The Eighties Sucked, Huh?

I'm a dang-ass freak, because my reaction finishing this chapter is basically 50/50 "yum yum more popcorn snack book for me!" and "aww shit, here we go again."

The Horrors of Old Dorley are almost so extremely bad that they just slide off of the front of my skull? I like, can't really imagine them in any kind of serious way. Just, a level of personalized mechanized horror that I find literally incomprehensible.

So, reading that it's more a case of "what is Greaves doing here?" for me than it is a case of real character-empathy. Call it a reader deficiency, it's just how I experienced those sections.

And then, the rest of the chapter is by and large a combination of flavors that taste great and taste great together. Setup for new plot-lines, The Little Mermaid film-selection lore, the promise of seeing how Shahida and Melissa's childhood friends ended up, &c.

Thus, road dawgs, we summit our second peak, "The One That Got Away". Interesting chapter name. I might be overly-close-reading but isn't it often "the one who got away?"

Dorley, especially Old Dorley, deals in objectification, so that makes a ton of sense for a chapter about Val.

Oopsie Woopsie

Left a TODO in here earlier from a past draft. Gone now.

Recap

1985-03-20

Fucking England.

Indeed. I'm assuming this is Bea, just from the timeline, but I could be wrong (I was wrong/misremembering her dead-name, it's Val.)

You know what? This is going to be controversial. But I think that disappearing men for their own plausible reform is better than murdering immigrants' parents and torturing them solely for the fun of it.

Her voice, guttural and deep, saturated with the unthinking arrogance of the English upper classes and their retinue.

I love how much of a hater Alyson can be. A real commitment to that bitter little seed is so rare once you're mediating and writing and even talking. That sounds sarcastic, but it isn't; mad respect. So far as I can tell, hating everyone in the British ruling class has been morally necessary since whenever the Bloomsbury Group stopped being relevant in international affairs.

Barbier.

Paris.

Some kind of a clue. Do we know anyone French? Anyway, don't let the bastards get you down, ma soeur.

2019-12-12

[A]ll reminders that Shahida's locked into a place she doesn't belong, where the motives of her hosts are something she has to take on trust, where someone's always watching.

Dipping back into the "Dorley-trans-but-cis" well for a second, and, yeah, that's bad. People who are suspicious of your every motive and who find your very nature grounds for that suspicion shouldn't be your de facto jailers and keepers.

Cheap OTC HRT with detailed, Wikipedia-simple-English documentation, seems like at least one small solution? Just, give people an out from that part of the panopticon. Does anyone do that already? I mean, doctors are good. I am glad I have my endocrinologist naturally. But, maybe we just start doing hormones-by-mail or what-have you (again, unless that's already a thing, in which case, good for them.) Just to see if nothing bad happens. Which, like, it won't. Probably like, one weird thing happens alongside a gentle lowering influence on deaths of despair, right?

This place is unbelievably weird. You're allowed to be freaked out.

Ayup.

Is head voice the same as falsetto or is that only in the context of choral music?

The social web at the heart of Dorley is really something. Greaves doesn't put too fine a point on it or anything, she just always has one more loose thread from every person.

Again, I don't think Melissa made an idiot out of herself. What Dorley is basically demands that she did what she did; she was just being a good sister.

Shahida's right: this is basically a good outcome given the setup.

I also met some of their girlfriends, and then one of those girlfriends, an extremely determined young thing who swears she only found out about this place a fortnight ago, stridently defended the very concept of therapeutic kidnapping.

Lorna really did do a 180 on this whole thing. I still sincerely clutch my pearls if I consider The Horrors at all. And, hey, it's good fiction but also maybe a sign that I'm more of a radlib than even a proper social democrat in my heart of hearts. The individuals, you see, they're having their rights trampled.

Except Victoria, Lorna, Paige and Tabitha all argued quite persuasively that, in their collective opinion and regarding the inhabitants and graduates of the Hall, there is not.

Well, they would, they're in the violent rebel organization already. FARC may have been trafficking in cocaine and abusing farmers, but they were doing it for the vanguard of the proletariat.

She found herself liking Paige a lot.

Well, yeah.

ROGB

My eyebrows furrow. Awfully close to "RCBG" there aren't we. Is the increasingly popular e-sports recap blog named after a scramble of "ROGB", or is that a coincidence? (Will I ever actually read RCBG? I dunno, it's probably funnier for me to have no idea what it's about.) There are cathedrals everywhere etc. etc.

Secrets are, in fact, No Fun

Melissa denied herself so much socially during her life to date. It's really cool structurally that we saw so little of her perspective until the denouement. She was wrapped in secrets; we didn't get to discover her until they all unraveled.

