This week, my essay on Kristen Stewart’s film The Chronology of Water (which I published here in April) was republished by The Hot Mess Weekly! Check it out there if you haven’t read it yet.
Today, I’m publishing the monthly-ish column I Will Always Love You, an advice column for creative collaborations (inspired by Dolly Parton herself). You can read more about the inspirations for this column here.
I’m always looking for more questions to answer, so write to me about your studio-mate sculptor (who you wish was your bed mate), the drummer in your band who always talks over you, the cool kid poet who you wish would talk to you at readings, and much more. Send me your juiciest quandaries!
Dear I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
I work as a freelancer in a creative field so I meet new collaborators all the time and work with them intensely for a short period before moving on to the next project. I was recently talking to a colleague and he says that he never flirts at work even when people try to engage, but I flirt all the time! (Consensually with boundaries in place) Is this wrong???
Sincerely,
FLAWED (flirting at work edition)
Dear FFAWE,
I turned to the academic literature for this one: “The discourse of seduction and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power,” reads the introduction to Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction. “Flirtation, by contrast, is a game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender.”
I think this distinction is key, especially in a culture of hierarchy and domination. There are manosphere influencers offering courses on picking up women, but they are not teaching flirting. Post-#metoo, men complained that they “couldn’t even talk to women anymore,” tragically admitting that, to them, there is no such thing as flirtation or even connection, only veiled seduction (what a great loss for them; what a great danger for us). To seduce is to seek power over someone (which, consensually, can be great fun!), but to flirt is something else: together you pass power back and forth, improvising banter, chemistry, and inside jokes. Flirting is essentially creative.
Flirting is also Queer, regardless of the genders or orientations of its participants. In bell hooks’ oft-quoted definition, Queer is not “about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Flirtation, at its best, is a bit utopian: a playful experiment with power, a rejection of the domination of seduction, a zone where one can “invent and create” together. Sometimes, and in the way we most often think of it, flirtation is a way to “find a place to speak and to thrive and to live” by forging a romantic partnership. But if we think of it Queerly, by flirting, we can together find so many places of speech, thriving, and life. For this reason, I think flirting with your artistic colleagues is not only not “wrong” but quite important.
Part of the work of advice columnists is to read between the lines of three sentences, and sometimes project assumptions. I don’t know any more about the gender or sexual orientation of your colleague than his pronouns, but those pronouns imply a relationship to masculinity—and masculinity is fraught. It is absolutely his right not to flirt if he doesn’t want to! But also, toxic masculinity makes flirtation impossible; flirting “is a behavior that leads to the loss of virtue, virtus, to the loss of manliness, virtus proper. It is the reign not of the female but of effeminacy,” writes Barbara Vinken in her essay “Frill and Flirtation: Femininity In the Public Space.” Some men choose toxic masculinity, eschewing flirtation for seduction. But others—craving connection, creativity, and thriving, but injured by the violent pressures of patriarchy—fear that the most cruel impulses of our culture will well up in them, causing great harm. They might fear making someone uncomfortable, crossing a boundary into harassment. I can understand how someone like this might close themselves off to flirting entirely, out of fear that they cannot know the difference between flirtation and seduction. Even the “good” man, the man who takes great pains to avoid dominating those around him, might close himself off to a practice of connection and creativity—the “male loneliness epidemic,” indeed. How cruel is masculinity’s grasp!
In Barbara Natalie Nagel’s essay “Three Terrors of Flirtation,” she asks “While we are flirting, can we ever not regard each other as queer equals?” “Queer equals” is a rare state, and an excellent orientation for artistic collaborators. So, I would not only encourage you to flirt, I also encourage you to pay attention to what happens in the process. What if you treat it not only as a fun thing to do during rehearsal breaks, but as a crucial tool in your artistic process? How does it stoke your creativity? How does it nurture your collaborations? What does “Queer equality” feel like, and what effect does it have on your art?
So flirt away, and may it make your art better.
