"I didn’t see that my body was the thread connecting what I was doing sexually, what I was doing with how I fed myself, what I was doing at work, etcetera."
Talking about labor, bodies, consent, motherhood, and writing with Margo Steines, author of Brutalities: A Love Story
Margo Steines’ Brutalities is one of those books that makes me want to write. It’s put together with such precision and care that it almost feels as though it wasn’t written, but rather, was always meant to be. Though it’s a story of Margo’s own experiences with pain—how she was drawn toward various forms of brutality in work and in love, and how she moved toward another relationship with herself, as well as towards motherhood— it’s also a book, quite simply, about the complexity of our desires.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Margo about her book at Green Apple Books in San Francisco earlier this week. You can view our live conversation here. As I told her during that conversation, she has a rare ability to highlight beauty in her depictions of various forms of violence— not at all in the sense that she glorifies trauma or pain, but in the sense that she’s able, as a writer, to highlight the deep longings underneath what some might simply write off as the “unhealthy” things we do with and to our bodies. Because of this, her book offers endless revelations about what it means to live in a body, especially how we might make peace with the compulsions we once held, even those that really hurt—whether that be a predilection for extreme exercise or being punched in the face.
Margo and I corresponded last week, before our in-person event, about bodies, labor, consent, power, addiction, and motherhood. Our conversation is below. Margo is a writing coach and teacher, so we also discussed the craft of memoir and the question of the “difficult” book.
Though our lives have taken very different paths, there are so many overlapping themes in our books. While reading your book, however, I found myself thinking about how wise you were about consent, power, and your body before you got pregnant (it took me longer to get there). Can you speak to how the many forms of work you’ve performed in your life, which you explore in the book— sex work, farm work, metal work—helped you develop a sense of awareness of your body and its desires?
I feel like I have spent the current era of my adult life unraveling the damage I took on while I was moving through the world using my body as a vehicle and shield. As a young person I felt profoundly dissociated from my body, both on a physical level where I was (I thought) unbothered by touch and treatment that absolutely should have (and, spoiler, did) bother me, and emotionally/psychologically, where I did not understand that I was accruing damage. If anything I felt explicitly the opposite, like I was accruing some kind of protection by placing myself repeatedly into spaces of harm and extremity. I thought—felt, or intuited might be better words, because this was not an explicit calculation but rather a thing I just kept doing and kept ratcheting up—that I could perform some kind of homeopathy on myself by continuing to expose myself to greater and greater levels of discomfort, intensity, and demand. It was a very confusing network of habits that I did not understand as such—as related, deeply related—until much later, because I didn’t see that my body was the thread connecting what I was doing sexually, what I was doing with how I fed myself, what I was doing at work, etcetera.
I now see my various jobs as sites where I explored how much I could take, in a lot of different ways, while simultaneously using them as practices to gird myself against the harms of the culture and the interpersonal dynamics I was engaging with. To be plain, I thought that if I could do exhausting, terrifying, and disgusting things, I would have immunity against the pain of being alive. While I was doing those jobs, my body jobs, I did not understand or really even think about anything like this, in large part because the practice of the work served as an intoxicant that prevented me from thoughtful analysis. I don’t know if that’s a personality quirk or universal, but I can’t usually see a thing while I am actively doing it.
I thought that I could perform some kind of homeopathy on myself by continuing to expose myself to greater and greater levels of discomfort, intensity, and demand.
The book ended up being the place where I put it all together—where I arrived at what now feels like the incredibly obvious conclusion that my work as a dominatrix, as a metalworker, and as a farmer, which I had once worn so proudly as emblems of my “manic pixie-mental patient-guy’s girl” persona, were different versions of the same thing, that their specifics were largely incidental, and that I just as easily could have ended up anywhere else where my body was the currency.
