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it’s week 4 of eating almost-expired yoghurt in my little room and laying on my back of this exercise in free-writing and trying to garner psychic revelations through lying on the floor. back when I was sad and on exchange (but no refunds) in London, my friend Nab suggested we do morning pages, which was just us writing for 20 minutes without stopping or self-censoring. I liked it because I was lonely. she stopped doing it after about four days (no shade) but I kind of got addicted to the idea of vomiting whatever deigned to burble to the surface of my conscious mind. of course there used to be a lot more words (but perhaps less sense? I’m not the best judge of sense). as my ex’s cousin’s wife said to me once, ‘where do all the words come from?’

from the scummy surface of a pond. from the blessing of a large typewriter. from the wayward dreams of a piece of soot stuck all the way down next to your coccyx. from loving the word coccyx, as well as louche, festooned and susurration.

it makes me sad that being constantly scrutinised lodges in all of our consciousnesses and that it’s harder and harder to sit with a thought. all of a sudden the percolation of a single stream of consciousness is a privilege. and the expression of said thoughts, even more so. I will also say that due to the single event in my teenage years which forced me to reckon with surveillance, being sanctioned, and non-consensually going viral on twitter, I seem to have had perhaps an early exposure to online vitriol that’s changed the way I think about humiliation and saying things publicly. for sure, I wasn’t a typical victim, but being filmed having lesbian sex as a minor (young and sweet only 17! less sweet than young, tbh) and having it DISSEMINATED (seminally) to what seemed like the entire country does something to you. the findings of the longitudinal study on that should be out right about now. I’ll let you know in a couple of months what our insights are.

and it is no surprise therefore that surveillance, and privacy, and the internet, and eroticism, intersect and mingle in a way that is deeply personal to me. back in 2010, when a pivotal life event of Post-Surveillance Sex Trauma (PSST) happened to me, the concept of revenge porn and sex tape leaks was still quite a novel idea. perhaps the law has caught up with ‘revenge porn’ and weaponised exposure + exploitation of people’s bodies in some areas. but there’s been a palpable cultural shift, one that Joshua Comaroff pointed to in the recent Human Collaboratively Speaking No. 8 Parallel Worlds: Perceptions of Space-Perceptions of Self panel at Zarch (co-featuring my fiancé, just to get it all almost too close for comfort), in speaking on rave culture in singapore and the ‘violence of being perceived’, only for countercultures to move towards anti-surveillance through creating spaces for dark bodies to writhe as an indistinct mass—to thrive in both being seen and not appraised, to find solace in the abject.

there is a real fear of being put on display that has been worsening in the past five years or so, and perhaps it has something to do with the pandemic, and perhaps it has something to do with the ‘terminally online-ness’ of the crowds that have recently come of age. I’m constantly re-evaluating what it means to have a sexual orientation and often am fascinated by what seems to be an increasing number of asexual and asexual-adjacent individuals coming out as such, finding community, creating culture. what is asexual culture? real question, no rancor. I ask this because I always struggle with labels, and even though definitionally ‘bisexual’ seems to fit me the best, I always have certain qualms about identifying as such (qualm one: not as seductive a label / qualm two: femme bi invisibility remains unpalatable to me / qualm three: I find, saying I’m bi makes cishet men think their chances of sexual intercourse are higher than they are). call me internalised biphobia but I think I externalise quite a lot of it.

I will say, on privacy and eroticism, that I’ve gone the complete other way one would expect in the face of the PSST. my degradation fetish arms me somewhat but not much. I always say I like my adorations public and my humiliations private. As the beloved central thesis of Georges Bataille (also beloved) asserts, ‘eroticism is assenting to life in the face of death’, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to put the erotic down, even while being unblinkingly surveilled. between people repeatedly recognising me on hookup websites and uncles who unabashedly stare at you in the depths of Chinatown where I used to live, as well as having been hand-reared from birth in the hypersurveillance landscape of CCTV City Singapore, my usual approach to the matter is to make sure you look good for the camera. if you want them to stop staring, you should make eye contact and wave. when they’re looking at my tits, I like to get close enough to them and moo very very loudly. they walk away.

this has nothing to do with my auditioning for a local play over the weekend on a jumped-up whim, because I thought I should do something terrifying once in a while. I thought I’d gotten over my fear of theatre professionals but my immediate cold sweat when I saw other auditionees proved otherwise. apparently, I don’t mind being looked at, until I have to be something that resides in someone else’s mind. it’s quite a fascinating kind of pathetic that I observe in myself, in having to forget myself, and perform someone else’s words. maybe I can’t. maybe I need to take an improv course. maybe I just need to accept the meager doling of talent in this regard and sit down.

