Decadent and destabilizing
DECADENT, adj. This week, The American Conservative published an article by Rod Dreher worrying about the downfall of society, not because of the pandemic or the climate crisis or anything that actually threatens human lives, but because a lot of the young folks are queer and trans these days. I’m not linking because this newsletter does not give monetized clicks to garbage, but the relevant passage is
Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there's no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.
Later, after many people pointed out to Dreher that bisexuality exists, and likely accounts for most of the statistic he cited (which is itself pretty unclear, but anyway):
UPDATE: A number of readers have pointed out that the “B” in “LGBT” — bisexual — is probably doing a hell of a lot of work in that 30 percent number. This is probably true, but it doesn't really change much. I'm not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because bisexual could cover “open to sex with both sexes,” but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.
Handwringing over fertility rates is, of course, white supremacist bullshit. Dreher and company never have any interest in increasing our country’s population through immigration, or dealing with those “structural difficulties” that prevent people from having kids. But it’s the fear of queers in these excerpts that I want to talk about. Who doesn’t love to be called “decadent and destabilizing”?
Dreher means “decadent” in its sense of “in a state of decay or decline” and not in what I think of as the more common contemporary usage of “luxury” or “indulgence.” The latter comes from the former—society decays when people go overboard with luxurious self-indulgence. That’s still true, I think, but it’s more about Jeff Bezos amassing an inhuman amount of money while his warehouse workers suffer and fall ill than it is about my hobby of googling “women in suits” and gazing adoringly at photos of Janelle Monáe, but clearly Dreher and I disagree about the harm caused by these activities.
These days, what comes to mind when I think of the word “decadent” is the low, smooth voice of TikTok creator @decadent_dayne, who improvises narration over other people’s cooking videos that is both soothing and hilarious:
“Decadent” also gets used to refer to a late nineteenth-century artistic and literary movement about being gay and bedazzling turtles. It started in France, of course.
Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing Before Herod, 1876. I don’t know if Moreau identified himself as a Decadent, but this painting gets described lovingly in that most Decadent of novels, Against Nature (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, and it does have a lot of luxuriously indulgent detail. Plus Salome is destabilizing as hell, just look at her.
English gets the word “decadent” from French “décadent” and its noun form “décadence.” The Latin verb at the root of all this decline is “decadere,” also meaning to decay.
The verb “cadere” means “to fall,” and you can see its modern form in Italian “cadere” and Spanish “caer.” If you’re a huge fuckin nerd who’s read a bunch of old literary stuff in French, you might recognize the rare verb “choir” (to drop, to fall) or “déchoir” (to wane, to decline) as descendants, though granted French went through a lot more phonological transformation in this case. The past participle of “choir” is “chu,” and that’s where we get the word “chute” in French and English.
“Cadere” is the ultimate root of so many different words: cadence (the flow of poetry or prose, also applicable to music, literally a falling, as in at the end of sentence), accident and incident (things that befall you), and cadaver (a fallen person). I love it so much when it’s possible to connect disparate words to the same root. Language is so decadent and destabilizing, don’t you think?
BONUS ETYMOLOGY 1: I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm, which treats Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf, and one of the hosts shared that Gar-Dena, which means Spear Danes, shares a root with “garlic,” which is a leek (from Old English “lēac”) that looks like a spear. Spear leek. I love seeing the roots of words that are genuinely from Old English because even though I’m a native English speaker, they never feel obvious to me. English: it’s a surprise every time!
BONUS ETYMOLOGY 2: I heard romance writer KJ Charles use the expression “mad as a spoon” in this interview with Queer Romance Readers. Much like Old English root words, British expressions are continually surprising and delightful to me—what, exactly, is mad about a spoon?—but unlike with “garlic,” digging into spoon madness produced nothing. Nobody seems to have a reliable answer for the connection between spoons and lunacy (spoonacy), but at least in my searching, I found etymologist Anatoly Liberman reflecting on “nut” and “spoon” and their various food- and sex-related connotations.
Content warning: discussion of pregnancy and child loss in this section
Speaking of luxurious self-indulgence, this week in small-r romance, I read the entire rest of romance novelist Scarlett Peckham’s published work (The Duke I Tempted, The Earl I Ruined, The Rakess), all historical romances between cishet men and women, copious content warnings available in those links. Damn she can write.