You write about how, while pregnant, you hoped that in motherhood “suffering and personal disintegration would be optional,” and how you often felt yourself closing up around people who talked about how hard parenting was or how much they had lost themselves in the process. What struck me about reading this passage though (and granted, I read it against the backdrop of the current, pretty polarizing outlook on maternal complaint), is that it reminded me how complex maternal subjectivity and embodiment is, even as we’re told motherhood is just this flat, one-dimensional, universal experience (whether that be the sentimental version or the everything’s-a-drag version).
Parenting is hard on the body and can bring up old wounds, but as you show in the book, it can also be a refuge. Can you speak to how, perhaps, infertility or the wellspring of consent you felt in your love for your partner and your pregnancy shaped your entrance into parenthood?
It’s so hard to read that now, because I have experienced a tremendous amount of suffering and personal disintegration—like, that is the EXACT term for what I have experienced—but not in the way I was afraid of. I think reading your book really radicalized me because I have spend the whole three years of my child’s life feeling so angry at myself for not managing better and the idea that I have received an intractable situation *from the culture* had not crossed my mind.
I do think that the ten years when I was so sad for want of a baby did a complicated thing to me, and a lot of infertility moms talk about this: like that you’re not allowed to complain about *anything* if you get a baby, because you Wanted This So Hard. The idea that “I did this to myself” comes up a lot in my therapy, and your language of “I did this to myself” is really resonant for me. There is so much to be angry about—I did not get a single day of parental leave, paid or otherwise, and I will be angry about that for the rest of my life. I was pregnant and with a newborn during the early pandemic, in a state where protections were just removed one day, quite early on, and never came back, which initiated in me a version of agoraphobia that I believe was and is a sane reaction to circumstances. The way my birth was medicalized (despite preparing in the precise way you did) and *managed* in a way that felt oppositional to my autonomy and intuition, and that neither I nor my partner spoke up in a different way makes me rageful, but I feel like I should not complain, because my baby was healthy and I didn’t die.
And then also I was 38 when my kid was born, and I absolutely was better equipped to handle everything that came with raising a small child than I would have been even five years earlier, let alone ten or more. I knew how to live with depression without torpedoing my life, which was critical, and I knew how to work, to put my head down and grind, both of which have been very useful to the task of raising a family under late capitalism. As a younger person I lacked the self regulation and work ethic that has allowed me, and us, to manage, though I remain sad and angry that self abnegation has been what has been required of me to do so.
I feel like I should not complain, because my baby was healthy and I didn’t die.
What has been a surprise and a relief, and what I do think is related to the strengths of my partnership and the work I did on myself before getting pregnant, is how easy my relationship with my child has been. I really feared the version of postpartum depression where you struggle to connect or bond with the baby, but I had an opposite experience, where the love was so instant and intense that it felt like it was consuming me. I have always loved her in a full and uncomplicated way, and even in the hardest moments when I am losing my shit I feel a sense of camaraderie with her, a sense that we both got dropped into a complicated and sometimes shitty reality but we are working our way through together.
The book does not cover your experience of breastfeeding, but I know you have feelings about this. There’s a lot there: pain, pleasure, consent, power! What was your experience feeding your first child and how did it further your education about your body?
Well we are still nursing at 3 years old, so there’s that. Nursing is very hard and also very easy. It is the single most time and energy consuming thing I have done in the last three years, and also the facet of my parenthood that I am proudest of. I definitely developed a gross superiority complex where I felt better than people who chose not to nurse, which I am not proud of but which I understand to be an expression of what a complete failure I felt like in every other space of parenting. Like, I wanted to be a gentle Waldorf mom but I do not have a marble kitchen island and a skirt woven of natural fibers and I don’t make the sensory boxes and we don’t do crafts and I say fuck all the time and my child knows the lyrics to Big Pun. There is nothing fit for Instagram happening over here. I am constantly on the verge of losing my shit. But I make the milk!
I don’t have a coherent answer to the rest of the question, except to say that I feel so curious about it that I am writing a book length essay about milk making.
