All Comments on 'Untraining Yourself Ch. 03'

“Even though Emily had still not managed… isn't a proper date.')

Pedantic Editorial Aside: I don’t think there’s a need for the reintroduction, or else it might be italicized and inset.

“I thought you were a good girl, Ms. Emily, but you have been a very bad girl indeed.”

In the dialectic of this hero’s journey, Emily is tested, her progress checked by the antithetical letter recalling her home. The letter begins and ends this chapter, defines Emily’s flight, dissolution, and re-formation.

“…the idea of going back and being punished and then absolved filled her with relief. She thought of her mentor and his muscular body.”

“She could not bear the thought of disappointing this man, but at the same time, she knew that he could not be correct.”

Emily experiences her existential break: the absurdist paradox that some truth that must be true because it’s fundamental but cannot be true in experience. “Choosing” a position is not an option because a paradox cannot be “worked through” as a process of ratiocination. The crisis results in either oscillation or stasis or, contradictorily, both. But there is a way forward via something both external and internal:

“And, for the first time, that pleasure seemed like something her body was taking, something she could have independent of deserving it, independent of being a good girl or a bad girl or any other kind of girl except the kind who was going to find pleasure where it could be found and have it.”

The paradox breaks when the terms of the structure are changed from moral to sensual: pleasure (an external stimulus driving and driven by internal response) works. It’s practical. It solves problems, it creates new structures, it advances our hero.

I think of feminist stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper” and how they follow similar courses -- an initial oppression, an initial flight, the quest or development, the empire striking back and inflicting doubt -- but here an epiphany, a transcendence (not a movement of the self but a transformation of the self) out from the oppression of the good / bad girl channels that had been carved into her.

"For the longest time I wanted to be a good girl, but now I'm not so sure that's something I want to be, or even that it means what I thought it did. I want to ask for what I want and maybe even take it."

(The hero’s Tinder profile.)

“What if, having failed to be a good girl and having let down her father and mentor and her whole town, having committed this act of rebellion, she also failed at whatever other task she was attempting here?”

Echoes of the training’s crumbling infrastructure. Emily is untraining herself but no new training -- other than a general hedonistic principle -- has been instituted. Interestingly, Emily is least interesting in this chapter. She was defined by her training and then her opposition to it; freed of the struggle, who is she? She’s new, rather blank, given to (self-) pleasure as infants are. All of her choices feel arbitrary because they’re experiments in pleasure but also identity.

Ariel (cf. “Tempest”) appears magically and just when required to serve as alien opposite of Emily’s former life. It’s symbolically rich that Emily’s first act of domination is to ask Ariel to worship her feet -- both physically lowest and most servile but also, a la Jesus and historical tradition, a profound act of kindness and hospitality.

“She could feel her pussy, wet and insistent, although what it wanted, she was not entirely sure of.”

Emily is a stranger in a strange new longing. She has broken free from her internal compass, which always pointed the true way she has been trained. Now she needs a way to find each next step, and the story provides: her pussy is divining rod, drawn to wetness and satisfaction. She follows it.

“…she felt both confused about what had happened, but also more settled, more grounded. She'd been able to go on an app and have a new experience and keep herself safe… She’d been honest about her desires without feeling like she needed to share everything… Emily felt less like her training has broken her… but was now stuck with this unique and shameful set of longings… and her training had been good preparation for exploring her desires…”

A good summation of this chapter’s course and successes.