1986-02-14

Failed attempt to get at Karen's carotid artery with a shard of broken glass.

Bet they'll go to plastic utensils after that one.

Except he's not much like him any more, either.

That's an interesting sentence.

I don't really understand Old Dorley. The current regime is still a moral sinkhole that runs, wobbling, fueled by willful ignorance and ideological wallpaper, but the older version seems like it's just self-consciously evil.

The 1980s vignettes are still a really interesting exploration in the specific culture of the second version. That sense of death-of-the-past-self that keeps coming up, not always cleanly (compare/contrast Christine, Melissa.) Naturally different people must feel very different ways about it, but survivor bias applies to readers for long-running series as well, so maybe that's a common way of feeling for Dorley's audience?

It makes sense even outside the context of changes as significant as transitioning; I look at who I was as a boy and have a very tenuous hold on the sense that that was me, sometimes. Things happen, you move places, you age, your context changes. For people prone to feeling that sense of self-separation that must only be exacerbated by being trans.

[T]he interested indifference of one who planned to age into his looks.

On the one hand, thinking all the other Dorley girls are beautiful but you is the surest sign of a Dorley girl. On the other hand, that is a real thing for guys. My face finally lost its baby fat a few years ago and I gotta say, going a little gray, getting a little drawn, and getting a little wrinkly have all been significant upgrades from where I'm standing.

But while he is down here, he is your responsibility.

I don't feel like I've climbed out on any particularly spooky-to-me limbs lately, but here goes. The way that the Current Regime evolved out of an even darker place is a fable for the development of contemporary trans cultures in part, right? Like, fighting to self-define vs be defined by, fighting for external acknowledgement of trans womanhood as womanhood, that's kind of same-shaped as what we see in Old Dorley. And I guess by the same token, Old Dorley still stretches to present day and fucks with the Current Regime.

2019-12-13

You want dick pics? I’ve got twenty!

The Holt Thing is becoming a Holt Person, but is still a Holt Noun.

She’s not a girl through adaptation, like Maria or Monica or the other women here; she’s a girl because she’s always been one.

Sometimes the more reasonably Aaron thinks, the more annoyed with him (any minute now that'll change) I get. Just, fuck's sake, how could Aaron have acted as he did outside while knowing that people were people?

Aaron had been forced to undergo Indira’s tender ministrations, and face up to the ugly implications of his own grim satisfaction at seeing Maria hurt. Not something a good man would enjoy.

Aaron is papering over some horrors there, which seems to be a continuing load-bearing component of Dorley Hall (whomst among us, though, to be fair).

It's the choice and he made it.

Proud of Aaron here. I'm glad he sees the alternative "girl-shaped hole", and I continue to wonder how many girl-shaped holes Dorley produces?

1986-09-09

Greaves, picking dates designed not to confuse Americans who write them out in standard formats, is a hero.

She’s beaten Dorothy’s much-vaunted timetable by half a year. She can almost see the bitches getting desperate.

I'm not sure I quite grasp this timetable concept. Is it just that she hasn't been broken spiritually? That's the main thing for them? Again I'm reminded about Alan Turing's fate, which is only tangentially relevant at best.

Very Sloppy Historiography

So, I pulled up Wikipedia to try get a sense of if there was any huge regime-change in treatment of trans people in the 20th c. Among other, more relevant, details, I wonder if Bea's named after Beatrice the Sixteenth?

But anyway, and sorry for splashing my ignorance on a subject the reader presumably knows more about, it looks like I wasn't that far off for thinking of Turing, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 and the mid-1960s when a gender clinic opened up might be bookends for what the fuck is going on in Dorley 1?

That's pretty sloppy reading on my part, so let me road-sign that I'm open to ripping up and rewriting the above paragraphs; if you send me a thing to read that better explains the historical context in analogy, I'll do that and link it.

Back to the Ancient Regime

[T]here’s a block, something he can’t get past, that’s preventing him from adapting the way she has.

Interesting. We haven't spent a lot of time on the recruits who can't make the change.

Also this is as good a time as any to highlight just how strapped for people modern Dorley is, that they would bring Karen back.

[S]he misses her former self so much that sometimes she thinks she can hear him, scratching at the edge of her consciousness, trying to break back in.

There's surely something to this that I'm just not getting. It seems like cutting away the manhood at the level of their souls, for lack of a better term, would be the ultimate victory for Dorothy and Karen. These girls are disposable, and will be disposed of. Isn't it better to annihilate them fully, if the goal is to enjoy their annihilation? Just in terms of Dorothy and Karen's perspectives, naturally.

