Lux Magazine, Issue 4
I was surprised by what I found. First, it is a glossy magazine, full of photos, more like the old familiar fashion magazines in that way although smaller, just a little larger than Reader’s Digest, that frequenter of moldy summer cottages. And the contents were even more surprising. I consider myself out at the radical edge of feminism and yet I felt an old-fashioned shock on reading the first article, “Move Slow and Break Things: A Guide to Workplace Sabotage” by Cheryl Minerva with art by Janet Mac.
It begins, “The So-called great resignation is underway. But what about all those bills to pay, mouths to feed and other obligations that mean we can’t quit our bullshit jobs?”
I certainly know most of the low-level jobs in corporations or the ground-level jobs in fast food are bullshit, and I would agree that “dissent is always on the table.” But the forms this dissent might take trouble me: “Decolonize Your Mind: Your Job is Not Your Life,” sure, although it certainly takes up most of your time. “Get Some Gossip Buddies,” great, we all need them. “Always be committing Time Theft”—here I begin to get uneasy. “Steal and misplace everything”—I remember the old maxim, two wrongs don’t make a right. “Do just enough not to get caught”—how do you do that? I’m not sure yet certainly, “Resistance to office culture is a way to make space for what really matters.” But—what about your fellow workers who are women? Doesn’t this imply some betrayals of those who don’t agree with you—and may even try to report you to the old white male authorities?
More articles follow on the vain efforts of companies to lure women into miserable jobs with no benefits; they include fifty-dollar “bonuses” when hired and free snacks—“as though that equaled healthcare!”
I’m intrigued and go on reading although I don’t think I’ll go for the “flat life solution”: housesitting, lying in a hammock, refusing to strive. But LUX is breaking new ground here and I’m applauding, although a little uneasily.
Features cover the Customs ordeal of Solmaz Sharif, “Poet Laureate of Nowhere,” and many photos of this beautiful young woman, reinforcing a familiar stereotype of conventional news: only beautiful young women are worth writing about and photographing. Articles on what is never covered elsewhere, such as the fact that the National Welfare Rights Organization—I’ve never heard of it—was founded in 1966 by a group of poor women on welfare demanding better benefits, and even earlier, in 1881, black washer-women in Atlanta organized strikes.
All this is important and it is not covered elsewhere and probably never will be.
The most difficult article for me to digest was Vivian Gornick’s essay “A Serious Woman, Reflecting on a Life in Feminism and Psychoanalysis.” I know Gornick’s writing and have always admired her, and so I found it distressing to read such self-doubting prose, focusing on what sounds like a singularly unrewarding long analysis with a woman Freudian, extending over many years. Gornick began her therapy trying to find out and possibly cure the difficulty she had finishing an assignment—a difficulty, I would assign to the prejudice against taking women seriously that played a crucial role in my early years as a writer, as well as Gornick’s. While admiring her frankness, I felt sad that her notable achievements, such books as Fierce Attachments, Approaching Eye Level, Personal Life and her biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, another writer limited by self-abnegation and her impossible husband Robert Lowell were not even mentioned. This leaves the contemporary reader to assume that Gornick’s writing life was stunted by her difficulty in finishing anything, a difficulty she clearly overcame—without help from her therapist, it seems, who insisted that her troubles as a writer were all caused by her troubles with men.
It would be wonderful if the feminists of the younger generation would remind us founders that what we managed to create years ago, in spite of daunting obstacles, has continuing worth—and even to expand on the problems for women with Freudian analysis. I do think we’ve left that dubious remedy behind.
Nevertheless, I’m excited by the appearance of LUX and plan to support it. If you are interested, do check out their website.
On! The future needs all our voices.
Thanks for vetting this for us: for the tip and the warning. I hope that the nihilistic screed you first read was there to show that they are not afraid to publish radical perspectives—not that they have no standards of what feminism is. As you noted, something that injures other women in order to rip off capitalism (or whatever the author named as the enemy) doesn’t feel like feminism. But I also remember how in 1968 we were putting together the theoretical journal No More Fun & Games, we were pretty wide ranging in the angles and analyses that we included. Because it was all new and we didn’t want to miss opening some doors that we didn’t know might lead to critical insights. Even the couple articles that had Marxist angles were not Old Left Marxism, but turning it to feminist application. But I remember the recognition that the patriarchical structures are so ingrained that we need to be digging deep to find the weaknesses.