Things Are Getting a Little Out of Hand

Editor's Note: After the publication of this feature, Erin Taylor announced that they now use they/them pronouns. We have updated the language here to reflect that change.

In the 1990s, I was awash in fevered, urgent writing by teenage girls from all over the United States. During high school, from my home base in suburban New Jersey, I made and traded zines with other riot grrrls and found in the process a kind of salvation. Our writing, done on parents’ typewriters or with the earliest word processing programs, dealt with peer pressure, beauty ideals, sexual assault, rape, abortion, and eating disorders. It was snotty and surly, fueled by fury and boredom, shame and pride—or at least the desire to feel pride. We were young and insecure, choking on new social expectations and discovering the raw, sometimes terrifying, power of becoming sex objects.

We fancied ourselves revolutionary, but instead we got an early lesson in Adorno’s theory of the culture industry. Our rebellion was swiftly co-opted. It scarcely stood a chance against the machinery of capitalism, which handily absorbed our dissent and sold it back to us, pirating even our aesthetic, the crooked collages and mottled typewriter font of our zines, which became visual motifs of the era of corporate Girl Power that followed. (From there, it was but a hop, skip, and a jump to today’s treacherous girlboss.)

Bimboland (Archway Editions, 2021), the debut collection from poet, journalist, editor, and former sex worker Erin Taylor, recalls those early riot grrrl dispatches. It reads like the diary of someone coming into full awareness of what can broadly be termed the "female predicament": its complexity and the speaker's own complicity, the thrill of commanding desire and the weariness of living with the pervasive threat of violence. Courting transactional intimacies through social media and sex work, Taylor’s subjects practice femininity as grift. They are coming to understand that femininity is a grift—a heavy realization that’s both exhilarating and devastating. The book, peppered with moments of spartan, possibly accidental, profundity, is also a broader reckoning with family estrangement, financial precarity, and climate hopelessness.

Taylor’s poetic subjects appear to be women who are young, white, urban, educated, and very online. Their rage and disappointment are visceral and often unfiltered, as in the riot grrrl writings of my teen years. In Bimboland, there is much sobbing: at a desk, in an Uber, on the bedroom floor, in the kitchen, to disco music, and while watching Sleepless in Seattle. Poems with titles such as “dull little slut” (whose line “do you detest the way I shake my little ass, do a fake laugh?” is reminiscent of Bikini Kill lyrics) and “a bitch in heat” promise provocation but mostly convey a sense of ennui through scenes of everyday life in the city. In a poem titled “difficult to work through my emotions,” Taylor writes, “I will take off my dumb slut clothes / and wash off the cum / I don’t need to be empowered, / I just need to have rent paid.” The poems in this collection are about loneliness and heartbreak, lust, sex, sex work, and trauma; they venture occasionally into leftist politics to express sarcasm, flatlined discontent, or Utopian longing. “I don’t want a feminism that is without whores, cunts, cumming, gossip, dykes, fags, the deconstruction of all that exists right now,” Taylor writes. “I want to destroy the IPhone, I want to destroy the American Dream within Me, Within You, Within Us.”

The “American Dream within Me” presumably refers to internalized pressure to conform to the dominant culture’s expectations, but there’s something anachronistic in this framing. Does the idea of the American dream still have purchase at this stage of global technocapitalism? Many of the rebellious sentiments in Bimboland have this outdated quality. They read like relics of an earlier historical moment, but it’s unclear whether Taylor is consciously parroting older counter-cultural rhetoric or simply recycling passé ideas as if they were new.

When Taylor writes about the constraints of femininity, their work can sound like that of Second Wave feminists. Consider “how to redirect fate,” in which they describe

the minor feudalism of being a woman
                                                    without capital
witnessed
my sister
provide
home
babies
bread
to
an
outline

Such lines aren’t dissimilar to “Letter to a Sister Underground,” a 1970 poem by the pioneering feminist Robin Morgan. “Each sister wearing masks of Revlonclairolplaytex to survive,” Morgan writes. “Each sister faking orgasm under the System’s very concrete bulk at night to survive.”