A Little While Later

Old Dorley was creating dysphoria for fun, and thinking back to "Everything Must Go", one of the things that struck me was how Melissa's dead-name was so painful for her to hear even before she transitioned.

She’s still not clear on exactly why he doesn’t like his name — neither’s he, seemingly — but she takes care not to use it anyway.

So, the name thing has to do with the victims' degraded identities? Val being called by a boy's name in the body of a woman is, I guess an inverted sort of closet? An armoire?

Yeah, I still don't think I get what Greaves is doing there. That's okay. Maybe it highlights that it's a choice ultimately? If they were assigned girl names it'd be a lot harder to argue that there was a core of womanhood for them the whole time because the moment of choosing would be an even more interior one.

2019-12-13

Melissa gets ready for the morning, Shahida wakes up. They slept adjacent but they did not sleep together. There is a tension between them, naturally.

Shahida keeps a little secret of her own, about how much sleep she's lost to Melissa's presumed death. That said, it's pretty legible to someone paying attention I'm sure. Whether Melissa is, who knows. She had a busy day yesterday.

Shahida resorts to the banal.

That's a shame. She should tell Melissa, of course she should. Melissa could probably use a reminder that she matters to people like that.

Then why are you dressed and ready at eight in the morning?

I shake my head, eyes downcast. Another character in a book, lost to waking up at an objectively late hour. Maybe if these people would wake up in time to be out and about by 6AM, they wouldn't all end up kidnapped and they could've already built Dorley 3: the Cuddly Medical Spa, you ever think about that, Shahida?

God, my kid slept so poorly last night. I had a blood sugar thing to deal with in the middle of the night too, just, I feel like my stomach is lined with steel wool this morning. Fucking woof (road-dawgz, my tummy hurts).

Anyway, 8 is too late in the fast-lane take-some-prisoners world of Dorley Hall, and Faye drops in. This is why you wake up early; so you can collect yourself before the children need you.

Maybe this place got better. I want it to be better, and my intake was a long time ago. Maybe the sponsors are just better at it now. I hope so.

There's a deeper discussion to be had about that specific kind of wanting, but at minimum it's really funny putting that sentiment next to day-old croissants and instant-coffee because the machines are all broken. In the rest of her monologue, Melissa wants something concrete for, maybe not the first time but close to it? She wanted to free Steph before she knew the details, but otherwise we've seen her be unhappy without a lot of clear recourse. So, desiring friends, family, and connection feels like an important step for her.

It’s actually weird how normal this place feels. Ignoring the locks and the silly mugs and what I know is going on in the basement.

Oh hey, Shahida's reading Dorley too.

Rachel starts messaging Shahida, because of course you read the dead-woman's switch email. It's inconceivable not to do so.

Em&Em has joined the chat! Em&Em has changed his name to Melissa. Melissa has changed her pronouns to she/her.

Very economical bit of communication there. Gotta hand it to Greaves again for having characters tell people things. This would be a half-novel-long arc in plenty of books, call it the Dragon Ball Z-ification of novels.

Suspenseful breakfast waiting ensues.

1987-01-22

He used it like it was important to him.

I guess it is, for the core transphobic project? Like, the whole thing of it is calling a woman a man or visa versa, even as it's increasingly obviously not true.

The line "the boy she buried" perplexes me a little bit. The whole structure of Old Dorley does, honestly. Like, sure, obviously evil, but there's a puzzle box in why any of these people are doing this that I'm more or less just rattling around currently. New Dorley makes more sense to me at least; there's some coercive baggage keeping the place funded, some trauma recurring and mutating over intakes, and yes some genuine reform. But the original is real vampire stuff.

Anyway, Val and Dee have formulated a contingent plan to escape at the moment of most danger.

2019-12-13

Shahida hasn't been swimming in ages.

I might need to refine my theory on the water motif.

Melissa, it turns out, ..., hasn't been swimming in more than seven years.

Maybe it's more community than femininity, and if a woman is suppressing her femininity (or having it suppressed) that blocks the avenues for community? Maybe it's just plain sisterhood? Or maybe it's a novel, and there's not a 1:1 mapping from events to broader semantic frameworks, because it's a novel.

She giggles. She’s going to forgive him. She’s going to forgive herself.

Am I going to link "The New Gender Synthesis" again, Ma'am?

Elle Lambert meet Christine Hale, presumably your next project. Chrstine Hale, meet Peckinville security compromise, presumably our next plot hook.

2005-10-07

In which Val becomes eventual cog in the machine, some kind of handmaiden to Smyth-Farrow, whose predations and predilections are still baffling.

Reminded narrowly again of "Mask of the Red Death Capitalism" from Minstry for the Future.

