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From New Yorker

From Vox

“There are certain ways — and maybe it’s not cool to say this — in which quarantine has been helpful.”

This is The Lost Year, a series of stories about our lived experiences in 2020, as told to Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff.

Before Covid-19 hit, Honey rarely left the house. Much of their work as an artist and photographer could happen within their home, and they were used to spending a lot of time alone. Chronic physical and mental conditions made staying at home a strong preference.

But that hasn’t been true in the midst of the pandemic. In the past nine months, Honey has taken a job with the post office as a delivery driver and gotten married (to someone they met during the pandemic). I’m fascinated by the ways so many of our worlds have shrunk over this period, but Honey’s has actually expanded, to encompass both a spouse and a new job that takes them out on the road a few days a week.

I’m also fascinated by Honey’s story of managing a chronic pain condition in the midst of a pandemic, especially when so many of their symptoms present similarly to Covid-19 symptoms. Their solution for making sure they’re “just” suffering from chronic pain and not the virus is clever. Throughout our chat, I was blown away by Honey’s observations on a world in isolation, a world that resembles the one they’ve lived in for most of their life.

Here’s Honey’s story, as told to me.

Before the pandemic, I did a lot of film photography. I was creating all the time. Now, I shifted gears and got into other formats. I’ve been doing a lot of collage work. I’ve been doing sewing and embroidery and stuff. Some people have hired me to do paid photo shoots, and I always tell them I’m going to wear a mask and shoot with my close lens, so I can be far away from them. But I do them. Money’s money.

Honestly, changing art forms has been really good for me. I don’t think I would have done it [if not for the pandemic]. I wouldn’t have been able to discover all the things that I can do.

My quarantine experience probably hasn’t been like other people’s. Before the pandemic, I didn’t go to parties or anything, and I just left [the house] for things like grocery shopping. I have some mental health conditions, like autism, ADHD, and PTSD, but I also have physical health struggles, like endometriosis and arthritis. Those are definitely a challenge.

If anything, there are certain ways — and maybe it’s not cool to say this — in which quarantine has been helpful. When I used to tell people, “Oh, I can’t hang out,” it was much harder to get them to understand why. And now it’s like, “Oh, there’s a pandemic. I can’t come.” And a lot of jobs beforehand were not at all accommodating, or they didn’t have a lot of infrastructure for that. And now if I say that I’m sick and I can’t come in, they’ll say, “Oh, my gosh, stay home!”

I even got a job as a delivery driver with the post office. So it’s interesting — I’m definitely leaving my house more [than I did before the pandemic], but I’m leaving my house to be alone in a car by myself, which is the ideal situation.

I live in South Carolina, and in the upstate area [where I live], we shut down for maybe two weeks max. It was so quiet and weird. And a lot of people were home when I would deliver, which I wouldn’t like. But what was really weird was that very shortly after that, everything was back to normal. Everybody was out, like the pandemic didn’t exist. No one was wearing masks. The times when I’m in the building, loading my packages in my truck, I have my mask on. Some of my coworkers do, but most of them absolutely do not wear their masks. And it’s so stressful to me. I want to say something. I’m scared to say something.

I think many white people will always see inconvenience as oppression. And it’s not even that much of an inconvenience! They just hate that they have to do what everybody else is doing. They have this obsession with hyper-individualization that carries through not only to wearing a mask like everybody else; hyper-individualization in America also means that you’re responsible for your own health. It’s your fault if you get sick. It’s not my fault for not wearing a mask. You got sick, and that’s on you.

I grew up in a very isolated setting, and that prepared me for a lot [of this experience]. My parents had seven kids, and we pretty much didn’t interact with anyone outside our family. It was complete lockdown. I couldn’t watch TV or read unapproved books. So most of the relationships I formed in my life, I’ve formed over the internet.

I feel like this pandemic has been less challenging for people who grew up in specifically traumatizing households and people who have certain mental illnesses. For us, it’s often normal to conduct all our relationships over the internet. And some neurotypical people and people who love going out to meet people are having a lot of trouble adjusting.

I’m living with my wife now, and I’ve been semi on my own since I was 17, but I never had my own space. And now I have my own space. I get to control the experiences I have. I’m just starting with movies and TV and books. There’s no end to the entertainment and the new things I can discover. I just watched an anime called Fruits Basket. It’s really gay, and it’s awesome.

