Do you feel like either of these labels are accurate? I think you can make a case that my work is feminist. The people who have made the case for my work as being feminist look at it more from the perspective of: I was doing some very degrading things and I was being degraded by men, but I was also very aware of it and I talked about it and I expressed it. So in that regard, it was feminist -- revealing the conditions of my own debasement.
I feel like you can see the case of my work being both feminist and also being self-destructive. Ira Silverberg leaves the National Endowment for the Arts. Nikole Hannah-Jones became a political target. Sylvere Lotringer, intellectual who infused U. Veterans of fruitless wars: Two Marine Corps memoirists share their gratitude and dismay.
All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. What is so refreshing about what purpose did i serve in your life is what is most hidden from its stories of abject degradation: Its purity. When you see Calloway's pieces gathered together you recognize what this young woman has been doing, what her plan has been from the beginning, which she has executed, without error, right to the end. She has been submitting herself to horrific sexual experiences in order to write about them.
That's how much she cares about writing. That's how deeply she is willing to sacrifice to be an artist. I must say that I find this, whatever its motives, profoundly worthy of respect. Tao Lin's anomie is a carefully spun form of empty narcissism.
Marie Calloway has put her body and her soul at risk. She is, come on her face and all, a Romantic. Calloway is twenty-three years old now. What purpose did i serve in your life is such a unique document that I have no idea if she could ever repeat its success. But she has gone all the way. She has not chickened out. She wrote the story she was given down to the bone. That's what real artists do.
It's maybe the most surprising triumph to emerge from the literature of disaffection: What purpose did i serve in your life is the real thing. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Every 'Bond' Film Ever, Ranked. Gene Gregorits wrote in basically the same style years earlier, mixing email exchanges and emotionally dead, drug-fueled, roller-coastered action shots of his affair with at-the-time boyfriended, much older, much more established Lydia Lunch when he was just starting out as a writer.
Not one critic or reader called him an "ugly slut" or a homewrecker for it, as they do Calloway. He does get called a narcissist, which is at least action-oriented and self-starting, as far as insults go. It's not a passive recipient of others' energies. More encouraging critics call her "naive," a "Lolita," an "enfant terrible," and offer unsolicited advice. Molding is grooming.
Women writers don't require your direction in describing what they think or feel, old man. It's just that most of us don't write about it because we're ashamed of ever having been a victim.
After she sent him a piece of hers to publish, he started enthusiastically bossing her around: how to change her writing style, how to use other writers, how to look at things, how to be. It seems to me that he recognized something giant in her that was still unrealized, and he seized his opportunity to go down in history as The One Who Had Her First. Writing-wise, that is. It's worse to penetrate still-forming talent than a vagina.
Lin invited her to Paris to stay in his hotel, making a writing assignment out of how things unfolded between them. Calloway didn't have the money for the flight. He flew back to New York. They met. He did not want to fuck. He had a lot of excuses, for example, that he'd watched too much porn to have real-life desire anymore. He'd seen her as a writer-object.
A new person. But now she'd been published—she was used goods… Plus, she'd turned out to weigh more than pounds. Men and women alike became enraged and judgmental about Calloway turning this dynamic around by exploiting in print her exploiters, by laying bare how she had offered up to these predators her own debasement, anxiety, needs, and wishes—some of them secretly malicious.
It saddened me to hear my hero Chris Kraus's take on Calloway in an interview. Kraus recounts Calloway asking the pseudonymous character Adrien Brody to "take a sex pic with her phone, and he asks, 'Are you going to use this? We think and do hateful things in our lives.
It's a major part of relationships, at least ones with such vastly unequal power dynamics. You can see her influence in the way personal writing on the internet has become a cottage industry, and how it has gone from something people considered a passing fad women talking about themselves? You can see it in how the public discourse around sex work has started to shift away from judgment toward compassion. One thing Calloway likely understood earlier and better than almost anyone else was the cruel tides of the internet.
And after experiencing intensely corrosive blowback, she simply decided to leave. Like everyone, I think about logging off most days. The more I stare at Twitter and worry about my least generous critics, the less I feel capable of cogent and publishable thoughts.
Why does anyone live here? It betrays the kind of cynicism that can only come from receiving endless virulent criticism from your peers. Why make yourself available for a new round of cruel takedowns about your work and your body? The tragedy is that there is probably no one better suited to speak to the misery of the online feedback loop than Calloway.
She was an early victim of the worst of the internet, so who would be better to contextualize it for the rest of us still trapped here, hoping to escape? But Calloway owes us nothing, especially after giving so much and getting very little in return. Her victory is in her retreat. Contact Scaachi Koul at scaachi. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here. A BuzzFeed News investigation, in partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based on thousands of documents the government didn't want you to see.
Tyrant Books. Courtesy Tyrant. People would be like, we know this story. A spread from what purpose did i serve in your life.
Calloway at a reading for her book in St. I think a lot of those people had a problem with Marie because she was a young woman and she was writing about her experience. We fucking hated the New Yorker.
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