If Taylor’s emotional intensity and focus on the perturbances and reverberations of intimate relationships echo an earlier generation of poets—among them Adrienne Rich, Diane Wakoski, and Marge Piercy—one gets the impression that such affinities stem more from a general dispersion of these ideas into contemporary culture than from conscious engagement with poetic forebears. (One exception is Kathy Acker, who appears in the poem “kathy acker where are you?”) Rather, the primacy of Taylor’s I, of their personal experience, creates a kind of vacuum. In “body alone, body here, body where,” a poem about family, Taylor writes

I wanted to be away for so long I only knew how
to be away and then there was no way to go back
no one ever tells you that back is non existent
there is only the cold devastating future

“No one ever tells you”—but doesn’t everyone tell you that? The notion that “you can’t go home again” is itself a cliché drawn from literary history. This is but one instance of how Taylor’s poems occupy the temporality of juvenilia: a clamorous, cloying present that occasionally longs for the future but has little feel for history. This mode lends the writing a kind of immediacy, but there is a frustrating disconnect between it and the rich tradition of women’s writing and thinking—whole libraries full—on precisely the themes that vex the author. For young readers, there may be much here to commiserate with. Even for this reader, approaching middle age, the reminder that youth is youth and that the anguish that attends entry into adulthood is timeless offers perverse comfort. Despite abundant evidence of imminent apocalypse, things haven’t changed all that much for today’s female poets. And besides, it can be fun to stand so close to the fire.

But if Taylor’s poems unwittingly revisit the tones and tropes of earlier writers, they are undeniably contemporary elsewhere. Poems such as “dead girls 100% off,” “billboard memoriam nudes,” and “RIP The Free Internet” frequently reference social media and mirror those platforms’ ambivalence and juxtapositions—the everyday alongside the grand, the ridiculous alongside the sublime. In “teach me how to Unknown,” Taylor writes

carrying all my baggage everywhere
all the time is exhausting!
              I want to be a light baby doll of a human
 
I wanna fuck you when I’m not fucking you,
                                        how are you here all of a sudden!
 
I try to distract myself from my affection for you
scrolling on twitter
             there’s always something inane and fucked up being
              said online,
              listen to Julia Jacklin, sob at my desk

In poems that enact the fragmentary, ephemeral highs and lows of scrolling, Taylor also laments the effect of social media platforms, the “dull ordinariness” of a world in which “even the most taboo has become daily.” In one poem, they write of sex dungeons and grocery-store French bread pizza; in another, designer thongs and President’s Day; in a third, Applebee’s and our “broken world.” This swing between urgency and exhaustion makes their work feel resolutely of the present moment. In “nobody fucks anymore,” Taylor writes

I vomited in a warehouse bathroom last night,
things are getting a little out of hand!
 
funny to allow myself into situations that I know
are bad for me and yet do them anyway,
 
               I’m a maniac baby!

As in many of Taylor’s poems, the emotional intensity of the material is neutralized by the implied self-mockery of the exclamation mark. In the dialectic of extremes that characterizes life online, genuine wonder, or even surprise, is almost vulgar. The blasé, seen-it-all sensibility of the digital native demands that things that get “a little out of hand” be counterbalanced. The expression of emotion must necessarily be chased by deriding the act of expressing emotion, as in “twenty-four gone,” in which Taylor writes, “so many twitter notifications of loss / obituaries are all the rage right now!”

These flourishes can be amusing, but they also cheapen the poems. However funny the gag, the exclamation mark, like a slammed door, forecloses the possibility of further scrutiny. In many places in the text, this reader craved more and deeper analysis than is on offer. When Taylor writes, “I think there is something extremely fucked up about childhood,” for example, I want to know what.