Interested in seeing Dorothy arrive at Val's doorstep. Baffled that there isn't so much as a telephone to be had in 3 weeks.

2019-12-13

Can anyone tell me how to disarm taser-wielding blonde women?

Indira running a blameless post-mortem on recent events while the gang run out of groceries is hilarious. The Sisterhood start thawing Stew from a Deep Freezer, and that's always a sign of how your day is going. Dorley Hall's food provisioning has been a little herky-jerky, this chapter and earlier, what with various leftover pizzas, day-old croissants, etc. These are growing girls and they need their vitamins, so I hope the sponsors get a recurring grocery drop-off together.

Over lunch the Sisters recount their worst horrors and Melissa and Shahida return from the pool.

As they talk, the name "Stef" returns to the text. That seems significant, especially since other characters are still calling her "Steph."

Maybe it's an earlier-in-life context, and a comfortable one with Melissa, so she's falling into that earlier identity. Maybe she was just trying it out and she'll go back to the name drawing board.

When Stef thinks in-depth about Pippa, I realize that I might need to pay more attention to Pippa as a reader; she's clearly an important character but I couldn't have recognized "Rani" out of context or described her as lonely.

Having Will back in the basement should prove interesting.

Speaking of,

Just remember, we’re very powerful, we have friends in high places, we can ruin you with a stroke of a pen, and so on and so forth.

I wonder what Ollie's up to these days in the tube-zone. Hopefully not still going through that, I don't know if the Dorley health package includes new teeth.

And then we return to The Little Mermaid.

Who are your little eels? Is one of them Edy?

I know they're supposed to end up sisters but seems very maternal to me. Aaron's room needs to be exercised I'm sure. It must smell, just, atrocious at this stage. They don't enforce any deep-cleanings in the basement do they? Oh God. Oh God it must be so bad. And bringing food in there? No. No, no.

You should have told me, but I know why you didn't. And last night I was all, I can’t be mad at her because I’m such a piece of shit and I don’t deserve the truth, and that’s not at all a productive way to think about myself.

Facts. All said and done this is a pretty speedy turnaround for a pretty difficult situation, just, generally speaking, regardless of recent attempts, romantic flailing, torture dungeons, and cases of Stockholm syndrome.

This whole scene, Aaron seems to have turned a corner. Historically, when I predict anything about Aaron, I am wrong. So, I won't. But he's acting a lot more like a normal person in this chapter than he has to date, and that is a seemingly positive development.

You can’t deny you’ve hurt someone when you’ve fucking hit them, you know? But you can do it if all you’ve done is pushed yourself into her life, made her feel a bit less safe, made yourself into someone, something she has to worry about.

So maybe I'm a little bit Dorley-pilled. This kind of moral brokenness does need a pretty significant correction. Carcerality, torture, seizure of bio-autonomy, and forced-enlistment aside, a couple months' boot camp to iron out these bugs in the brain has done wonders for Aaron.

There's something easy about it, too.

This paragraph is a funny little bit of meta-exposition about why Dorley is such a pitch to people.

And it’s not like girls are worse than guys, either. Weaker or whatever. I’ve never thought that. Even if I pretended to.

I don't know how honestly to take this. His resistance earlier on was explicitly predicated on that worry, but that doesn't mean that the worry was real. All the same, that's where his mind went, so he must have believed it on some level, because he wasn't scheming about it or anything. In any case, for some of the characters in Dorley (like Christine, for example,) some self-separation, self-deception &c., are a useful step. "It wasn't me who did those things, it was the before/him." And if Aaron needs the ironic distance, he should take it.

And now we get the point of The Little Mermaid. Maria was the crab.

2019-12-14

Again we read over Val's shoulder, this time in the contemporary day.

The wages of sin is shitty skin.

I can't believe she's still trapped, that's mind-destroying.

She’ll have been castrated, kept without food and with very little water until all fat has dissolved and all muscle has wasted away, and then put on a high estrogen dose, to encourage development in the 'right' places.

So, not to be too much of a hater, but the Weetabix-to-Frootloops pipeline in New Dorley is the softer, gentler version of this right? Year one, "Wheat on wheat", year two, "Croissants", the bread that is butter?

Brief moment of lucidity and introspection: I really do fixate about the food and feeding in Dorley. That's probably worth, considering, in like, how I think about food in general.

Ah, Declan. Washed out. The washouts got burried by Val until this one? Where'd the last year's go? I have so many questions.

Errant Thoughts

Book Two!

That really sneaked up on me! I figured we were a half-dozen chapters out from the end until last chapter had so much happen, and then this chapter we got so much of the 1980s.