I met my wife at the start of the pandemic, on Tinder. I met them at the perfect time. I was learning a lot of important things on how to be independent, and they, as a person, are extremely independent. We’re around each other, because we enjoy each other’s company, but whenever we need our own space, we just take our own space. There’s a mutual understanding and a flow to it. It helped to almost approach the marriage like a business arrangement and not put pressure and stress on it and see where things went. It progressed very naturally, and it’s easy to be in a relationship with them.

Neither of us really believes in marriage, but they are ex-military, and they have health benefits and a retirement fund. I really needed surgery at the time, and it worked out, because we like each other. We met, and we saw each other every day since the first time we met up, and then we got married.

It’s been good. It’s been pretty easy. We’ve made sure to take precautions. If we mutually agree that we don’t want to be together in a romantic or sexual way, we have everything planned out for that. We’re not stupid.

The pandemic has exacerbated certain struggles we have. But because we have different things to manage, there is a balance. I’m able to be there for them, and they’re able to be there for me. The issues that affect me the most right now are my physical issues, and they are affected by their mental issues. So they’re able to help me with physical things, and I can help them with mental things.

Everything that I deal with — chronic pain, nausea, having trouble moving — mimics the symptoms of Covid-19. And every couple of weeks, I’ll have a freakout and be like, “Oh, my god, what if I have it.” But the one symptom I don’t get with my chronic illnesses is a loss of taste or smell. So if I’m experiencing symptoms, I can easily spiral. “What if the hospital is full? What if the bill is so expensive we can’t pay it?” Just freaking out. So now whenever I start freaking out, I just go eat a pickle or something to calm myself down and reassure myself. But it took me a lot of months to get there!

One of the biggest struggles has been that both of us are learning we don’t have to hide things from each other. It’s difficult, because we both grew up in environments where we had to hide things, just from us being queer and growing up in very homophobic families. At the beginning, it almost helped with the honesty [between us] being thrust immediately into a situation where we can take our own space if we want, but because of the pandemic, we are like, “Okay, you’re the only person that I’m going to see now.”

Knowing we have [a plan] but also being stuck in a house together helps with two things. First, [we have that plan], so I don’t have to be afraid to bring things up to my partner. And second, we are kind of stuck here, so to speak, so me keeping things to myself is stupid and childish. It’s just better to talk it out.

Next: A new baby who didn’t know your face for days because you were always wearing a mask

Bridgerton wants to explore consent while it ignores its own glaring consent issue.

Bridgerton, Shonda Rimes’s first collaboration with Netflix, may be a sumptuous, scandal-laced frolic through Regency London. But like many Shondaland series, it has plenty of dark and disturbing moments, and the show’s first season leaves us with more questions than answers. Chief among them: Does the creative team realize how badly they handled the rape scene?

Romance novelist Julia Quinn wrote the novel series on which Bridgerton is based, starting with The Duke and I in 2000. The first season, written by Shondaland veteran Chris Van Dusen (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy), follows The Duke and I fairly closely — including one scene that’s central to the plot but that has been called out repeatedly by romance readers over the years as a rape.

In the two decades since the book’s release, much of society has become more aware of what is and isn’t consensual sex, and the show deliberately made changes to the scene to make it less explicitly nonconsensual. That indicates to me that Van Dusen and his fellow creatives knew the problems with the scene they were adapting. But the version of this scene that ended up in the show is still nonconsensual, despite the tweaks. And although it’s framed as a serious violation of trust between consenting parties, it passes without any explicit acknowledgment on the show’s part that what just occurred was a deeply disturbing violation of consent.

Bridgerton is thematically concerned with the dynamics of informed consent, which makes it even stranger that this scene was left unaddressed; indeed, if there are any lasting repercussions for the victim of the assault or their dynamic with their rapist, we don’t actually see them.

Because it happens pretty quickly and the narrative moves on immediately from the specifics of the sexual encounter itself, I’m not sure everyone will judge this scene in the same way I do. But that’s why we should discuss it. 

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Our hero has a secret that sets the stage for everything

Bridgerton is a historical romance set during London’s Regency era, a period of whirling 19th-century ballrooms and high-society intrigues. Our story revolves around gorgeous debutante Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and the fake courtship she arranges during her debut on London’s “marriage mart,” the upper-class ritual of social functions that help eligible ladies and gentlemen make a match.

