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RHIAN SASSEEN

I cried when I read former Amherst student Angie Epifano’s account of being raped. I texted my little sister, thick in the middle of application season, and she told me that this had changed her mind about applying to Amherst. I closed the window. And then I thought: thank God I went to Smith.

Immediately I felt ashamed. This is not a helpful response, I chided myself – women are assaulted and hurt on your alma mater’s campus, too; there are plenty of kind-hearted, feminist men that attend Amherst. I took three classes at Amherst during my time in the Pioneer Valley, and served as editor-in-chief for a Five College literary journal I co-founded. A good portion of my life, in short, was willingly spent across the river, or passing time on the B43. And yet: when I think of Amherst, and when I think of co-ed schools on the whole, I cannot help but remember the male student junior year who told me that he thought Adrienne Rich was “silly.” That for a woman to be concerned that her voice would not be heard, that her work would be dismissed on account of her gender – well, we all live in the twenty-first century nowadays, don’t we? Times have changed. Women who talk of being women – oh, we are silly.

Silly.

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Enough of thinking, enough with thought: the end of words. Why is the red line always deafening towards Boston, never away? I sit on the train on my way to work and I listen. A deluge of information: two girls discuss the Emmys, a mother coos at her infant son. Smart phones everywhere. Enough! On go the headphones, and on my iPod I listen to one album and one album only: the Goldberg Variations, recorded nineteen fifty-five, and played by the pianist Glenn Gould.

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According to the media I am a “Millennial.” This means something along the lines of entitlement, attachment, obsession: I am addicted to my smartphone, I depend too much on my parents, I expect someday to have a job, and sooner rather than later. If you were born sometime in the years 1984 to 2000, chances are that you’re a Millennial, too.

I got a Facebook account in the early spring of 2007, my junior year of high school. This was big news in the halcyon early days of the post-Myspace era; previously, Facebook had been the domain of college kids, a rite of passage obtained as soon as the eager high school senior received his or her hotly-anticipated “.edu.” On behalf of my peers, sorry: with the influx of under-eighteens, Facebook became annoying in a whole new way. But there was still a level of privacy, a mark of secrecy that was extinguished as soon as it opened up to anyone over the age of thirteen, and the decidedly over-thirteens signed up in droves; suddenly, my peers and I were confronted with the peculiarly generational problem of etiquette in the face of the dreaded mom-request.

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I suppose the upside is that we’ve never seen the word “pussy” appear so many times in the pages of our national news sources.

The downside? – How about everything else?

I am referring, of course, to the recent sentencing of Pussy Riot, the Russian political art collective, and the orgy of self-congratulatory support that has erupted from Western liberaldom in the aftermath of their trial. The counter protests, imitation balaclavas, and celebrity endorsements of the last few days have begun to take on a familiar shape and pattern; like Kony 2012, Free Tibet, and a host of other faux-radical pet projects, the Western reaction to Pussy Riot ignores the cultural complexities of their protest and vision in favor of an opportunity to reaffirm the feel-good consumerism and empty sloganeering that mark the political consciousness of the modern liberal bourgeoisie. Pussy Riot was not about punk, not about riot grrl, and not about the supposed freedoms of Western-style democracy; it was about dissent, a sentiment curiously absent from the Western liberal’s state of mind.

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412 LinkedIn connections. 746 Twitter followers. A profile on every social media site; a resume stuffed with a long list of internships, paid and unpaid. Sunday morning brunches; a closet filled with H&M professional wear. Sentences that begin, “During my summer co-op…”

These are the markers of success for a particular breed of ambitious youth. They are ambitious in name only; in the day-to-day business of their lives, they remain unconcerned with the content, just the image. Commerce, not creativity, rules their actions. Witness the entire career of someone like Taylor Cotter: list-filled clips and a relentless careerism aimed towards a job, any job, rather than producing a body of work that actually matters. It is telling that her apparent idols are Carrie Bradshaw and Harriet the Spy: one, a child, and the other, a grown woman characterized by her childish fixation with shoes. Both fictions, both surrounded by objects, endless objects. Joining them: the individual’s sense of self.

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Permanence, impermanence. Every other person in the café where I am sitting has a visible tattoo.

This is not unusual. The first spate, I noticed, occurred when I was eighteen, when seemingly every other friend or acquaintance of mine decided, upon legality, to mark their flesh forever. Tattoos seemed to divide the adults from the children; those that were oldest, with the earliest birthdays, were made obvious by the designs that dotted their inner wrists. Photo albums documenting the process filled my Facebook feed; “It wasn’t that bad,” my fellow children boasted. “It didn’t hurt that much.”
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“Fuck!” Even his sweat was ironic. Somehow I had found myself in hell, the back room of a video store in Jamaica Plain, and now a teenage boy was rolling at my feet, screaming “Fuck!” into a microphone over and over again, as though he wasn’t playing lapdog to a music scene in crisis. Punk’s been dead for awhile, and Friday night, in a room of obsolete technology and obsolete sound, I bore witness to its last self-conscious gasps.

What does a do-it-yourself aesthetic mean when nothing is actually being done? Forty years after the genre’s founding, screaming non-contextualized obscenities will only take you so far. Of course, to a band like the Fucktrots and the scene I saw at the Video Underground, this is essentially the point. Everyone’s in on the joke – unfortunately, there’s no real joke to be had.

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On the red line last week, and amidst the tourists headed towards Harvard, the black-clad middle-aged men desperate to be seen as intellectuals, and the middle-class mothers balancing strollers and Eugenides paperbacks I spotted him – a man, no, a boy, a man-boy, puffy with post-adolescence, clothed in a bulky leather jacket and too-big ripped jeans that read “fuck off” on each knee, the words scrawled hastily in ballpoint pen. He wore his rebellion on his sleeve – his meaningless rebellion. His empty sleeve, a white flag waving.

Fashion bores me. Theoretically I can appreciate the distinctions it offers, the classifications of rank and social status that the buttons of a lapel or the worn heels of a sandal can signify. But when we mistake fashion for ideas, for a legitimate questioning of the overarching system at hand, I think we have gone too far. Fashion is not life, it is not an art; it is for the most part an arcane presentation of what the morning’s weather patterns made us feel emotionally.

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Once I watched a man die.

This was six years ago in July, the height of summer’s sweat, and that man was my father. One sticky evening he arrived home diagnosed with cancer and a week later he was dead, a month shy of his fiftieth birthday, a month after my sixteenth.

So you see, I am not entirely unfamiliar with death.

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On the train yesterday morning I stared out the window and watched Boston shutter by as I listened to Vampire Weekend’s debut for what must have been the hundred thousandth time since its release in 2008. It is now 2012 and I have existed for two weeks outside of the rarified and lovely fortress that is the modern-day liberal arts campus; in short, sometimes I think that I am a contra, too.

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