Dear community,

I want to thank those of you who heeded last week's call for support from the bottom of my heart. This website, it turns out, is rather a different platform to Substack, where this community's engagement was higher—perhaps simply because it was seamless to read and comment from within the app. Sadly, that meant that I had been feeling a bit solitary over the past few months, as if I couldn't reach you all as well as I used to be able to. Reading your words of encouragement and being notified of the one-off donations and upgrades really settled me back in this work. Thank you.

I've started a writing workshop for a small selection of recent graduates and am meeting with them a few times a month to help them refine their craft and nurture new relationships. I am so grateful to them for their efforts and wisdom, and am learning as much from them as they are from me. Whilst I cannot open the group to everyone, it has provoked a need to hear more from you, the community. There are certain supporters who comment every week, and I always look forward to hearing what they have to say. That sense of interconnection has seeded the idea of a section on this website whereby you, the community, could share your reflections more deeply: not a letter to the editor per se, but a Commons of sorts.

I'm not sure how exactly it would function. I think submissions would have to be reserved for paid subscribers if only because I get bad enough inbox overwhelm as it is. My gut says it should be embedded into the existing newsletter, but maybe each post could be a collation of relevant submissions rather than just one. I want to work all this out with you because it feels desperately important that Planet: Critical become a space through which to think through and feel through together.

I was mulling all this over when I received the below reflection in my inbox two weeks ago. Anya has given me permission to republish it here to as the first piece of dialogue in our Commons. I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I did. Please let me know in the comments below if this is something you think we should continue with.

With kindness,
Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I really enjoyed your piece, Females vs Citizens. The part where you explain Simone de Beauvoir's faults touched close. A few summers ago I was reading one of her short stories "A Woman Destroyed" and I couldn't put it down because of how much the main character reminded me of my mother. In many ways I have too embodied what she reproduced about the way she related to the world of men and control as I have tried to figure out my relationship with men as well as my mind. When she is in her flow and she needs to be a mother, she is strong, willful and remarkable in many ways. I owe my own strong-headedness, if I have any, to her. I also owe my softness and ability to care patiently to her. But when she steps back into her head she chooses not to reconcile her power in motherhood with a position she sees as one of nonconsensual servitude. It affirmed in me my thoughts as I read through your paragraphs that the way to her empowerment is actually through her children, by embracing what she may not have felt she had chosen, but was able to deeply apply herself to anyway. And we turned out okay! (I think.) 

Unfortunately I see that resentment everywhere around me, especially where women my age, in their twenties, are insecure about their desirability and their individuality in the way you describe it more than they are worried about their freedom to express themselves and do all the things they care about (I for one love cooking and cleaning and looking after people). I was thinking about my own struggles with desiring patriarchal validation, and how the decisions I have made with great difficulty in the last couple of years have been in pursuit of a liberated sexuality: a sexuality not limited to the realm of just sex but every other aspect of loving an individual in their wholeness, including, and this sounds really obvious and dumb when I say it like this, but wanting to love, nurture and protect men and the relational space we build between us? I think if I said this to my flatmate she would cringe and roll her eyes. Sometimes she passes naive (well-intentioned) comments about men and they make me feel bad. I feel like she is afraid. I feel this because I used to feel afraid too. Because often no one hears the voice that values reproductive labour, at least not when it's uttered in the sphere of professional work and intellectualism. So we grow ashamed of our desire for it and learn to ridicule and dismiss it. 

I am starting to understand a lot better now what you mean when you distinguish between productivity and reproductivity, and I see it in my own work as well and your previous critiques of it. A few weeks ago, I started to have a moment of emotional vulnerability because I realised how afraid I feel of doing what I want to do in a professional environment, worried that I will never be good enough for the demands of the workplace because I don't have, I suppose "productive" skills. (I was making a lot of assumptions there about what kind of work exists that somebody else kindly pushed back against for me.) 

Then I was at the gym and listening to your conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta and I was enraptured by the idea of border-work. He verbalised what I think about all the time and find such difficulty expressing in my own words. I guess everything I create is essentially reproductive. I guess that reproductivity and weaving together and creating ties is very much about this border work between bodies that needs to be done and that requires overcoming our fears of each other.

A week ago Mitski released a new album and on it are these two songs. The first is called Dead Women and it's about how women are always turned into these wishful objects to suit somebody else's fancy and the second one is Charon's Obol where she talks about how she will take on the work of taking care of the spirits of these dead women (because she herself almost became a dead woman) and their hungry hounds and healing the heart of the house they died in. The way I read her lyrics really resonates with this idea of reclaiming reproductive power and putting to work this regenerative citizenship where we actually acknowledge how we are bound to each other and responsible for each other and to continue to nurture these desires. 

Warmly,

Anya
Nijmegen, NL