Despite coming from a powerful family and making a splash at her debut, Daphne is having trouble attracting suitors — so she bets (correctly) that faking a courtship with a very eligible duke will reignite the attention of other gentlemen. Her choice of bachelor: Simon, the hunky Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page), a Black man whose family was recently elevated to the peerage. Simon is trying to avoid matrimonial plots because he’s sworn off marriage, due to his solemn vow never to father children in order to let his entire family line, title and all, die with him. It’s a promise he made in order to spite his abusive late father, who emotionally abused Simon all his life and cared more about his dukedom than anything else.

The relationship ruse is mutually beneficial for Daphne and Simon, as it allows him to avoid seriously participating in the marriage mart. But of course, in between bickering and pretending to be in love, the two fake lovebirds soon develop a very real romance. Through an unlucky turn of events involving epic misunderstandings, secret love trysts, and a duel — y’know, the usual — the storyline scoots Daphne and Simon into a hastily arranged marriage. This leads to lots and lots of sex scenes because they’re a hot couple who are hot for each other. But their newfound love also creates a whole new set of problems arising from Simon’s vow never to sire a family — a vow Daphne knows nothing about.

This subplot contributes to Bridgerton’s most interesting thematic idea, if one it ultimately squanders: the relationship between scandal, secrets, and informed consent. The plot revolves around Simon’s choice not to tell Daphne that he has vowed not to have children. Instead, he only tells her that he “can’t” have children, a clear difference from “won’t.” This deception places her in a doubly vulnerable position: Daphne’s in the dark about sex generally, as a woman who’s had no sexual education, and since she’s getting most of her tutelage from him directly, she has no way of knowing that he’s hiding things from her about his sexual health and practices.

Simon’s duplicity is, to some extent, unwitting — he doesn’t intend to trap Daphne into marriage, but when events conspire to make marriage a necessity, he goes along with it, spinning a story that implies his inability to father children rather than tell her the truth. The narrative treats the difference between “can’t” and “won’t” as a crucial distinction, one that fills Daphne with horror and bitterness when she realizes it. It’s an interesting turn because Bridgerton frames Simon’s deceptive phrasing as deliberate, along with his choice to continue lying to her by omission. This deception placed Daphne in the position of being unable to give informed consent, either to sex or to their entire relationship.

The problem is that she only figures this out by raping him.

Let me back up. (Warning: This is about to get pretty graphic and gross.)

The rape scene is brief and disturbing, but it’s not treated as a rape

Daphne knows nothing about sex when she gets married. Her mother, too embarrassed to give her the specifics, sends her off to her marriage bed completely unprepared. Meanwhile, instead of telling his new wife what’s up, Simon enjoys ravenous sex with Daphne but adopts the ol’ tried-and-true contraceptive method of pulling out every time. Eventually, Daphne figures out that there’s some connection between Simon never completing the act and his insistence that he can’t have children. Determined to figure out whether he’s capable of it, she takes control during sex and positions herself on top of him so he can’t pull out.

When he realizes his predicament right before orgasm, Simon looks alarmed and tries to stop — he cries out twice for Daphne to wait — but it’s too late. Once she’s achieved her goal, she stops, and he processes what just happened in shock.

The strangest thing about this moment is that I’m not sure the show’s writers consider this scene to be a rape scene. Daphne is immediately furious with Simon for lying to her, and the show then focuses on her betrayal and rage; she even has a semantic speech about the difference between “won’t” and “can’t.” It’s clearly intended to spell out the intricacies of informed consent, but none of Simon’s duplicity justifies the way Daphne pulls his secret — and, to be clear, his semen — out of him. One bad moment of uninformed consent does not justify a moment of nonconsensual sex. And depriving Simon of his consent to both sex and fatherhood, even at the moment of climax, is still rape.

If the show had really explored the idea that Simon’s lie led to another similar violation of consent, that could have resulted in some really interesting narrative choices involving the two of them dealing with the fallout of both their betrayals and learning to communicate more clearly and carefully and sensitively.

But the show doesn’t dwell on Daphne’s choices, or on any long-term aftermath from that moment. The incident doesn’t seem to impact Simon’s ability to trust Daphne in bed. Instead, the show turns toward Daphne’s distrust of him for lying to her, dwelling on Simon’s need to win her forgiveness and give up his vow for the sake of their happiness.

I should note here that an even more nonconsensual version of this scene also occurs in the novel. Quinn clearly wrote the scenario as a violation: “Daphne had aroused him in his sleep, taken advantage of him while he was still slightly intoxicated, and held him to her while he poured his seed into her.”

