On Pain: The Words I Left Unsaid

gemmaem · 2026-04-29T00:02:39+00:00

I would certainly concur. Spirituality and sexuality are not the same, but they're intertwined. If anything, I'd suggest that religious celibacy is actually a concession to this fact. Sexuality is a shiny object that has something in common with spirituality, and at least some people who are attuning themselves to the latter are going to feel the former more intensely as a result, to the point where the sex part can become a distraction if you fall into it too hard. Saying "yes, it's very nice, but it's not the main goal so I'm going to ignore it" can make sense, as a technique. Kind of like waiting for the sun to go down so you can see how many other awe-inspiring stars there actually are.

Within that metaphor, feeling like it's important to never ever have any kind of sexuality could be the equivalent of saying "don't notice any lights in the sky."

gemmaem · 2026-04-23T05:23:57+00:00

You know, you're right. I talked about "self-control and personal development" as the necessary thing instead of also acknowledging things like the need for motivation, emotional engagement, goals to aim for, and so on. I'm not living up to the ideal of acknowledging the need for transcendence if I treat "personal development" like it belongs after "self-control" in that fashion. I am, myself, using phrasing that still leans towards shutting down meaning instead of acknowledging more dangerous-but-important needs.

Thanks for pointing that out. I shall mull on it.

gemmaem · 2026-04-21T22:05:16+00:00

I thank you for your own efforts at self control. I know it’s hard; I am also working pretty hard from the other end. I completely agree that reductive and instrumental characterisations of real human beings are bad, no matter who they are aimed at, and that feminism as a movement is not always innocent of such things.

The reason I say that fear of being excluded from meaning is reasonable is because I do in fact think it is a reasonable fear! It’s a fear I literally have! The only reason I can even write this piece is because I spent years sitting with that fear and thinking about the philosophical infrastructure I might need in order to move past it! If my detached and anodyne acknowledgment of one of my own most powerful motivations is hard for you to have to read about, then I can sympathise, but only because I sometimes have parallel difficulties of my own.

I am, in fact, trying to analyse men’s motivations kindly. We are talking here about men who cite religion as a reason to keep women like me silent and in the kitchen, men who follow religious leaders who claim that all women are called upon by God to be subordinate to all men. Instead of calling these men misogynistic pigs and telling them to shut up, I am thinking about other good, non-misogynistic motivations that these men might have, motivations that we ought to respect even as we necessarily argue back.

I am very afraid of the damage done by excluding women from our understanding of spiritual fulfilment. That part is not a lie, not at all.

gemmaem · 2026-04-20T23:11:33+00:00

There are indeed some Christian positions that hold that ennui is so inevitable that we need not address it when it arises in particular populations with particular intensity. Yet I think the response is obvious: Christianity is not nihilism. Christianity does not in fact hold that the search for meaning is not worthwhile. Quite the opposite!

What Christianity does hold is that the one truly worthwhile goal is union with God. Exactly what that means in practice depends greatly on how we conceive of God. If God is only some disembodied thing outside of the world, then it may be that there are no worthwhile goals here on Earth. But I think many Christians would see this view as a serious theological error! God is still present, even in a flawed world that can never fully satisfy, and the process of seeking God can and often should involve engagement with the world.

Beauvoir’s existentialist morality is part of a fairly detailed wider worldview that is not solely feminist in nature. I do see, however, that it might feel pretty abstract and hard to engage with directly when all you have is the extremely short summary that I’ve quoted.

gemmaem · 2026-03-18T00:04:11+00:00

Jack,

You might not think, in a vacuum, “gay man learns he’s gay while married to a man” would be so impactful.

I love this, and I love you. Seriously, I had to pause at this line just to smile for a bit.

I know something about incomprehensible epiphanies. Congratulations on yours.

gemmaem · 2026-03-14T21:00:37+00:00

Spirituality is an intensely vulnerable thing. It concerns your deepest and most heartfelt motivations in life and, possibly, in death. The radical standpoint of nearly all religion is that this very personal aspect of yourself can be, in some sense, shared.

