Living During a Pandemic
by Madison Diemert
By now, the entire world has been living through a pandemic for about six months. Each country has been handling COVID-19 differently— some better than others. New Zealand, for example, has had a total of fewer than 2,000 cases since then and has reopened as a country. To compare, the United States has had 8.23 million cases.
Currently, The Sock Drawer team resides in the U.S., and though we are all states apart, we are all experiencing very similar things. We have all gone back to work, those of us who are still in school have resumed classes… and we are all living in constant purgatory. None of us can go outside without wearing a mask. We are social distancing from the people we love the most, and after eight months, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. But it's not just the five of us who are living this way. There are millions of people, not just in the States, who have been failed by their leadership and are being forced to keep their economy going through a global crisis. There are millions more who are jobless with no source of income. So for me, that begs the question: how the hell are we actually living through all of this?
It seems impossible. It feels like the country should still be under total lockdown with the cases constantly rising and the political unrest only getting worse. It's as if we're being forced to live life as if COVID-19 did not exist. You're expected to work forty hours a week and turn in your assignments on time with no exceptions. You’re to take no time off or care for your mental health because why would you, everything is fine!
At least, that's how I feel. Since March of this year, my anxiety has been out of control and I was unemployed from May until very recently. Things have been looking up, but there is still a constant reminder that we are living in a global pandemic. People are dropping like flies around us and there is nothing we can do about it. I still don't know how to get on in the current state of the world without having a daily anxiety attack. I've tried hard to take care of my mental health, but it seems like there is only so much I can do.
No number of hours played in the Sims 4 or six-dollar coffees can truly allow me to escape the reality that our country is eating itself from the inside out. There are only so many times I can paint my nails and re-watch Avatar: The Last Airbender before I gravitate back toward the depths of social media. Where my family is at constant war with each other, where the news is so dystopian I truly feel we’ve been transported to another dimension. It’s so much escapism and distraction on my end not to fall down a wormhole of bad news and imminent doom. I know I’m not alone in this, either, and thinking about that fact also creates an even bigger sense of existentialism.
I am in a constant loop of being anxious, finally feeling stable, then falling right back into my disorder once again. For now, there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it. What can anyone do when they have no power?
Final Girls and Intersectional Feminism
by Izzy Peroni
Across subgenres of horror, there is a character consistency that finds its place in movies of all decades: the Final Girl. She is softly gorgeous, but modest, and within the raucous group of young adults she travels with through rural 70s Texas or to a cabin in the middle of an alarming wood, she is the one with the most common sense, and often a romantically troubled mind. She is virginal, but appealing, and the parts of her character arc that don’t involve running from whatever is trying to kill her usually involve a lukewarm romance and dealing with her vapid best friend. She pouts, she scolds, she screams, she solves problems, but most importantly, she lives. Her boyfriend, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, the blonde one, the black guy, the nerd, the jock, the stoner: they all get picked off one by one by two by three, getting shredded and slashed up and swallowed by gaping, bleeding holes in their beds, leaving our heroine alone to find victory against the violent entity, or at the very least, to escape. All others are merely tragic fodder for her character development.
The character trend is omnipresent in the slasher subgenre of horror, especially movies from the 70s and 80s; Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie Strode from Halloween, and Sally from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre all spring to mind immediately. These young ladies fit the bill almost perfectly, as their traits make up the Final Girl trope that we understand and build upon today; Nancy is paranoid but for good reason, and fights back as much as she is hunted; Laurie is also a fighter against Michael Myers, but before his interruption into her life, she is modest and bookish; Sally spends most of her individual screen time screaming her head off and narrowly avoiding death. Slasher movies emerging in the mid-2000 to the 2010s continue with the Final Girls trend, but often with a harder edge; in the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, the iconic Ash Williams is replaced with Final Girl Mia, who resolves the movie dramatically with a shower of blood and a chainsaw. In more recent years, a highly debated final girl is Dani of Midsommar, who seems to find a twisted kind of emotional healing while her friends get picked off by a white supremacist cult.
Moving tangentially from white supremacy; notice anything about the female characters I’ve listed off? You probably don’t even have to Google them to guess what I’m referring to.
Yes: they are all white.
According to tradition, the defining characteristics of the Final Girl can be summed up as smart, chaste, paranoid, and white. A Final Girl is instinctively expected to be a cishet white woman, and even if the rest of the cast is somehow diverse, those other characters will be killed in order to follow the formula. In recent years, diversity in movies has become a significantly broadened discussion, but if a movie still has a cishet white lead, the sacrifices made by and of the other characters nulls the attempt at a diversity. While horror is not a monolithic genre by any means, the majority remains white-centered, even when a powerful woman is at that center.
So what does this say for those who believe that the Final Girls of the modern horror genre are pillars of girl power? It’s true that many of these women manage to actively turn the tides of their story through asserting power and cleverness to survive, but why wasn’t that writing given to anyone else? Josh from Midsommar is a genius, genuinely respectful of the culture he is invited into, and sufficiently cautious; are we to believe that his vital character flaw was being a black man in a movie about a white woman? How do we, as an audience, digest the fact that black women are almost never involved in such a massive genre? And how best can we approach these problems— by remaking classic movies but with a diverse cast that somehow doesn’t kill all of it’s non-white characters; or, taking a page out of Jordan Peele’s book, creating fresh new narratives starring black actors, either decentering race, like is Us, or directly calling out the sort of faux woke ideologies that put black characters on the chopping block behind white leads, like in Get Out?
As a horror fan, I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others as well. Please comment down below, and we can discuss! And happy Halloween!!