Since the book was written, countless romance writers and readers have inserted productive commentaries on the role of rape (and tropes of dubious consent like “forced seduction”) in romance fiction. But according to Quinn herself in a reported recent exchange with romance vlogger BooksandKrys, the consent issues in that scene flew under the radar at the time The Duke and I was published. “Yes, it was shocking, but no one seemed to feel that Daphne had done anything morally wrong,” she told BooksandKrys. “It was only as years passed and we gained new understanding of ‘consent’ that people started to question her actions.”

Quinn offered some perspective on the dynamics of rape as early as 2003; speaking then to Time, she commented, “I can’t imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him ... I can’t think of anything in my books that any feminist would find objectionable. ... And I consider myself a feminist.”

Yet by 2010, the scene was being discussed among readers as an example of sexual assault and lack of consent. By 2015, readers were dissecting the scene to point out its disturbing dynamics.

That the show’s creatives included this scene while making it less broadly, but still explicitly, nonconsensual, suggests they knew it needed fixing. But it seems like they failed to see how badly they ultimately handled it. Without signaling more effectively that Daphne’s choice was just as violating for Simon as his secrecy was for Daphne, Bridgerton undermines its entire experiment in exploring the boundaries of consent.

Through this moment, the show also undermines its central relationship, causing us to question the whole foundation of Daphne and Simon’s affection for each other. Because Bridgerton doesn’t make an effort to depict Daphne’s rape of Simon as a huge issue that must be addressed for them to heal their marriage, we don’t really have much way of understanding whether their mutual trust is really fully repaired in the end. And we’re given no assurance that she won’t violate his trust the next time she decides he might be lying to her.

It’s also frankly a giant gaslight; even as I write this, I’m wondering if maybe I’m wrong and that the scene wasn’t rape — or if, perhaps, maybe this is the one time in history where somebody gets raped and it’s just not that big a deal, so it’s just kinda okay that the show glosses over it and moves on and Simon seems totally fine afterward.

Obviously, these are horrible takeaways for a show to leave us with. The dynamics of consent are complex and often frustrating and confusing, but one thing is almost universally certain: Rape is a big deal, and it often hugely impacts and alters both the rape survivor and the rapist. For Bridgerton to ineffectively convey that Daphne raped Simon and then treat it like it was a minor side note to the much bigger issue of him lying to her makes it more difficult for audiences watching it to understand what consent looks like.

The fact that the rape victim here is both male and a person of color makes it even more egregious that the show is glossing over the incident. Men are often considered silent victims of sexual assault, and Black men in particular are often made scapegoats for sexual violence, which further erases the status of Black male victims of sexual assault. In this context, the show’s emphasis on Simon as the instigator of Daphne’s choice basically paints him as being responsible for his own rape. This aligns with the broader cultural gaslighting of Black men and the shifting of blame away from the white men and women who enact violence upon them.

Bridgerton has drawn its fair share of rave reviews as, among other things, “delightful trash.” As a huge, lifelong lover of the sorts of romance stories Bridgerton is adapting, what I hate most about this summation is that it implies that the ingredients of this story are a part of the inherent nature of the raunchy, racy historical romance. Not only is that a condescending attitude toward a genre that is frequently very literary and very serious, but it’s flatly wrong: Rape, especially unacknowledged rape, is by no means a feature of historical romance writing, nor was it going unaddressed and undebated back when Quinn wrote this story 20 years ago. Countless romance writers have done better than this. Bridgerton could and should have followed their example.

In the US, Jews have been eating American Chinese food on Christmas for over 100 years.

For over a century, American Jews have eaten American Chinese food on Christmas. The annual feast is a holiday tradition that is likely to go on as usual this year, even in the midst of COVID-19 — albeit in the form of delivery or takeout. This pastime has evolved to a near-holy tradition, parodied on Saturday Night Live, analyzed in academic papers, and reaffirmed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

Perhaps the foremost expert on the practice is Rabbi Joshua Eli Plaut, PhD, executive director of American Friends of Rabin Medical Center, rabbi of Metropolitan Synagogue in New York, and author of A Kosher Christmas, the premier (and only?) comprehensive study of what Jews do at Christmastime.

I spoke to Plaut about Chinese food on Christmas, and why he used to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. 

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Both Jews and Christmas have existed for a while. When did Jews first ask, “What should we do on Christmas?”
It has been a question for as long as Christmas has existed, because Jews have always felt like outsiders. But how they felt specifically was really a function of their status in society. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Jews were not very assimilated. Christmas was a night of possible pogroms and violence, with so many celebrants, often drunk, going from house to house. Jews did not go to the synagogue to study. They stayed at home for physical safety reasons. If they did anything, they might play cards or chess.