I've been slow-cooking a few thoughts so I'll do my best to do a coherent book-2 review next week. My snapshot is that, "Everything Must Go" is a secretly future-canonical standalone piece of fiction, and Secrets on the whole is good, but probably less elucidating than Welcome to Dorley Hall for a cis reader. I only sort of get what it means to a trans reader, even accounting for the differences-in-qualia from Welcome. There's just so much social context to which I don't have intuitive access.

I'm really excited to watch the dynamic of Val and Declan that I assume we'll get in the upcoming book: an alternate outcome of New Dorley with an inherently less-sane brand of psychic healing.

Into the Manosphere

This is only related to Dorley in that for the first time I have a former friend who I think maybe should have been Dorleyed.

When I knew him, he was a really earnest music performance student who was a little bit unsettling at times. He put too much oomph on little acts of friendship like "watching a TV show as it aired" (they used to only air TV shows at a specific, predetermined time, like in sports.)

He would wear too-formal clothes a lot of the time (imagine, "you see, this is a car coat, whereas you are wearing a pea coat, like a parvenu would do", that sort of thing. He wasn't actually that cutting, he was more just really into more-formal clothes than most college kids.)

Stuff like that.

He complained a lot about his haplessness with women (red flag, but it was college, lots of people complained about their haplessness with women in college.) And that was true, but also, my mans had no game and consistently crushed on women who were not going to be interested in his brand of weird little guy. Just, as a rule, the lacrosse/sorority girl with Peace Corps plans does not want to hear about the fact that your loafers are not penny loafers, they're actually horsebit loafers. Why are you wearing loafers, this is a postpunk show and party in the basement of a shithole apartment complex?

Lately he's:

• Moved to Austin, Texas (concerned hmm)
• Gotten really into crypto (wouldn't become friends with someone who does that, would stay friends)
• Started talking about how men only care about women as romantic-sexual creatures, but to attract a woman you need to have a career, be super swole, &c. (dialing Christine to get an international flight to St. Almsworth)

And, that's it. His masculinity? It curdled. I know a guy whose masculinity went sour in real time now. As opposed to brutish would-be authoritarians and has-beens (hi dad!) who never had a good head on their shoulders in the first place.

The opposite exists too, and that's who I have more experience. On some measures, I am that opposite (dorkus->fuckboy->normal man is probably the accurate summation of my life, all things considered?) I've mentioned some of my semi-shithead friends in the past and they all evened out as they got older. They didn't graduate from dipshit to menace, they became the kind of guys who ask about people's hobbies and don't try to fuck everything that moves.

And I dunno. Maybe it's just easy to fit into some grooves for some men and not for others. I think about this kind of high-strung, but sharp-dressed, intense, funny guy I used to know. A conscientious young man. And he had an easy path right in front of him if he wanted to take it, is how I'm tempted to feel. He could have just, acted a little more relaxed, or accepted that he was going to have a different kind of social circle. There are other people like he was. He just didn't like those people.

And I have to ask, what part of that could have changed, really? It's so easy to think that he just didn't meet the right person or the right people. And it's also such bullshit; he had more access and affordances to make his life than almost anyone.

Reading Dorley, and hearing about how he's ended up so far, it's very clear that the, ah, "socialized non-intrinsic foundation of manhood", to paraphrase, has not been serving him very well. I can see it in the way he mutated over time maybe. From the Mad Men/How I Met Your Mother era (two shows that are kind of mirrors to one another I guess, one of which is good,) to this dumbshit cyberpunk-rancher-core period in mainstream manhood as a grift. The guy is just totally untethered and trying to play along with the orchestra.

Anyway, I know this isn't really a Dorley thing, but I'm having some more of semiliterate gender thoughts and they relate at least in theme.

God, it just rattles me, about this guy, because when we stopped being close, he was mad at me for, basically being a liberal (as opposed to a commie,) and for being "kind of a bad person" (I think that was harsh, but sure; I worked in finance and I volunteered a ton for the Clinton campaign at the time -- if you were a communist in 2016 America I was imminently hate-able. Probably still am.)

As far as I can tell, he just got radicalized by YouTube and podcasts, but as a grown ass man. That's not supposed to happen to people who went to elite universities for arts degrees. Or people with deeply ingrained socialist beliefs. Or decent people. What the fuck happened?

I think if there were a local branch of Dorley, he'd have at least been under observation as a student, though. Hindsight is 20/20, and There Were Signs that he'd end up going full shithead.

And/but here I am making excuses and/or advocating for gender conversion therapy, both of which are traditionally frowned upon in polite society. He's not closeted, he's just a shithead, in all likelihood.