Welcome to Dudely House

Mea Culpa

Someone warned me that one chapter per day might be a bit much, and they were correct; I am sorry that I bit off a more aggressive schedule than is actually plausible for me - I didn't know that this would be as dense or long as it is per chapter. Frankly, this is the first fictional-analytic writing I've done in about 15 years, and my brain is tired. I think I probably could find the time to read another chapter and write something, but I also think the quality would start to fall off pretty quickly --

Sometimes there's just too much meat for the grinder.

Anyway, in lieu of "some bullshit", or a schedule slip checks watch 5 posts into this project, I'm going to look at what feels like a reasonable breakpoint for the story. My Road Dogs™ will of course already know the exact contours of the plot so far, but to sum it up, Stef(an Riley) has uncovered, been abducted by, and decided to stay with the Sisters of Dorley Hall, who are an authoritarian vigilante forced-feminization cabal dedicated to the reeducation and reform of violent and socially violent young men.

First (Through Fifth) Thoughts

A Bit More About "A Machine Made of Meat"

He realises: she won’t believe him. Like Aaron. He saw someone like him, and so does she.

Deep inside, a small voice asks, Are you sure you’re not like those men? But it’s a voice Stefan’s got used to ignoring; his base assumption that nothing he believes about himself, good or bad, can possibly be legitimate. Old lies from an old liar.

I didn't take much time to talk about this line yesterday. That's a shame because it's a real knot and worth untying.

Stef has just met the other inmates, and sees himself as Pippa does, as one of them. We already know that Stef isn't like those men, along three critical dimensions.

She's not a man
She's not (socially/) violent
She wants what she believes Dorley has to offer.

That irony interlocks with the hinted-at irony of Pippa's own past; Stef as a reminder of her own sin, to be rebuked. It connects with Christine's past-and-present; Stef as an almost-victim of casual cruelty and anger.

And it indicates this really profound sense of alienation that is just, kind of a black hole. I read that Stefan thinks of Aaron, or Will, or Martin, or even Martin's victim as "normal guys," and himself as being, within a standard deviation, a normal guy too.

Stuff like the "caveman" aspect that Stef hates from the first chapter is uncivilized, barbaric, even subhuman. So when she meets these shitheels, I guess it's natural that she'd associate her discomfort with her body and her discomfort with their behaviors.

Along with alienation I see Stef as just, exhausted. In an earlier chapter, Stef squeezes her thumb to, I guess, hold back her discomfort in her body as it is. And that felt lived-in to me; I'm kind of a pukey runner, and that thumb-squeezing thing is always really useful when you're doing miles in muggy weather, or with gnats, or just on a bad stomach. It was pleasant surprise to see it in another context, and even enacting the same role as a "mind over matter" kind of a trick for one's own physical body.

I don't want to be maudlin, or overly focused on How Hard it Must Be to Be Trans™™. But Jesus H Roosevelt Christ, it sounds like sometimes it takes the kind of tricks to just be a person in the world that I'm used to using when I'm about to yartz. So when Stef talks about herself as the "same old liar", I think those words carry more than their casual reading suggests.

The First Five, Wholistically

I chose to write this post for two reasons:

A time crunch: the whole job-and-kid thing, and my degenerate stock-watching got in the way of my blundering-lit-blogging.
These five chapters feel like a prelude or even a first act.

We get to see Stef receive and accept the call to adventure and cross a threshold, in Hero's Journey terms. I'll be shocked if this ends up being a paint-by-numbers story, because Greaves is the writer, but that's a good signpost.

I'm, again, glad that we didn't spend the first 5 with Stef in the cell.
I'm glad we get to see Christine's perspective so much; I know we need Stef to be brought into any of this, and potentially as a change-agent, but Christine has so many interesting social connections and avenues to get deeper into the thicket.

I have the beginnings of a worry, and I'll be curious to see where it goes, about the presentation of what I want to call "feminine virtue" in this book.

There are a couple of references to feminization as, foremost, a guard against harm. And, in the case that all of the Dorley alumni were destined in their hearts of hearts to be women, I think that shakes out pretty well. Failing to live up to an impossible lie is an ill, and fixing that ill is a good.

But the complications around Christine's answer to whether or not she's trans point to something ultimately more complicated. Or maybe it's just another same-old-liar telling same-old lies?

In the case that Dorley is for the subjects and the broader society, the femininity is sort of instrumental to the healing and social improvement. I wonder, though, if Dorley is treating masculinity as itself an illness, versus ill men, versus people who will come to be happy that they are women.

That's not to say that the book is getting at a particularly anti-masculine message. It's surprising how much it isn't doing that, despite what seems like a pretty narrow path to that outcome.

I wonder what Melissa would be like as a sponsor, as opposed to Pippa. Greaves knew, I'm sure, when she wrote this that we'd be reading it as broken people trying to help other broken people.

A Few Uninteresting Notes

Stef and Pronouns

I'm pretty certain that deciding to stay at Dorley is a high-fidelity signal that Stef would prefer to go by she/her, so I will be moving forward with that barring any late-breaking changes. As such, I'll make a sincere effort to avoid future references to "Stefan" except where the writing would become unworkable for me, a sleep-deprived person without any special expertise in writing, and prefer "Stef". This post is going kind of transitory in that respect because Stef is so self-consciously Stefan to the others throughout the first 5 chapters.

"Eggs"

It sounds like I may have been stretching/misusing the term "closeted." I've been doing so to avoid using the term "egg", which, I'll be 100% honest, I'm still not incredibly confident isn't offensive coming from a cisgendered heterosexual man. That said, I want to strive for accuracy and clarity, so I'm probably going to use "egg" in the future when talking about, checks notes, people who currently conceive of themselves as (potentially discontented) men but who will come to conceive of themselves as women.

I am, obviously, not super-confident about that, but I think it's better than calling them closeted or using a longer construction. As I said, calling e.g. Aaron "closeted" isn't particularly respectful to the character's actual feelings nor, potentially, to any actually closeted people who might read this thing later on. If that strikes you as fucked up, lemme know and tell me what you think I ought to be doing instead; I'll probably do it.

Invited

I already said this in short a couple of days ago, but I want to reiterate how friendly people have been about this dumb blog.

Mark Johnston wrote this theological/philosophical book, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry which gets at, more or less, the problems of "sophomoric atheism" (think New Athiests) and "spiritual materialism" (think Joel Osteen or The Righteous Gemstones), but which also does some upper-cased Philosophy around the notion of "the Most High."

Aside from accurately identifying the 2 worst kinds of people in the subsequent 2 decades (reactionary atheists, grifter Christians,)Johnston does some great work trying to nail down exactly what he means when he refers to God. And, one thing he identifies as parallel to God is roughly, "the universe's capacity for self-exposure concurrent to inward-directed irony."

All of which is to say, I gotta pay the people who've taught me something about themselves so far literally the most high compliment- you've been really funny and really willing to tell me about your worlds.