In Western Europe, after the French Revolution, Jews were more assimilated. There, they had more freedom to wonder, “Do I bring a Christmas tree into my home? Do I have a holiday meal? Do I give out gifts?” The early Zionist Theodor Herzl was a secular Jew, and he had a Christmas tree in his salon. After the Chief Rabbi of Vienna came to visit, he wrote something in his diary like, ”I hope the Rabbi doesn’t think less of me because of this. Then again, what do I care what he thinks?”

Okay, so tell me when eating Chinese food on Christmas first comes into the picture. Is that a Jewish-American tradition?
Yes. It begins at the end of the 19th century, on the Lower East Side, where Jewish and Chinese immigrants lived in close proximity. The very first mention of American Jews eating in a Chinese restaurant dates to 1899, when the American Hebrew journal criticized Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants. By 1936, a publication called the East Side Chamber News reported at least 18 Chinese tea gardens and chop suey eateries in heavily-populated Jewish neighborhoods. All of these were within close walking distance of Ratner’s, which was then the most famous Jewish dairy restaurant in Manhattan.

Jews would go out for Chinese food on Sundays, when they felt left out of church lunch. It was a gradual transition from the traditional diet of Eastern Europe, to eating American Chinese food, to eating other pan-Asian cuisines, like Indian food. I like to say that, within a hundred years of arriving in New York, the average Jew was more familiar with sushi than gefilte fish.

In the last 35 years, Chinese restaurants on Christmas have really become this sort of temporary community where Jews in the United States can gather to be with friends and family. It’s a secular way to celebrate Christmas, but it’s also a time to shut out Christmas and announce your Jewish identity in a safe environment.

Was there any reason, beyond proximity, that Jews wound up eating Chinese food, as opposed to some other immigrant cuisine?
In terms of kosher law, a Chinese restaurant is a lot safer than an Italian restaurant. In Italian food, there is mixing of meat and dairy. A Chinese restaurant doesn’t mix meat and dairy, because Chinese cooking is virtually dairy-free.

In Chinese-American cooking, if there is any pork [which is not a kosher food], it is usually concealed inside something, like a wonton. A lot of Jews back then — and even now — kept strict kosher inside the home but were more flexible with foods they ate at restaurants. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman wrote about this practice. She described [the plausible deniability of non-kosher ingredients] as safe treyf. [Treyf is the Yiddish word for non-kosher.] A lot of Jews considered the pork in Chinese food to be safe treyf, because they couldn’t see it. That made it easier to eat.

In your research for this book, did you come across anything about Chinese food and Christmas written from a Chinese-American perspective?
I actually found a citation from 1935, in the New York Times, about a restaurant owner named Eng Shee Chuck who brought chow mein to the Jewish Children’s Home on Christmas Day. If you were to interview Chinese restaurant owners, they’d tell you that Christmas is their biggest day of the year, outside of probably the Chinese New Year. If you want a more thorough understanding, though, you should probably go talk to some restaurant owners in Chinatown.

Sometimes my family eats Chinese food on Christmas, but we always go to the movies. When did that become an established Jewish Christmas tradition?
When Jews began to settle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1920s, they were poor immigrants. They worked in sweatshops and lived in tenement housing. In their time off, they would go to the newly opened nickelodeons. For between one cent and five cents, they could see a very early form of a movie. By 1909, there were 42 nickelodeons adjacent to the Lower East Side and 10 uptown in Jewish Harlem. Christmas was just another day off, so these early movies attracted big crowds.

We know from the Yiddish press that Christmas became a popular day for the opening of new Yiddish theater productions. It was a day off from work, so what do you do? You can stay home, or you can go to the nickelodeons, or the Yiddish theater. Eventually, decades later, you could go have a meal in a Chinese restaurant.

What do you usually do on Christmas?
For many years I was researching this book. This year, I’ll be with my family in a small town, where there are no real restaurants open. We will probably play a board game or watch Netflix.

What did you do on Christmas growing up?
I never went to Chinese restaurants. We’d go skating in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and then we’d have hot chocolate with marshmallows. I have great memories of Christmas. My mother would take me to sit on Santa Claus’s lap. When I was writing this book, I asked her, “Why did you take me — the son of a rabbi! — to sit on Santa Claus’s lap?” She said, “Everybody in America does it, so why shouldn’t we?” She knew I was secure in my Jewish identity.

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