While Brutalities tracks your pregnancy during the pandemic, most of the book is about the earlier history of your body, including experiences with violence, self-harm, and addiction. You open with an author’s note that warns readers that the book covers “distressing” and “difficult” topics. This is a subject I think about a lot— the difficult or distressing book— because we live in an era in which it seems readers are often surprised to encounter a book that challenges them emotionally or gives them a reading experience other than the warm and inspirational. This says a lot, I think, about the state of memoir and nonfiction, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts. This book feels full of tenderness, care for the subject matter and for yourself and your readers. It never feels, in other words, like you’ve sought to traumatize your reader— but rather that you, as an author, were nevertheless clear-eyed about writing unsparingly. What experience did you hope to create for readers and how does this connect to your approach to the craft of memoir?
I wrote the book I always want to read. As a reader I actually don’t find similar material difficult or distressing, but I know that other people find it so, and I want to have empathy for that. I think part of why I like reading the most raw, unfiltered, fucked up stuff is related to *gestures at the material in the book.* Like, I always need the strongest dose of whatever. And I will acknowledge that my book is that.
I think a lot about my relationship with the reader, and what I wanted to offer was the kind of deep intimacy that tends to be either intoxicating or repelling. I wanted to write a book that you couldn’t feel “meh” about. But beyond those questions of how I wanted to be received, for myself I wanted to tell the truth in a way that I find hard to do in my lived life. Reading your book contributed to my understanding of why it is often so hard for me to say when I am uncomfortable, when I don’t want something. I have understood people pleasing to be both a personal failing and a consequence of so much work in various service industries (and I consider sex work to be very much a service industry fwiw), but the idea that I might be receiving it in a more systemic way is one I am newly folding into my understanding of my selfhood. But I often choose being liked over being honest, peace over truth, and I hate that about myself, and on the page I know how to not do that. So I wanted to have that space, the written space, to be the person I would like to grow into in real life, and to tell the ugly and unflattering truths without apology.
I learn so much about gender and power from reading memoirs that explore sex work. My experience of sex from a young age was also that it was very often transactional, to use a term you call up in the book, and yet, of course, the labor I felt was embedded in my experience of sex and sexuality is not at all equivalent to sex work. Your book is certainly in dialogue with writers like Melissa Febos and Melissa Gira Grant. Is there anything you want readers to know about this literary history, about what these books teach us about sex, consent and labor, or how Brutalities expands this canon?
It makes me so happy that sex work has come more into the light, so to speak, since the time I was working. I remember reading Shawna Kenney’s memoir, I Was A Teenage Dominatrix, back when I was working, and feeling so seen in a way that I had not experienced before, and also just in awe of how radical an act it was to speak publicly about sex work in a form like a book that you can’t retract if you get uncomfortable. Partially because of the circumstances that I started sex work under (underage and in secret from everyone in my life) and partially thanks to criminalization, there was, for me at least, a real sense of secrecy about it even during the many years that I was socially out as a SWer. Like, I always had a fake job that I would cite if I was in a situation that felt dicey or more stigmatic than I cared to deal with.
So, every time a thoughtful book about SW gets published, I clap, and it was important to me that now that I can pass as a civilian, I use the social capital of having an education and respectability (which, ugh, but also, it’s worth something out there) and a tiny platform to let more light in. I neither condemn nor celebrate the adult industry, it is a space of complicated harms and freedoms, like every space of labor under capitalism and also in its own unique ways. It feels important to me that we, broadly, hear about SW from actual SWers, and though I have been retired for a long time, it's a positionality that never fully expires.
I wanted my book to explore some of the ways SW was liberatory to me, how it served me, and also some of the ways I did not fully understand when and how I was being exploited, and how I have been harmed by it. But I also wanted to frame it in the context of other forms of labor, of which I could say the exact same things. Politically I believe that sex work is work, but until we talk about it alongside other forms of work and remove the veil of moralizing, that stance can feel flimsy.