In a piece for Lux Magazine, Bringing sexy back, Kate Wagner writes about the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy, in large part due to the social media industrial complex that demands that we keep creating content, rather than thoughtful interactions that demand pause. She says,

“Punishing strangers for their perceived perversion is a form of compensation for a process that is already completed: the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy through internet-driven surveillance practices, practices we have since turned inward on ourselves. In short, we have become our own panopticons.

“…The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?)”.

related reading:

Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny, by R.S. Benedict for Blood Knife, on the desexualisation and ramped-up objectification of bodies in popular media and the bygone days of ‘radiating overwhelming sex-haver energy’. real real pleasure is made up of experiencing the pleasure through the body, unfortunately or luckily for those of us who still have bodies
and everyone is sexy and no one is erotic, by elle jones.

this also brings to mind a recent conversation I was having with my friend K, who is in the midst of rising to their ‘hiaoness’ in hopes of achieving the ultimate destiny of culminated Leonine power. I’m not sure what this transformation entails but I’m very in love with the idea of the hiao, or the vain, the attention-seeking, as something to aspire to. often I think of gender as inextricable from sexual appeal (something that was also mentioned in Comaroff’s talk on the counterculture of the raving abject—the intentional removal of oneself from the pressure to ‘look hot’ is a recurring theme, to rescue the self from needing to perform desirability, a kind of transcendence that, for me, perhaps curves back towards wanting to be seen and acknowledged by consciousnesses that you know are on your side, and to repudiate and repulse those that would have appraised you and found you wanting anyway. this is the real safety that grotesquerie and abjections offer us. and thus the genderless masses of bodies writhing in the black night, in theory.)

in reality, it is too hard for me to stay in a space in which I cannot perceive my body for any protracted time, even though I grew up in the 2000s, when heroin chic was a thing, and tabloids that made their money off of zoomed-in pictures of muffin tops and cellulite were a thing, and diet fads swept global pop culture. it’s not to say they were all willingly starving while my arrogant disdain for trends and being worried about being unattractive saved me, but in a way, this may have been true. and of course it is easy to love your body when you are told it is attractive by strangers online. I came of age in the time of chatroulette and omegle. the internet was scary back then but also much more exciting. willingly getting catfished led us here, to my love of what I call “weaponised hotness”, meaning you wield whatever hotness you possess like armour, especially around people who don’t think much of you, built in part on the idea that that hotness is kind of a farce to begin with.

does glamour magick work? can people feel the prickling wave of horny magnitude and magnificence radiating off of you if you dab elephant semen behind your ears? I think hotness, like intelligence, can be sharpened— and a lot of it has to do with belief in one’s right to be there, and a sense of aesthetics, as well as a sense of how you’d like to shape any interaction with other people. flirting is play. the ambiguous unnamed is a source of delicious tension—conversely, the ambivalent is a kind of wilting lack in vitality. isn’t it interesting how you can’t fall flat or pull too hard in order to maintain the shine of interest? I don’t know if that’s in the pickup artist playbook. but I think the prevailing sentiment is that it’s cringey to even extend a tendril of invitation to play, to express interest, to see if one can charm someone. have you ever watched someone get charmed in real time? it’s a kind of actual sorcery. charming people know they are charming—I don’t speak of emotional manipulators, or lovebombing, or extractive predatory behaviour. real charmers don’t have to lie, and a lot of the secret of charm is full, undivided attention: to see someone else and notice things about them no one usually does.

and isn’t that all anyone’s looking for—a real-life miracle? to be noticed, seen, to appraise and be appraised and find neither wanting. self-acceptance in love and acceptance of self-loathing in the same breath. I still love the internet even though it sucks now (all shade to algorithmic slop and corporations who have decided to stake their turf on any scrap of nigh-uncolonised psychic space) and I hope you will always have a well-festooned coccyx that ripples with susurrations, if that is your preferred way of being flirted with.

on the topic of being seen and noticed, we had a wonderful little reading in Masuri’s space last saturday, where he sat with us and repeatedly assured the crowd that he was very very shy and introverted. it was nice to sit and talk about queerness, monstrous forms, hantu, and the various entities that plague us. here we are in a space red-lit which ensures our countenances are suitably obscured (topical!), so you can’t see the expression on people’s faces when they react to your poetry:

let’s be feminist writing with mama:

Singapore Writers’ Festival (7-16 Nov 2025):

1. Poetry is Not A Luxury
   “how gender concerns and politics can play a role in shaping and reimagining poetry”
   8 Nov 2025, 2.30-4.00pm
   Asian Civilisations Museum, Discovery Room
   Pooja Nansi, Kim Yideum, Marylyn Tan, moderated by Christine Chia
   
2. The Salon with Marylyn Tan and F.H. Batacan
   “Get up close and personal over a literary lunch with us! We will discuss Southeast Asian genre fiction, the body, the uncomfortable, class divides, and politics. Fun!”
   13 Nov 2025, 12.00-2.00pm
   Brasserie Astoria
   Marylyn Tan & F.H. Batacan