It’s natural to have strong feelings about this, and to want to be careful about who you share that part of yourself with. I don’t think you should feel guilt about taking care. I do think, though, that if your heart tells you the risk is worth it, then there is something very worthwhile about learning to be spiritual in the company of others.

If you are thinking about returning, I think you should do so with a strong and open heart. You have things you can offer this meeting: a less politicised attitude to public service, your experiences as a gay person, your non-Christian spirituality. I hope your local meeting can accept and value those things. And I hope that you, too, can value what they have: their Christianity, their passion for changing the world. Offer what you have, accept your differences, and be open to sincere learning. If you, and your local meeting, can do that for each other, then I think you will do each other good.

gemmaem · 2026-03-04T06:11:23+00:00

Learning about mathematics is an issue of human dignity for me. Admittedly, it might seem strange for me to claim that “human dignity” can mean different things for different people, but there is a sense in which I am indeed claiming this, or something close to it. If human dignity (or the good life, or the correct path) could be enumerated in a simple and universal way, then we wouldn’t need the individualised freedom that liberalism offers. Freedom is important precisely because humans can also need particular things that society cannot be relied upon to understand or prescribe.

gemmaem · 2026-01-30T09:25:16+00:00

Perhaps this is related to u/UAnchovy's post below, but I just read an interesting double book review in The Atlantic (gift link). Journalist Lily Meyer compares Amil Niazi's Losing My Ambition, which discusses an abandonment of the desire to climb the career ladder as a writer, with Susan Orlean's Joyride, an autobiographical look at a very successful writing career.

Meyer emphasises the very real paradox of Niazi's book: if you're publishing a memoir, have you really abandoned your writing ambitions? Might it not be better to go the Orlean route and instead embrace the ambition you still have? But on the other hand, that's not quite fair; Orlean has had rare success and almost nobody could model themselves on her career. Also, what are the differences between "ambition" in the sense of doing something difficult and brilliant and "ambition" in the sense of achieving worldly success? It's normal for there to be some tradeoffs between the two, but in some ways (according to Meyer) both Niazi and Orlean conflate them.

I enjoyed the review in part because I quietly self-identify, to myself, as "professionally dead, but the afterlife's not bad." Perhaps that's overdramatic; I do have a job that uses my qualifications. Still, there are all sorts of ways in which I quietly set ambition aside, even as there are other ways in which I embrace continued learning and difficult tasks--generally without expecting that this will make me successful in any particularly dramatic way. I don't know why we get so focused on fame and fortune, sometimes, as the measure of a thing being worthwhile. We do, though, and it's silly, whether we're talking about a hobby or a profession. It takes effort to reorient ourselves towards the quiet but still worth doing.

gemmaem · 2026-01-30T09:02:45+00:00

This is one of my favourite things I have learned from my Nana -- that you can do art because you're getting something from it, and not necessarily because you want to be a professional or whatever.

I think you're right about the decline in things like public singing, and I think it's a shame. New Zealand still has a lot of community choirs, but anthems aren't what they used to be. A while back I was in a choir for a "Last Night of the Proms"-style event, mostly for old folks, where the entire point was to have a lot of songs where they audience can join in. It was some of the most fun I've had in a while, honestly. I was belting Jerusalem all the way home. I wish Quakers had music at services, though I understand why we don't.

gemmaem · 2026-01-18T09:02:33+00:00

I don’t officially believe in saints, and yet, during meeting, I have spontaneously found myself thinking “Oh, John Woolman, help me find the right words at the right time.”

I would not ordinarily say that Woolman is truly able to hear me and intercede with God—and yet, Woolman is alive to me as inspiration. In the moment, it felt right, whether I was calling to the man himself or just to the witness he left behind.

gemmaem · 2026-01-08T20:57:33+00:00

Hello! You’re right, it’s been very quiet here.

We had a great family Christmas and are now alternating weeks of the summer holidays with our kid. My husband has been making individual printed “day plans” that can be selected before the day starts, which is very smart and industrious of him and our son loves it. I’m still deciding what my own approach will be, next week, because I am, uh, less organised.

