monica taps her phone again and the TV moves on to a photograph of a woman with bright red hair and glasses — Stefan recognises her from any number of insulting memes — with the caption, You Have Been Lied To.

Huh? This is almost un-searchable context; I think it's an IYKYK situation and I do not know. So, if someone wants to fill me in on the implication, thanks!

Coercively Reassigned Female

Stef has Christine and Paige over while Aaron, who's been spending a lot of time with Stef (to seemingly very prosocial effect) tries to jork it in his room. It's kind of an established trait for Stef that she's really uncomfortable being seen by women; we get some more of that here.

Being Around Women

This seems like as good a time as any to mention, that's maybe the most surprising difference to hear/read about for me. I'm sure it's not universal just like my liking being around women isn't universal for cis-het-men. Some things that I learn about trans women are totally out of my initial context, some are common experiences or easy to empathize with once it hits my brain at the correct angle. We're all people, there's going to be a lot of overlap in the human condition. But this still surprises me! I get it in-concept, I think; Stef explains it really well as the discomfort of internal-comparison and the fear of outside-comparison. It's just funny to me how much I cannot relate at all to that. Like, not among men, not among women, I just full on don't have that experience to draw on.

Quite a Relief

I worked it all out, once we started developing our new secondary sex characteristics. The logical next steps. The likelihood of escape. Weighed next to how much I’d liked my life up to that point — not that much — it made sense to acquiesce.

That's Paige, on figuring out Dorley. I've mentioned before, thinking of Christine and Stef as intergenerational counterparts. And my instinct is that Paige and Aaron might have at least this attitude in common. Not to be too matchy-matchy about it.

Aaron's Dick Sitch

anyway, long story short, I touched my nipple and I came in my pants

Aaron's capacity to whip it repeatedly has been diminished lately, and that has had him worried. He's gone days with no signs of life. And then, he gets a bit frisky and kabang. He's certainly aware of what's going on with his body on some level at this point; presumably all the boys in the basement are at this juncture.

What I find astonishing about this passage are a few things:

• Aaron's pretty weird and/or offputting just generally. He constantly talks about his dick, exposes himself, etc. to Stef. He's sent his unwanted dick picks to women. But even adjusting for that, I cannot imagine telling someone about that if it happened to me. That's an unusual degree of openness between two (to Aaron's knowledge) men who are friends. Maybe it's just esprit de corps between kidnapping victims, maybe Aaron's 10 minutes from knowing what's going on in Dorley, maybe both.
• Prior to that quotation, Aaron shows some new self-awareness. "[P]lease stop me if this is too much information" is basically the antithesis of why he's even in the basement.
• From Aaron's genuine distress over "After Floppy", I'm guessing that the Before-Floppy period actually happened, counter to my thoughts earlier in a prior post.

The whole thing sounds pretty disconcerting to be honest? Nobody's dick has worked just how they want 100% of the time (unwanted erections, paralyzing nervousness, horrible running-induced chafing, whatever: take your pick). For it to just start acting up (or not acting up as the case was) and then acting very differently, I'd guess that to be kind of confidence-shaking in a profound way. Or, for a man anyway. Probably not if you're a woman. This gets into the zone of "stuff that Dudely Hall is ill-equipped to handle," more likely than not and I, as a gentleman, shall recognize discretion as the better part of valor and cease this line of inquiry.

This is really of a kind with something someone mentioned on bluesky about how cis guys react to (crosses legs) orchies. I must admit against interest that I wrote this part of the recap first.

Errant Thoughts

Generational Turnover

It's, interesting to see Stef showing so much compassion towards her fellow recruits, when she, by rights, should share less with them than her captors do. It gives a little more credance to the difference between AFABasement and trans that the book has explored lightly so far. It makes sense, works within Greaves' style, if there's an extra layer of sympathy that Stef can have for the boys in the basement since she was "prosocially" (scariest quotes you can imagine) mutilated during her own early puberty and shuttled into cavemanmaxxing. That also reinforces, for me anyway, the socialist bent the text is taking on. I'm fully aware that might just be my own weird politics stuff working itself out, but I think it's at least fertile soil for the reader.

But when Stef idly mentions couping Bea to Christine and Paige, it's a radically charitable act for someone like her among people like the other recruits. I'm under no misapprehension she's serious, there. Just that she even gives a breath for these men is pretty shocking. And her solidarity is kind of lightly infectious to the other women; Christine later jokes that if Stef were to suffer any terrible consequences, Bea would face a political problem. Just jokes and all, but Bea's core of "reform" as a motive is a really interesting institutional seed to have planted in a torture dungeon. I don't think we'll get e.g. Dorley 2080: IN SPACE ever, but you can imagine an institution growing out of ruinous human catastrophe into something positive in the world. Or, if you can't you should probably get that checked out, you may have a bad bout of the morbs.

Mean Girls

I remembered because Stef and Aaron were going to watch Desperately Seeking Susan: everyone in my year of high school saw Mean Girls. I guess it's old now, but at the time, just, everyone knew that movie, at least in my school.

Also, we used to have a shit-ton of "chick flicks" and it was a lot better. I feel like Someone Great is the last one I saw and remember? But don't forget what they took from you. Sleeping with Other People came out in 2015, rules. Honestly romcoms got really good before they died out. I suppose that's survivor bias in action, or just dedication to the form by whoever was making them, or even just painting the frame of the canvas to make something new. But I do miss a low-stakes movie with a beautiful kitchen.

A Quick Heads Up About URLs

I don't know if this will matter to anyone in practice; I think most everyone who reads this follows the blog-handle on Bluesky. But in case, I'm planning on moving over hosting off of vercel and onto my hobby cluster soon, so keep an eye out, I guess?