One way to read Bimboland is alongside a strain of contemporary literature that has been called “very online” or “extremely online.” Recent novels such as Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021), and Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018) depict the mental cacophony that social media produces: the sense of endless distraction and infinitely proliferating content—cat videos abutting scenes of political violence. These writers also explore what being a popular (white) woman online feels like: the pressure to brand oneself, the paradox of simultaneous fame and anonymity, and the dopamine rush of likes, among other experiences. These books pose larger questions about what actually constitutes life now that so much of it happens virtually. There are shades of Oyler’s cynicism and Lockwood’s absurdism in Bimboland. In their novels and in Taylor’s poems, the internet both abets and thwarts sociality and meaning. The unshakable sensation that modern life is a simulation counters the materiality of bodily fluids. There is an air of fatigue, of vague complaint: the acknowledgement that living now takes a gargantuan amount of energy, even if people just sit on their asses in front of screens much of the time. As Taylor writes, “I’m the olympic gold medalist of moving / my bed into the middle of the room so I can / charge my phone and lay in bed at the same time.”

Because it performs a reflexive—and aggressive—self-awareness, so-called very online writing lulls readers into believing it is self-aware, although it isn’t always. “If I wanted a book that resembled Twitter, I wouldn’t write a book; I would just spend even more time on Twitter,” says the snide blogger-narrator of Oyler’s novel. But the novel is a lot like Twitter: strung-together capsules of reductive cultural criticism and mean-spirited posturing. It is determined to float above real feeling, deathly afraid of betraying any weakness. It turns out that ironizing self-regard is not the same as subverting it.

Taylor’s poems evince a similar studied boredom and an awareness that concern with others’ appraisals has eroded the narrator’s sense of self—“so much within me archived in other people / yet I couldn’t point myself out in a crowd,” they writes. But there are also forays into extreme earnestness in Bimboland. In a way, this makes the book more interesting than some “extremely online” lit. Taylor risks instances of real vulnerability (“vulnerability is a half-cracked egg,” she writes). At moments, they do drop the pose, refuse to be the avatar, and just talk about what hurts and how badly. They write about fear: “feel as if I am fading / in the memory of / everyone who / has ever loved me”; “am I just entertainment”; “this timeline frightens me onto the next.” They write about the planet: “climate crisis forever / every poem written is for / a dead and dying world.” And they write about violence:

when the police helicopters almost
           crashed into crowds and
           the philosopher raped me in
           my friend’s apartment
I wanted to call you and tell you
because I want you to know everything
about me still but I didn’t

Taylor’s poems are most effective when they resist the urge to provoke, stop projecting shock onto others (“‘oh no, the whores have gone political!’”), and leaves aside the machinations of seeking approval. When Taylor leans into earnestness, their work is saddest but also funniest: “if I ever work in a coworking space, shoot me!” they write in “after labor,” a line that made me laugh out loud. “I want to find a dynamic solution to the end of / everything we know right now.”

Alas, these glimpses of sincerity and humor are rarer than I’d hoped. When Taylor swings not toward exclamation but exhaustion, toward a flat affect, toward being over everything, they put me in mind of “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,” a 2019 essay by Emmeline Clein. In it, Clein coins the term dissociation feminism to describe an affliction that lies somewhere between PTSD and simply giving up. It’s a condition Clein claims is most apparent among women who are “white, attractive, have a certain amount of class privilege, and are intelligent and witty”—in other words, those with the luxury to give up. Clein parses the ways different characters present their disaffection, from the nearly universally reviled Hannah Horvath in Girls to the nearly universally beloved character Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays in Fleabag. “Fleabag would never blame society for her specifically female emotional traumas,” Clein writes. “Instead, she blames herself and makes a joke about it, which is much easier for the viewing public to swallow.” Clein argues that “The dissociated girl of Fleabag might be the cool girl or chill girl’s cousin.” Of course, on some level, she knows the problems that ail her have structural roots, but she doesn’t aim to destroy those. Like a good woman, she turns her destructive impulses inward.

