Getting Off on the Sludge: A Review of Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia
“What turns on doesn’t obey optimism or ethics.” —Catherine Fatima, Sludge Utopia
“Last night I slept with someone primarily due to our shared capacity for extreme misery, but you cannot give up absolutely that which brings you closest to who you are,” writes Catherine, the twenty-something narrator of Catherine Fatima’s debut novel Sludge Utopia. Fatima’s novel is a work of auto-fiction, a term used to describe texts that blur the line between fiction and non-fiction in which it becomes difficult to separate the author from the narrator (some examples include Shelia Heti’s Motherhood and Karl Ove Knassguard’s multivolume My Struggle). Sludge Utopia is a sexual odyssey, a diary catalogue of Catherine’s sexual encounters: some are with men she desires, some with men who are giving her a place to stay, and others are with men she is merely sleeping with, she tells us, to stave off boredom. At best, the experience is pleasurable, but lacking orgasm; at worst, the sex leaves her feeling “not terribly affected by last night’s discomfort”—and that, it appears, is good enough for her.
Taking place over the span of a year and broken into six sections—stimulation, depression, utopia, family, love, and sludge—Sludge Utopia is Catherine’s personal diary. Recalling the pages of young girls’ diaries everywhere, some of the entries read like a disconnected list of events: “Trip away to NYC with Caroline; no personal writing; little time alone; no screens after certain hours. It was a lovely trip. We did lots. All introspection was shared outwards. We: took bus; arrived to Penn Station…” and the list goes on for a whole page. Full of questions and musings—“I should feel a bit inadequate, right?”—the writing invites you to get personal with the narrator. And yet, there’s always a staid distance, a feeling like you’re not fully being let into the most vulnerable thoughts and feelings of the narrator. For a narrator deeply interested in vulnerability, this interest gets trapped in the world of ideas and intellect, failing to find its translation into the lived experience of the narrator. “Why should vulnerability seem like an absurd thing to allow oneself? Because it is,” proclaims Catherine. In one of the most indecipherable passages in the book, Catherine tries to articulate a theory of vulnerability that I’m still not sure I can say I understand (despite how much I want to). Catherine’s theorizing becomes impossible to parse due to grammatical and syntactical errors—and these errors uphold the distance that Catherine wishes to keep between reader and writer. While part of me wonders if the lack of editing here and throughout the novel was purposeful—an attempt to stay true to the unedited form of a diary— I also felt disappointed that Catherine’s smart ideas got lost in these sentences.The sex in Sludge Utopia isn’t the kind you really want to read about. There’s something ugly about it.Despite these issues, Sludge Utopia offers a compelling look at the struggles of a young girl living under late capitalism and just prior to the eruption of the #MeToo movement. In a world where the only kind of ‘feminist’ sex is sex that’s empowering, it’s all too easy to judge Catherine for continuing to engage in sex that makes her feel uncomfortable. The sex in Sludge Utopia isn’t the kind you really want to read about. There’s something ugly about it. When faced with narratives of sexual desire like those offered by Fatima, it is all too easy to judge, pathologize, and turn away. But when we do so, we refuse to acknowledge the “primary ethical conundrum of a woman’s sexual life,” which Catherine defines as follows: “how to take the reality of a world that does not work in her favour—a world of desire that subjugates her—and learn to get off on this.” The narrator of Sludge Utopia explores the fraught, messy, and complicated nature of desire through a variety of ugly sexual encounters. The ugly sex that Catherine has allows her to recognize that she cannot reconcile her ambivalent desires—and maybe the best thing she can do, for now, is be okay with that. Catherine can still get off on her problematic desires, all the while dreaming of the sexual utopia in which gender equity will open up the possibility for something better. It’s important to note that ugly sex isn’t the same as bad sex where you didn’t get off, or as non-consensual sex. Rather, it’s the sex that gives you pleasure at the same time as it repulses you; the sex that makes you feel not so great after, but that you find yourself desiring again. Ugly sex captures the way that one can oscillate between attraction and repulsion in a matter of seconds. When having ugly sex, you might get off and thus enjoy the act, but also feel humiliated, degraded, and objectified in the process. Or, like Catherine, you might just patiently wait for it to be over. But accepting that one’s