I neither condemn nor celebrate the adult industry, it is a space of complicated harms and freedoms, like every space of labor under capitalism and also in its own unique ways.
I have to ask you about touch. You write so beautifully about the ubiquity of unwanted touch felt by women (it’s so common that, as you write, the memories of it blur together). You write about the fascinating and really beautiful intersection of violence, touch and consent in masculine sports like fighting. You write about how touch became a topic of discussion during the pandemic, and about how, while in the course of your life your body had been touched and used in many different ways, you hadn’t really been “touched well.” Can you speak to how love (“love as in care” as you write) depends on a certain kind or kinds of touch?
Yeah it’s funny that we both have a section of our books titled “TOUCH.” When I began thinking about all the experiences and processes my body has undergone, touch was the lowest common denominator, the one thing that was present, in some way, in everything, from my sometimes-problematic life with the gym to my sexual relationships to the work I did with animals, etc, etc. It’s also the link—and this is a point you argued so convincingly—between the kind of tender, pleasurable, loving sex I have with my partner, the violent and coercive sex I have had previously, and the stereotype of the “back-alley” sexual assault, which I have also experienced in its true Law and Order: SVU archetype. Touch, which by definition invokes the body, is the connection between these experiences, and while it is more comfortable to think of them as binaries (sex/rape), the truth of my experience, and (I hope I’m not misreading) yours has been that they actually exist on a continuum.
I was very wary of writing anything that implied that I have been healed by a man, or anything similar. That said, my relationship has been a tremendous site of healing for me, particularly around sex. I think there might have been opportunities to experience the kind of touch that demands a real seeing of the other person before, but I was not ready for them or interested in them until I met N. A lot of the worst treatment I have experienced, sexually, was treatment I explicitly sought. Also, for work my partner does a type of physical therapy-adjacent bodywork that demands an incredibly acute focus and perception of the bodies of his clients. He is gifted at this work, and can watch someone walking from across the street and know which tendon in their foot or their pelvis isn’t working correctly, and how he would fix it. That’s a great person to have sex with. I think it's Dan Savage who talks about the pillars of sexual excellence, and that there’s technical mastery and then there’s passion/enthusiasm, and how you really need both. Like, excited and sloppy is not a good time, but neither is a dispassionate virtuoso.
To circle back to your question, I do think that touch is one of the places where we express love—and where it is revealed when love is lacking. I think of the way I touch my child, and how much love is conferred by little things like tucking a piece of hair behind their ear. I also think about the moments when I am frustrated and overwhelmed and just cramming their little limbs into jammies so I can have a moment alone—I’m not sure what I think about that, because it’s still love, I’m caring for her, but it’s a less loving touch. Sometimes in the morning she comes into our bed and gives me a small kiss on my shoulder or cheek and it is the most loved I have ever felt.
Lastly, how has addiction and recovery fit into the knowledge you’ve gained over time about your body? The book covers many types of addiction, and it seems we’ve had similar experiences in pursuing pain and dissociation, coming out the other side with a deeper understanding of our bodies— not as free from pain, as you write, but free from numbness.
I have come to understand addiction/compulsion as less a pathology and more a way of moving through the world, of making it tolerable. For a very long time, and sometimes still, the only thing that was tolerable to me was numbness, or a manic version of it that allows me to move so fast (mentally or otherwise) that it provides the same effect. My body has, unfortunately, received all of the collateral damage of this way of being, and many of my addictions have been highly embodied. Though maybe they all are, because now I am something of a workaholic, which doesn’t sound embodied at all, but in fact is profoundly affecting my physical existence. Maybe addiction is deleterious to the body by definition—maybe the body is the limiting factor, when we ask whether a habit is causing distress, maybe it is the body throwing up the white flag.
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I loved this conversation! Grateful to you both for working through so many veins of this millennial mothering experience.
This book sounds fantastic! Just ordered and can’t wait to read!