There is a photograph of my extended family from 1993, celebrating my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. I am four years old, sitting in the front, fingers shoved into my mouth. If photos could move, there would be flecks of nail grinding between my teeth, spitting towards the lens like brittle fireworks.
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Writing
Feature interview with Books on the Rail for frankie issue 74.
Australian actor Brenna Harding is best known for playing Sue Knight in the television remake of classic coming-of-age film Puberty Blues, a major role she landed at 15. But she was in the public eye at a younger age, when she appeared with her same-sex parents on a segment of Australian children’s program Play School.
We need to view sexual safety through a dual lens where it is the responsibility of both parties, and dispose of the mentality that values physical over mental health, when they should be considered in tandem – and sexual pleasure is no small part of both equations.
The date went well. We ate Japanese and drank ciders before I watched his band play and he smiled at me from the stage. At the end of the night he kissed me on the cheek and said we should do it again the following week. He texted me every day after, asking how my days were and sharing stories about his – and then he abruptly stopped replying mid-conversation, and never contacted me again.
As anyone who’s ever used the internet in a last-ditch attempt to fill their empty souls with a hollow imitation of intimacy would know, ghosting – a close relative of theslow fade – is when, after a date or hookup, one party suddenly ceases communication. When things seem to have gone well, words are exchanged about how you’d love to do it again (after bodily fluids may or may not have been exchanged) and you get ghosted. It kinda sucks.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been an overly sentimental person. In my parents’ house, in the bedroom that still looks exactly how it did when I left home five years ago, in a cardboard box on the shelf inside my wardrobe, all of my past lives are stored. Every card, letter or note I received from preschool until I moved interstate is immaculately kept, a telescope peering into the way things were.
I am so incredibly thrilled to be included in the sex-positive anthology Doing It, edited by one of my feminist heroes, Karen Pickering.
My piece, Getting It Online: Feminism, Online Dating and Sex, explores the ways in which internet dating have revolutionised the sexual landscape for all different kinds of women and non-binary people, as well as discussing the ways in which it still fails us.
The book is out 24 August through the University of Queensland Press.
I was 13 the first time I wanted to save a boy. He was a year older with a litany of issues, from substance abuse to manic depression and self-harm. We were both kids, and I thought loving him was enough to erase all the things that plagued him – his broken family, his best friend who had committed suicide, the monsters only he could see and feel.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way. He fell deeper into his issues, and I felt myself falling with him. In the end, neither of us won – I experienced my first heartbreak, and he was no better for my efforts.
Once I was in love with someone I had never met.
We would Skype for four, five, six hours at a time, him in Hong Kong and me in Melbourne, and he would say “you’re my dream girl”, and I would say “when can I see you?”, and he would say “do you want to see me cum for you?”, but it was all wires and codes, so when he said “I love you”, what he was really saying was 1011100011010, or something like that.
But numbers or words didn’t matter, because every Instagram heart said “I love you”, and that fucking annoying Skype sound said “I love you”, and then it was all over before the zeroes and ones ever turned into words that met mid-air.
Fusion isn’t new, but in 2016, it’s reaching insufferable new heights.
We’ve got the phorrito (pho without broth is like a sushi donut without a hole). We’ve got a rainbow of bastardised hummus variations (honestly, do you just mean dip? I think you just mean dip). A place near my old house served ‘Viet-Mex’ cuisine, including rice paper rolls with refried beans and burritos with vermicelli. A friend once saw Caesar salad sushi on offer, complete with croutons and dressing. Cheeseburger gyoza, ramen burgers, Indian nachos, Greek yum cha…
Why is ethnic food so much “cooler” when presented in this Western context? Have you colonialists no shame?