desires are predicated upon a system of oppression poses a problem for a subject invested in ethics. In the opening paragraph of Sludge Utopia Catherine asks a question that haunts her throughout the novel: “My desires form a system of ethics, right?” The world of Sludge Utopia is one of cruel optimism—a term coined by affect theorist Lauren Berlant in her book of the same title. For Berlant, cruel optimism describes how the objects we desire, which we believe will help us flourish, actually prevent us from doing so. Grounded in our neoliberal moment, Berlant’s concept might be best described by the ongoing investment in the American Dream. This ideology tells us that if we work hard enough we can overcome the obstacles and become financially successful. We’ll get the house, the two cars, the family plus dog. If the world knocks us down, we just have to pick ourselves up again and keep going. The American Dream masks the reality that the world is unjust and that it doesn’t matter how hard we work because systemic inequalities will keep us down. But the cost of seeing the American Dream for what it is—a fantasy—is just too high, for the American Dream keeps the subject going. In an interview with Book*hug’s Mary Ann Matias, Fatima evokes Berlant to explain how she “would like to help in the global effort to overthrow capitalism, and detail some of the relational and emotional ties which keep people bound to it and its dehumanizing effects. This is the goal: to make sensible the ways in which ideological attachments become personal attachments, and the way those attachments inform one’s most intimate experience.” Given the landscape of late capitalism, in which “ideological attachments” must become “personal attachments” in order for the subject (and for capitalism) to survive, it makes sense that Catherine chooses to embrace cruel optimism and get off on porn, despite finding it “tacky and ugly.” Catherine rejects the anti-porn arguments of second-wave feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, who argued that pornography is inherently violent and only serves to further the commodification of women. Susan Brownmiller would go so far as to claim that “there can be no ‘equality’ in porn, no female equivalent…pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access.” Unlike the second-wave feminists involved in the pornography wars, Catherine’s central concern is that porn has made it impossible for her to get off during sex with others. And so at various points in the novel, Catherine gives up pornography, committing herself to getting off on the material of her imagination, before lapsing back into her former habits. During her summer abroad in France, where Catherine has committed herself to studying French, she describes a major success: she has gotten herself off on the image of a sexual encounter she’d had with a young man. Here’s the catch: she doesn’t feel sexually attracted to him. After numerous advances, Catherine finally gives in and lets him suck her breasts. The experience is far from satisfactory. And yet, she writes, “Though the encounter itself had made me feel unhappy and uncomfortable, I retained the visual stimulus of Claude’s sustained suckle. I came not to the video, but to this, with my eyes closed!” The “sustained suckle” left her feeling detached from her own body and produced the ugly feelings (to borrow Sianne Ngai’s phrase) of unhappiness and discomfort. Catherine gets off because this sexual encounter was ugly. It would be all too easy to ask why Catherine submits herself, time and time again, to sex with men like Claude and all of the other “emotionally debilitated, predatory fucker[s] in life” (her words). This was the question on the minds of many men after reading Kristen Roupenian’s story “Cat Person.” Published in The New Yorker in December 2017, “Cat Person” went viral. It follows a 20-year old woman named Margot who goes on a date with 34 year-old Robert, a man who frequents the cinema where she works. After exchanging a series of text messages, Margot meets Robert for one of the most awkward—and sadly, unexceptional—dates in history. Despite her better judgment, Margot goes home with him and has some of the ugliest sex ever described in literature:
Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.As women flocked to social media to proclaim #MeToo, men were left wondering why Margot didn’t just get up and leave. One man was so confused by Margot’s actions that he penned an open letter to the character entitled “Dear Cat Person Girl” (if you’re going to go down this dark corridor, I would recommend reading “Dear National Review Guy Who Wrote An Open Letter To The ‘Cat Person’ Girl...” to help restore your faith in the world). Confronted with the lose-lose situation of saying no to sex and being viewed as a tease or having sex that’s just plain bad, Margot chooses the latter. And, like so many women before her, she chooses his pleasure over her own.