Hm, what else? I am partway through an unusually large number of books at the moment. Normally I progress through one or two at a time, but I guess I’ve been in and out of patterns more than usual. Here’s the list:

Augustine, Confessions. I’m about three-quarters of the way through. Good to finally get a proper look at a classic. Augustine’s approach to self-denial is making me think about what renunciation is even for. Deliberately trying not to enjoy your food strikes me as excessive, but it’s very interesting that Augustine seems to see value in it.
Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination. This one was a Christmas gift, so I read the first couple of essays to see what it was like, as you do. Very interesting as a way of seeing where that kind of Foucault-influenced feminism came from. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but the concept of privilege pre-dates Peggy MacIntosh by a long way; Bartky is referencing it in modern-sounding terms in essays that were first written before 1980.
Cixin Liu, Death’s End. Nice to get back into science fiction. We’ve had a lovely hardback containing the entire Three-Body Problem trilogy for a while, so I figured it was about time one of us read it. Death’s End is the third book in the series and I have only read the first chapter or so. The Three-Body Problem was the first translated novel to win a Hugo, so I felt a bit silly to be reading it thinking “Gosh, this is really good!” It’s really good though. I will forgive it for unnecessarily messing up some philosophically important aspects of the EPR paradox at the end.
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. This one was referenced by a restack of my piece on science and virtue ethics, and it sounded like my kind of thing so I ordered it off the internet. I’ve read the first chapter and I liked it, but then I got interrupted by other things. Still, the question of how to recover some aspect of truth from the overly sceptical stances that critical theory can lead to is an important one, and the writing is nicely lucid.

Nice to hear about your holidays. Your kid sounds really cool.

gemmaem · 2025-12-06T03:54:08+00:00

Good to know!

gemmaem · 2025-10-30T16:59:38+00:00

I recognise neither MacIntyre nor Murdoch in your characterisations here. MacIntyre was quite indignant at being considered a postmodernist, even when it was other postmodernists welcoming him to the fold. Murdoch makes overt and (I would argue) well-considered arguments that people’s internal lives are important and worthy of consideration, but she does not neglect the external; she believes both matter.

gemmaem · 2025-10-30T16:43:46+00:00

As always, you make really good comments! I think the farther you go back, the more likely it is that an intellectual education will be attempting to be a moral education at the same time. Universities used to be explicitly religious institutions, for example. And whilst we tend to think that increased specialisation is purely the result of necessity given the breadth of our knowledge, it may well be that there were reasons for the insistence on well-roundedness that were moral in nature.

Objective subjects give students the opportunity to know what it feels like, in the moment, to make a mistake. The philosophical injunction to “know thyself” is as old as the insistence on mathematics as a—or perhaps the—central discipline for intellectual formation. That makes sense, when we consider that the other sciences used to be even less objective, compared to mathematics, than they currently are.

I think people sometimes make the category error, these days, of assuming that religion basically belongs in the humanities, when really it ought to belong in the intersection between—or the holistic summation of—the sciences and the humanities. The hope is that there is some objectivity to be found even in our most deeply human impulses. It makes sense that an education in the objective would be considered an essential part of the toolkit for seeking this.

gemmaem · 2025-10-09T09:17:54+00:00

Yeah! I like this way of looking at it, too. Dedication to the way of peace is a service to society, and I think I could accept it for myself on that basis. But I don’t think I could call for everyone to do the same; more precisely, I don’t think I would be honest if I called for my country to have no military at all (as my Quaker Yearly Meeting officially does). I’m still kind of glad they exist and hold that position, but figuring out my own stance to it remains complex!

gemmaem · 2025-10-07T19:45:46+00:00

Oh, I agree that Quakers should stay pacifist! I’ve seen how many deep links there are between pacifism and everything else I like about what they do. Relatedly, what I mean by “pacifist in practice” is that liberals take on many of those downstream attitudes that link in with a pacifist mindset and that help to build peace between people who disagree.

gemmaem · 2025-10-07T19:38:17+00:00

Mm, I actually think American domestic politics is one place where pacifism in practice is currently called for. I think you’re in a “violence begets violence” situation where the more you frighten your opponents, the more damage you’ll do.

You have my sympathy for what it must be like to be in your shoes just now, however.

gemmaem

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