Taylor’s Bimboland is rife with moments of—and overt references to—dissociation, particularly as the poems affect a self-protective cool-girl pose. In “dissociating on niteflirt,” Taylor writes “it’s fun to dissociate / sometimes / and other times / I forget that I have a therapy appointment / because my brain is a big cloud.” Moments of congress or companionship are followed by flippant remarks addressed to men striving for (and failing at) intimacy or sincerity: “sorry babe I couldn’t / really understand love / before I met you either, / all I know is that some / women are too crazy / to be loved or so they / tell me time and time / again,” they write in “I beg to be devoured before flying.” It seems that whether with men, family, or internet followers, being OK with being misread, misunderstood, or mistreated is mandatory. These are the very terms of any social (or social media) encounter. Drawing on the sometimes outrageously performative personae of femininity and sex work, Taylor’s subjects yearn to be treated with respect but compulsorily dismiss the very possibility: “wouldn’t it be so sexy if you took me seriously? / I don’t even know what serious is anymore (that’s the joke).” Does Taylor’s subject really not know what serious is? I suppose it doesn’t matter. They know enough to know that being taken seriously isn’t realistic—furthermore, demanding such a thing wouldn’t be chill.

In her celebrated essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison writes that “a wound is where interior becomes exterior…. Wounds promise authenticity and profundity, beauty and singularity, desirability. They summon sympathy. They bleed enough light to write by.” That was in 2014. What is the value of showing one’s wounds in 2021, without context, without analysis, and without the hope of being taken seriously? With the explosion of the first-person essay and identity politics in the internet age, baring one’s deepest scars has become de rigueur and relatively meaningless. To a great extent, Taylor, like most with a social media following, knows it, which is why many of these poems scream “Look at me!” and then rush in to neutralize their own desperation, breezily mocking readers for believing that the author sincerely wants respect or believes they could have it. It’s a tragedy of low expectations that plays out all over the internet and that seems to be the hallmark of the current moment. Perhaps it’s simply realistic. Though Taylor’s language evokes earlier phases of feminist activism, especially those riot grrrl zines of my youth, they may be immune to the callow faith in social change that my contemporaries and I shared and so may be spared its heartbreaks.

Although I resist reading Bimboland simply as a “very online” book of poetry, the double-edged (really, multi-edged) sword of onlineness is central to its essence. Taylor writes about the internet as a familiar comfort, a numbing agent, and a site of trauma. Inside text boxes shaped like a computer screen and a keyboard, they recall “my sweet sweet / loss of innocence / in cyber chat rooms, / perpetually reaching to the void / for affection.” But they also call the internet “Home of My Youth!” and suggests that it can serve as a space of simplicity and security. They write

my sims have
a christmas tree and happy family dynamics
there is zero passive aggression in my sims family
there is no incest
there is only protection and safety

In her 2020 manifesto Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell enumerates the liberatory possibilities of the internet, citing in particular the ways that existence online is beyond the body. Recalling her experiences in early AOL chat rooms, Russell writes, “I toyed with power dynamics, exchanging with other faceless strangers, empowered via creating new selves, slipping in and out of digital skins, celebrating in the new rituals of cybersex.” It occurs to me while reading Bimboland that much as there is to dislike about the internet (and the literature it has spawned), it remains the rare place where a woman might feel safe, where she might fleetingly believe herself to be controlling the means of production. Of course, she isn’t actually safe, or she can’t be safe all the time, and the capitalist malaise that suffuses this volume is best expressed in that futility: knowing that sense of safety is a trick, knowing that internet life is ersatz or fraudulent or momentary or partial or inadequate but rising each day to seek it out anyway. In some of the most affecting lines in the book, Taylor writes, “safe sex is when no / one can touch me / and I choose all the angles.”