Instead of focusing on why women choose to sleep with awful men—a question that can be answered quite simply: #patriarchy—we need to shift our focus to a different question: Why are we so quick to pathologize the woman who has ugly sex and what does such a reading foreclose?Like Margot, Catherine often finds herself between Scylla and Charybdis, forced with making a choice in which neither outcome is ideal. As Catherine explains: “I have spent time with and fucked someone I dislike and disrespect, not because there was some truth there, nor because I had to, but because I chose to against other options [boredom, a public nap, the cold that would likely result therefrom], and it has neither changed me nor proven that I’m different from what I had thought before.” For Catherine, the stakes aren’t as high as for Margot: boredom or ugly sex? And yet, both women illuminate how the world we live in doesn’t offer women the choices we deserve. Instead of focusing on why women choose to sleep with awful men—a question that can be answered quite simply: #patriarchy—we need to shift our focus to a different question: Why are we so quick to pathologize the woman who has ugly sex and what does such a reading foreclose? Included in that royal “we” isn’t just the men who were confused by “Cat Person.” Women can all too easy fall into this trap—that’s the magic of internalized misogyny. Take Marie Calloway’s 2013 novel, what purpose did i serve in your life? When Calloway published the story “adrien brody” in 2011, she became the subject of much online vitriol. The story was originally published as non-fiction on Calloway’s blog and included the real name of the man she slept with and a photo of his cum on her face. Calloway (age twenty-one at the time) sent the piece to alt-lit writer Tao Lin and he published it on his website, Muumuu House, under the name “adrien brody” (the pseudonym for the forty-something writer Calloway meets online and sleeps with in New York City). In this fictionalized account of a real story, Calloway arranges to meet up with a semi-famous literary critic in order to have sex. They meet up, have sex, he cums on her face, she asks him to take a photo, and the story is born. It’s impossible to talk about Calloway without discussing the polarized response to her work. While some embraced Calloway’s confessional writing, other critics and writers proclaimed her writing a boring, flat, talentless attention grab. As Lisa Carver of Vice Magazine notes, Calloway has been labeled “‘a fame whore, with the accent on the whore.’ Her ‘lazy, Penthouse Letters style’ is ‘offending to real writers.’” An anonymous contributor to the now defunct literature blog HTMLGIANT sums up what they call “The Marie Calloway Problem” as follows: “we live in a society in which the mechanisms of commerce are designed to encourage us to believe that young women are randy hot sex machines, but we have a collective meltdown when one of them actually writes about sex that is anything other than vanilla. It breaks discourse. We’re that unevolved.” Sadly, as “Cat Person” demonstrates, not much has changed since Calloway’s work was published—and Fatima’s Sludge Utopia risks being read along the same lines as Calloway and Roupenian. When presented with undesirable options, Catherine states that perhaps all you can do, is “[t]ake your pleasures where you can,” knowing that “when the better world dawns, there will be better pleasures, too.” And so as we move through Sludge Utopia, the main question quickly changes from “Can my desires be ethical?” to “How can I create space for my ambivalent and potentially unethical desires?” The latter question comes up when Catherine confronts the fact that she never achieves orgasm during sex because the fantasy world of pornography offers her the disaffected distance she needs. Eventually, Catherine becomes exhausted with interrogating her desires. She tells the reader: “I’m over trying to find some motive for my sexual desire of lack of it.” Catherine provides an imperative (whether it’s for the reader or for herself is unclear): “Spend less time interrogating your ambivalence.” Having grown up in a patriarchal world, it can be difficult—if not impossible—to understand which desires are truly yours and which desires belong to the patriarchy. In her essay “Marie Calloway, Degrading Sex, and Books About It,” Alexandra Molotkow notes: “Porno didn’t implant our desires, but it shapes them unilaterally, and since desire is hard to express, it gives us a vernacular: we fall back on what we know, even if it’s nextto [sic] what we want.” The typo—or is it a neologism?—in Molotkow’s statement is quite perfect: “next to” becomes “nextto,” further emphasizing how the space between what we’ve been taught to desire by pornography and what we actually desire is much smaller than we might want to think. With this knowledge in mind, Catherine decides to embrace the ambivalent nature of her sexual desire and admits that she’d much rather get off on the sludge than the utopia. “On all my most optimistic days,” she writes, “I try to come to abstract notions of what’s right and good, but it’s hard to bring about a climax from this.” She goes on:
What good masturbatory material is made of light? My orgasms come only from darkness. They have not come from the playfulness of the sexual encounters that have made me feel most utopian…I don’t like what I come to. I needn’t. There’s always shame, envy, dominance…I love a sexual encounter that feels friendly and fun because it suits my values, but I never masturbate to “friendly and fun.” I masturbate to things getting very uncomfortable. I want to like the sex I desire in my utopian mind, but I come instead to the sludge…Maybe shame is what I feel, so I like the fantasies that make use of it. Let sex bring you into the gloom of your psyche, just like in your masturbation fantasies. Maybe then there will be concordance. Maybe then there will be orgasms.This moment of disclosure is refreshing in its honesty. Coming at the end of the book, it might have been all too easy to hope that Catherine would say “no” to ugly sex. To see this embrace of the sludge might feel disappointing. And yet, just as Catherine “masturbate[s] to things getting very uncomfortable,” so too might the reader find some pleasure in the gloominess of this ending.