See-Through Closet
by Gracelyn Willard
I found the past in my old google drive. I was looking for something else but as is often the case, found the past staring back at me instead. Prom, 2015.
(Two girls in black dresses, wholly in love.)
I have been hiding for a long time. Not intentionally hiding, but hiding all the same. I was bravest at 17 when I proclaimed to the world that I was bi and then I hid all the photos that showed me and my girlfriend at the time. (I broke up with her in part because I saw how uncomfortable everyone was with my relationship.)I didn’t want to face relatives that wouldn’t understand or judgmental strangers. I posted platonically posed photos so no one could say for sure if I was or wasn’t dating someone. I never made gushing posts about how much I loved my partner. In the end, it was easier to hide then shout from the rooftops, to never show that I wasn’t straight.
(Other people’s fear pushed me back into the see-through closet.)
Even though I had grown up in a neighborhood of gay couples and had liberal, understanding parents; society still pushed me to hide, extended family pushed me to hide. (I was once told “It’ll be easier for you if you just like one or the other (genders)” ) I currently look the ‘straightest’ I have in the last 4 years (not that you should judge people’s sexuality based on appearance but comparing 17,18,19 year old me with me now- I have that 90s movie mom aesthetic down). I am still coming to terms with my own sexuality, it may take me a lifetime to be fully comfortable and confident, but I am happy to be taking one step forward. I love my boyfriend more than anything (even coffee) but being in a hetero presenting relationship is strange because it adds to the mask I’ve built up. Even though I’m technically out I have the safety of being straight presenting which contrasts with the fact that I can love and be attracted to any gender/non-binary individual.
I wrote a story about two women and dating and heartbreak that was workshopped in a class I took. Another person in the class, who had heard me mention my boyfriend, asked me “what was it like to write from such a different perspective for you?” I responded by outing myself to them, “I’m bi, I’ve dated women it’s not a different perspective.” No one should have to scream their sexuality, we should all be allowed to be as open or closed about it as we want, but we shouldn’t have to put up with the assumptions and the fear that so often comes with the non-heterosexual sexuality.
I have never had a full conversation about my sexuality with my family and after I broke up with her and began dating guys again the questions about who I liked stopped including neutral gender pronouns. “He’s cute.” “Do you like him?” “Which of the guys on (x show) do you think is attractive.” And I did nothing to change that. I accepted the closet again. I accepted my ability and the privilege of people assuming I was straight.
Spoons and Technology
by Gracelyn Willard
Lately, I’ve been using technology more than ever, as I would assume most people have been. I’ve always used social media to connect with people the pandemic has simply highlighted the importance of social media in my life. My use of social media has only changed in the sense that I spend more time on it currently than before, my purpose on social media has remained the same; I want to connect with people. Instagram specifically allows me to reach out to people I’m unlikely to meet in real life. For me, Instagram is a platform I use to find and give support to and from other chronically ill individuals. I seek out the “spoonie” community and use the knowledge and words I find there to help me in my own life and to remind myself that I am not alone. A “spoonie” is a term for a person with a chronic illness and comes from this theory where everyone has a certain number of spoons for a day and each task you do cost a certain amount of spoons and once you run out of spoons you run out of energy for the day. People with chronic illness typically have fewer “spoons” than the average healthy person. And sometimes tasks cost more spoons for a chronically ill person.
I use my Instagram to document moments of my life; both the positive and the negatives. I want the people who follow me to see that it is possible to continue to live life even when your health places restrictions on you and that there are people out there that are dealing with the same shit as you. The internet helps us all find a community, but it is especially useful for individuals who have difficulty leaving their homes due to illness. Instagram, for the Spoonie community, helps to spread hope, information, and support for those who may lack those things, or who just need an extra dose some days. When the outside world can often be rude, unbelieving, and difficult to navigate for a chronically ill individual the internet is a surprisingly safe bubble at times. It is a place where stories of health can be traded without a misinformed bystander butting in asking if we’ve tried “exercising: as a solution to our health problems. Without technology or social media, I would have a difficult time maintaining a positive outlook on my life. The stories of success and healing that I find through the “Spoonie” community helps me maintain hope that I can get better one day too, and when some days the flares are too much I have a community of people who understand and who go through the same thing right at my fingertips. We watch out for each other and are always there to give support in whatever way we are able. Technology and social media have the power to bring hope and support and people together.
Let’s Discuss Silence
by Kerstin Holman
A person can contribute to a cause in two simple ways: positively, or negatively. This statement may seem too open-and-shut, too dismissive, but when it comes to advocating for human life, there is no time to debate on the gray matter in something that is so easily identified as black and white. One may believe that their choice—yes, it is a conscious choice—to remain silent during times when using your voice and platform and privilege that many others do not have is just as bad if not worse than being on the wrong side of history. In fact, your choice to remain “neutral” by not posting, retweeting, donating and showing up to protests ironically speak volumes to the people who know you. You are screaming right in their faces that you do not care for those who are suffering at the hands of those who have way too much power. Your decision to continue living your life like everything is normal as if the world isn’t burning to the ground is like taking the world’s largest megaphone and vocalizing to everyone that you are comfortable with people being murdered left and right as long as you remain unaffected. You may think that because there appears to be an endless parade of loud voices consuming the air that your silence will go unnoticed. But our shouts advocating for change and mercy are not enough to distract us from the deafening sound of you choosing to do nothing to help our cause. Your silence means our arrests. Your neutrality tolerates our pain and our deaths. Your indifference equals racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism. Our voices and actions may lead to our demise, but your insistence to remain quiet is just as deadly. Your complacency makes you just as culpable.