The Duke I Tempted and The Earl I Ruined have high stakes and big emotions, but they’re also over-the-top and trope-y—a marriage of convenience and a fake engagement, respectively. I flew through both, and my only complaint is that if you’re going to write about an 18th-century sex club catering to unusual tastes, there had better be some queer people in your cast of characters. Their absence is a jarring omission.
The Rakess does have a lesbian supporting character, which I was relieved and delighted to see. Its main character is a proto-feminist writer and activist, loosely inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, and she and her best friends form a society to fight for women’s rights. They’re from very different backgrounds (a Black painter with ties to the aristocracy, a famous white courtesan, and a white merchant’s daughter) but they’re all excluded from polite society on the grounds of not behaving as women should. Rod Dreher would definitely have called them decadent and destabilizing, regardless of their sexual orientation.
The Rakess is a more serious book than the other two, and it deals in depth with the suffering and terror of pregnancy, child birth, miscarriage and loss in the eighteenth century. I thought Peckham treated this subject matter thoughtfully, since it is the reason that cis women could not be promiscuous, carefree “rakes” in the way that cis men could. The book does end happily, as all genre romance novels must (no matter how many times we have to have the same boring fight on twitter about what “romance” means), and its happy ending includes a healthy pregnancy—one that results from a condom breaking.
I might have liked to see a version of this book that saw its two protagonists falling in love and making a family together without this pregnancy, since the female protagonist has suffered a previous infant mortality and the male protagonist’s first wife died in childbirth and he is terrified of reliving that experience with another woman he loves. To me, these are not issues that can be solved by love and trust. No matter how convincing the emotional resolution of the romance, in 1797 there was really nothing to be done about the risk. (You can still almost die from pregnancy even in the 21st century. Ask me how I know.) It’s pretty easy to just… choose sex acts that can’t cause pregnancy, and thus won’t kill your beloved. You might even call that an act of love.
But anyway, the two protagonists decide they want to have a child together and they accept the risk, and it works out, as it often does. They gamble and win. That’s the story this book chose to tell. I don’t object to romance protagonists getting lucky (heh), of course. I love an unlikely happy ending as much as the next romance reader. I just have a lot of feelings about this particular issue, and I sort of wish these characters had gambled on something else. Perhaps future installments in this series will treat the matter differently. (If you want to read a historical romance that deals with infertility, I highly recommend both Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy and Elizabeth Hoyt’s Thief of Shadows.)
I don’t mean to make it sound like The Rakess wasn’t enjoyable. I thought the book as a whole was really smart and compelling. And there’s a little sequence where the main characters infiltrate an asylum to rescue their friend! I hope by now that my love of such schemes is well-documented.
The Rakess was also a great thing to be reading this week when romance twitter had to respond, yet again, to an article claiming that more “romcoms” should have the “happy ending” of a character ending up single. (Sure. Fine. But that’s just a “com.”) There was a subsequent conversation about whether a romantic Happily Ever After is, you know, feminist or worthy or whatever. I didn’t pay a ton of attention because, as previously mentioned, people outside Romancelandia pick this fight every few months and it’s boring to me. I’m only mentioning it now because Scarlett Peckham saw this shit coming from miles away and she wrote this skepticism into her heroine’s memoirs:
If you had told me the night that Elinor went missing that our rebellion would lead to my falling in love with a man, having a child with him, and gaining his family as my own, I would have scoffed at you that that was not the kind of ending I considered happy.
There you go. The Rakess thus becomes a vindication of the romantic happily ever after.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, here’s what I loved on the internet this week:
An incredible twitter thread from professor of gender studies and history Gabriel Rosenberg, responding to the Rod Dreher article I quoted above, talking about the weird origins of 4-H in the US
The case for Dinétah, a great article on the possible benefits of statehood for the Navajo Nation
This Vox piece on things to make the pandemic winter more bearable. For me, the most important idea in it is “even in the dead of winter, a 15-minute awe walk outdoors is probably something you can do.”
Activist Garrett Bucks on living in community with others, including this question “With whom have I been given the opportunity to be in relationship with today? To what extent did I treat those opportunities as gifts rather than obligations?” that I have been thinking about a lot. Our whole society is chopped up into such insular little bits, and I think it’s the root of a lot of our problems.
Rabbi Ruti Regan’s Open Letter to People Who Do Things, about how to respond to criticism, which is so powerful that I could quote almost any sentence from it, but I particularly loved “You don’t have to be perfect to do things that matter. If only perfect people could do things, nothing would ever get done.”
Stay decadent, friends. See you next Sunday!