Sludge Utopia asks the reader to interrogate the desire for closeness and connection with a text’s protagonist.The pleasure I felt at the end of Sludge Utopia came from a surprising place. The ending gives the reader a glimpse at the vulnerability they’ve been waiting for. For a novel that’s structured in diary entries, one might expect to feel close to the narrator, as we’re being let into her darkest, most private thoughts. But there’s always this feeling that Catherine is keeping the reader at arm’s length. Given that she defines vulnerability as “kneeling before the earth as an always-wounded person”—it makes sense that she finds it difficult to be vulnerable, even in the pages of her diary. In one of the most confusing passages in the novel, Catherine reflects upon the nature of vulnerability:
To seek affirmation from a person who must recognize in you something you desire to be seen in yourself, having not known you—that is nonsense. You won’t get what you want. You will either suffer disappointment (what they see in you fails totally to meet the fantasy of what you want to have seen in yourself) or, otherwise, you’ll be surprised (what they see in you won’t match what you’d wished to have seen, it will surpass it).What Catherine seems to be arguing is that you are vulnerable when: a) you seek affirmation from another (yes!) and b) the other sees the thing you want them to see. But if you want them to see this thing, and they do see it, is that vulnerability? I guess it depends on the thing. What is the “something” that we want the other to see? Don’t the most vulnerable moments occur when the other sees something in us that, on the surface, we don’t want them to see—because of fear, anxiety, trauma—but deep down actually do want them to see—because it’s a part of who we are? Catherine’s definition of vulnerability gets stuck on “the fantasy of what you want to have seen in yourself” when the reality is that we often fail to live up to the fantasy version of ourselves that we wish we could be. And so it is perhaps here—in the moments where she fails to be vulnerable, where she admits that her understanding of vulnerability is wrapped up in fantasy, in her desire to be seen in a certain way—that Catherine is actually most vulnerable. While the ending of Sludge Utopia might provide the reader with the a glimpse at the vulnerability they so desperately desired, Catherine can only offer that glimpse of vulnerability in the distanced, and therefore safe, relationship between reader and writer. When it comes to her other relationships she never fully allows herself to be vulnerable. As she learns to embrace her ambivalent desires, she moves further away from fostering intimacy with others. In order to feel okay about getting off on the sludge, Catherine must present herself as disaffected, distanced, and invulnerable. She tells the reader how, “my wish for years has been to experience sexual pleasure without the vulnerability that it has usually relied on, and I’ve been granted that wish, but I fear I’ve unknowingly offered up the opposite experience in exchange for it. If I never miss Noah, if I never fantasize about sex with him again—did I still enjoy the way his dick felt inside me?” The two things that Catherine is most invested in, vulnerability and freedom, are at odds. For vulnerability depends on acknowledging your lack of freedom in relation to the other. Every time we enter a romantic or sexual relationship we are essentially saying to the other “I’m hoping that you won’t hurt me.” Relationality is an act of trust, and what’s at stake is that the other might break your trust, might say something mean, and might do something that hurts you. In Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant and Lee Edelman argue that sex—or any form of romantic/sexual relationship—is “unbearable” because it threatens one’s sovereignty. You are no longer just an “I” but a “we” and within that formation, there’s little you can do to control the other (much as you might want to). Catherine offers her own articulation of Berlant and Edelman’s theory when she asks: “How much of ambivalence is really just being terrified of another’s departure or choice against you? How easily can you act the way you really want when you know you’ve both consented in some way to being trapped?” The answer to her first question comes easily: A LOT! The answer to the second question is a bit harder. If the act of trapping requires deceit and surprise, how can someone consent to being trapped? If we’re talking about the act of trapping as preventing someone from escaping or leaving, then it’s also hard to imagine how consent operates in this paradigm. These antithetical concepts can perhaps be read as demonstrating another form of ambivalence. If ugly sex comprises feelings of revulsion and attraction, perhaps intimacy is made up of the oscillation between consenting and trapping. A bleak proposal, surely, but one that is perhaps more honest and vulnerable. By the end of Sludge Utopia, it’s clear that Catherine is still grappling with how to be vulnerable in her intimate relationships. But perhaps the most sludge-like utopian reading I can offer is that her sexual relationships might be the gateway to acting the way she truly wants to in her other relationships. If she can accept ambivalence in/via her sexual desires, then perhaps that will open up the space for ambivalence and all its attendant vulnerabilities to exist in her friendships and romantic partnerships as well. While I left the world of Sludge Utopia feeling no closer to Catherine than when I began, I understand why such an affected distance, such a foreclosure of vulnerability, is desirable and even necessary to survive the world as a young woman today. Sludge Utopia asks the reader to interrogate the desire for closeness and connection with a text’s protagonist. Again and again, I find myself having to convince my students that such “difficult women” (to borrow Roxane Gay’s term) shouldn’t be so readily dismissed. Women like Catherine have something to teach us—not just about the world we live in, but about ourselves. For the ugliness we see in her can also be found buried deep within ourselves.
Author photo credit to Angela Lewis.
