Jenlena Is Too Relatable

“Unemployment when used correctly allowed one to think about things quite deeply”
— Jenlena, "Mood Swings" by Frankie Barnett

I read this book a week or two into my first bout of unemployment without being in poverty, perfect timing tbh. I had the most peace and quiet and time to think that I think I've ever had. I was far more immersed into this book than I thought, which I realised when I was explaining it to my boyfriend and caught myself vehemently defending the somewhat vapid main characters. The thing about this book is, it's truly not about the crazy background. It's so easy to take the notion of time travel and all animals being dead in stride, because you're just immersed into these 20-something year old, poor girls' lives and their stories.

~~ Insert from halfway-through Sophia: I started writing this with the intention of it being a review of the novel, however about halfway through I realised it's about how much I love Jenlena as a character and relate to her. 5/5 star book though

I spent much of my unemployment reading and none of it writing. I think the embarrassment of it kicked back in, when I was mentally stable again. But this book kind of gave me permission to write embarrassing shit—it's full of these passages of Jenlena's Instagram poetry that clearly means so much to her, despite its debatable quality. I read this book about a month ago, but I built this site and this had to be my first piece of writing. So I scrolled my highlighted passages and what better place to start my writing, than with Jenlena's:

once i stuck a beer-soaked tampon up my pussy because i wanted to get fucked up and tell you everything i was feeling because ever since we fucked at the biodome i've been so confused you came looking at the monkeys and i pretended to come looking for the sloth but never saw it and never came didn't a girl die somewhere in america from sticking a beer-soaked tampon up her pussy? sometimes i stand in the corner of a party wondering, am i drunk yet? am i drunk now? then the next thing i know i'm passed out on the floor if i died, would you come to my funeral? and be like, yeah i fucked that dead girl how sexy you would be awash in that weird glow that surrounds us all when we know someone who has died

As a borderline alcoholic myself and a raging autist, those lines wondering if you’re drunk—I understand those deeply. Because yes, you are impaired and stumbling, but are you drunk? When does it actually count? When do you become the version of yourself that everyone else seems to reach so easily? Are you fun and pretty and vulnerable and sexy? Are you too far gone to consent? And how are you supposed to tell the difference in the moment, when the whole point was to stop thinking? The feeling of needing more and more still to reach where everyone else is at, until suddenly it’s far too much and it’s too late, and you are stuck with the embarrassing consequences and the danger you put yourself in just to feel like everyone else does. And you still don’t even know if you ever actually got there.

Jenlena is sex-obsessed in such a relatable way. In the way that somehow the topic just crawls into everything—how she didn't cum, how when she's dead she'll be reduced to a girl he fucked and how sexy he'll be at her funeral. Not a salacious nymphomaniac, it's just logically there, a fact of life. I think some people are just wired that way—or maybe that's just cope, maybe it has something to do with the difficult, confusing sexual histories Jenlena and I also have in common. It's hard for me to tell how, as neither of us are truly ready to broach that topic for the duration of the book. But I would say the latter. There's an uncertainty in her when she talks about sex. She talks as though it is happening to her, not with her. The scene where she is with the billionaire Roderick Maeve, she describes the dissociation from her body while fully acknowledging him fucking her. She thinks about men almost constantly and is overtly proud of her skills to wrap men around her finger, many skills I recognise from my menace years at 18, that ultimately just prevent her from getting close to anyone.

She panted and lapped up the air with her tongue. Am I not a modern girl? The man seemed to like it, he seemed to be satisfied. He told her to roll on her back and she wondered if he’d rape her. She thought about it and felt proud for having figured it out before it happened. So in this case, she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She could leave her body and watch it all unfold as if it were happening to someone else. Was it happening? Has it started happening now?

This part is harder to talk about, so I will do the easy part first. Puppy play. Jenlena does puppy play in a non-sexual manner, she is a dog for hire who fills the hole left behind when Roderick Maeve wiped out the animals. I too would jump at the opportunity for people to pour their mindless affection into me. I too love the easy praise. Try to understand the allure of puppy play with me: knowing your place, being cared for, no pressure, no expectations, being looked after, being loved. Simplicity your life as a human can't give you. And the petting those starved for affection need. She's a modern girl after all, she can do things like that and be empowered. She can predict this man raping her in a hotel room while she plays as his dog and feel empowered in her ability to dissociate. Lobotomy chic, am I right? Why protect yourself when you can just remove yourself, numb yourself. Women have had it done to them for decades upon decades and now we do it to ourselves because it is safe and it is feminine. Ozempic, Botox or a Xanny? Every woman needs some part of her numb or suppressed enough to continue on.

When she was a kid, her mother would say that wearing the wrong clothes for the weather was a sign of mental illness, as it belied a fundamental disconnect between a person and their environment.

I read this shivering at the bus stop and immediately forced myself to stop, because I felt so called out! Is it me? Do I have a fundamental disconnect? I'd ask my therapist but I don't think he would get it. It's one of those annoying "Mother Knows Best" phrases that make you grind your teeth and roll your eyes.

Men didn't always care what you wore or even how you looked. Certain men, certain times of day, only needed someone to look them right in the eyes and tell them—not with words but how you held your shoulders—that they weren't as big as they thought they were. Or, alternatively, that for twenty minutes or so, with you, they didn't have to pretend to be as big as they thought they needed to be.

The Male Manipulator Mindset. It's this certain point that I think many women reach (and for good reason), an early part of the misandrist phase. I say phase in no way to belittle it but only because I hope there's an end in sight for me, as I have been in this era since I was about thirteen. I can use my soft face, high voice and genuine vulnerability to elicit the response I want in certain men—and I can recognise those men. I agree with Jenlena, when she says women have a certain power over men. I don't doubt this, not because there is an inherent difference between men and women. But because we train our boys into a certain kind of man and it comes with vulnerabilities that some women have learned to take advantage of. A skill of being so conscious of our place in the world, of how men around us might treat us, that we learn how to manipulate it. Yes, that man across from me—he knows I’m weak and poor and have no means by which to hurt him. It lets them rest, and then we see them as they truly are. And all the power to us. All of a sudden we are big and scary—because we know them. But of course this is a double-edged sword. Not all men react positively to vulnerability, it softens some and sharpens others.

And there's a side effect of it, making yourself softer, smaller, weaker, tighter. It becomes a reflex, giving the response that will get the reaction that you want, rather than the truth and the response you need. And when you're vulnerable for real? Well you've spent so long faking vulnerability that you're so much more exposed when it's real. And you are not infallible and you will be real, especially when you don't realise you like them. She tells billionaire Roderick Maeve about her poetry and immediately feels small and dumb. The same way I will when I hit publish.