Seduction, Corruption, Desire, Part 3: Sydney Krukowski in Dykes To Watch Out For
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I have predictable hangups about whether or not I am really committed to the things I think I believe in, or merely pretend. I don’t know whether Marian the Librarian or Otto the Communist would share these anxieties-- their respective meltings-down are relatively instantaneous, motivated on one hand by Harold’s kindness to a boy with a lisp and on the other hand by the knowledge that the USSR will kill Otto if he returns. Adapting to different beliefs is easier if it is involuntary, or excused by insurmountable passion.
Another librarian seduced by a hot out-of-towner, and another upright lefty brought down into capitalist consumerism, is Mo, from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For. One of the most enduring erotic relationships in DTWOF is that between Mo the neurotic bookseller and Sydney, the sarcastic online-shopping-addicted gender studies professor. Mo is Alison’s self-insert, and is most often found complaining about other people eating meat, working for no benefits and minimum wage at a women’s bookstore, agonizing over whatever act of imperialism the U.S military has recently committed, or pontificating about how to spread her spare $13 among the sixty nonprofit organizations that matter to her.
When I first read The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, I was fourteen, and freshly out as a little baby trans boy. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, and I was dating a butch lesbian who asked me out nonverbally by tossing a paper airplane in my direction during history class, and then continued to speak to me almost solely via text, even when we sat together at lunch. I remember reading aloud to her Alison’s introduction to the 2008 hardback edition. Bechdel describes her own realization that for younger generations of lesbians, Bechdel’s dykes were the first they had ever actually encountered in the world-- in attempting to document the zeitgeist of queer culture that Bechdel was a part of, she unknowingly altered something about it. I was self-aware enough to realize that this was happening with me, too-- that my own ideas about life and possibility and important values were being informed by these comics documenting queer breakups, marriages, babies, and feuds from 1987-2008. But I had few other models as complete, or as varied. Most of the other stuff I read was about gay men wanting to die. As I grew, and learned more about police brutality, Reagan, Bush, Gay Shame, gentrification, and debates about trans inclusion that had rocked prior lesbian communities, I understood more and more of the characters’ arguments in DTWOF.
I learned about the March On Washington from documentaries after I read about it from Bechdel; I actually learned about the details of Clinton’s impeachment from reading Mo and Thea’s sarcastic takes on it. Sex wars, bi inclusion, the crisis of American independent bookstores, Michfest? Long before I read my first post calling out Kathleen Hanna for being trans exclusionary, I knew that there had been some kind of argument about land in Michigan; I discovered what kinds of people might believe different things about bombs in Serbia and dental dams. Up until ninth grade, my galaxy brain value systems had been informed by Christopher Isherwood’s politics circa 1930 and weird trans monarchist cartoonists on Livejournal; I was glad to see so many value systems ready-made to try out. I had arguments with other teenagers about whether Bechdel was transphobic, because her self-insert said bad things to trans women (for the record, Bechdel drew a couple one-off strips about how transphobia is wrong as early as the early 90s after conversations with Leslie Feinberg, and several of her characters go to Camp Ten Trees, though she also attended Michfest). There is a general bent of DTWOF’s characters being a little on the prudish side of things--Lois is the only sex freak, and even she ends up married with kids.
My friend Seph recently pointed out that it’s sometimes uncomfortable that Mo’s political feeling is so often the punchline of the joke in DTWOF-- while she occasionally lectures people about eating processed sugar, many of the issues she cares about concern violence against people that is ongoing, and the tone of the comic sometimes implies that to get this worked up at all about harm and violence is a comical personal flaw. But there are reasons for this other than moral righteousness--Mo boycotts friendships because people move to the suburbs, gets petulant when her crush doesn’t like her back, lectures Lois on having too much sex, and in general is kind of a pill. Politics, justice, is just an excuse.
Mo’s relationship to Sydney is marked by different kind of conflict. For once, there’s a tangible, close-to-home personal harm that has to be addressed-- and for once, Mo is shown as being firmly in the right. Specifically, Mo learns that her new love interest Sydney once threw over Thea, Mo’s coworker, for a professor, just after Thea was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and then abandoned her on her own in a new city.
Mo tells Sydney that she could never date anyone who could do something so cruel. Sydney is moved to tears by Mo’s call-out, and then manages to smooth things over-- with an apology to Thea that seems genuine but is awfully well-timed. Mo easily accepts her invitation to go on a date (thinking, “has she always had such long fingers?”). Sydney, unlike the friends that Mo has been recklessly cutting off at this point in the story, argues that Mo, in all her neurotic political fervor and moral absolutism, is “perfect, just the way [she is],” even though Sydney tends to quickly contradict any actual opinions Mo voices.
Unlike communist Otto or productive literacy advocate Marian, Mo is comically impotent before Sydney’s introduction-- for all her radical posturing Mo never really does anything because of her beliefs. She organizes a poetry reading that she almost excludes trans women from and, once, throws a tomato at a wall while calling her girlfriend a liberal for wanting to use plastic trash bags. She also regularly turns down the opportunity for sex or love because she finds it politically abhorrent (lesbian play party at the local gay bar? Gross and unseemly! A young writer eager to make out on the floor of your office? It’s time to panic about Wal-Mart!) Mo is lovable—and deeply sympathetic, at least to me, in her imperfection— but she’s born to lose and kind of pathetic. While Lois eats fire in front of Republicans’ houses and Sparrow runs a women’s shelter, Mo stays hung up on her ex for years and comes over to watch TV on other people’s sets because she won’t buy her own. Sydney enters the comic as Mo’s depressing tendency to pick fights with her friends is becoming tiresome to every other character. Sydney picks fights with Mo, distracting her from undermining all her other relationships. She dismisses her tastes as parochial, her critiques of the world as simplistic, and responds to her whining with provocation--also flirting. As it turns out, the sex is great. Bechdel hits on a new dynamic in the comic-- it’s better if Mo is arguing with someone who actively disagrees with her, instead of someone who is just tired of being lectured. Or, even better, someone who reacts to Mo’s moralistic speeches as if they’re sexual foreplay.
As a consequence, Mo’s own (individual-consumer-action-focused) politics start to backslide; we find her, several years in, allowing Sydney such luxuries as dildos and flat-screen TVs (quelle horreur). Still raging and repetitive sometimes, she’s getting laid a lot more, and she seems happier. Her shift tracks with the general position of white cis lesbians in American society over the decades covered by the comic-- no longer radical outsiders, just mainstream (sometimes broke) girls who happen to have some odd kinks.
For the record, I don’t think Sydney is evil-- she’s just a lot less concerned than Mo is with appearing good, while they inhabit more or less the exact same social and class position within white America circa 1992-2007. Mo was never a revolutionary, with or without Sydney. Sydney seduces Mo into having a good time--and while they end up not exactly happily ever after, they are alive, and not killing each other, and having good sex. Imperial dream? Bad? Evil? My brain whirrs; my moral compass jerks. But the question of whether Sydney is good— or anyone is good— is beside the point of Dykes To Watch Out For. The point is that she, like the other dykes, exists. It’s a representation game. There are nice dykes, there are business dykes, there are punk dykes, poet dykes, Black lawyer dykes, Puerto Rican accountant dykes, and there are insufferable, superior, unbearably hot academic dykes. Really, Dykes To Watch Out For is merely a catalog of types of guys, where guy means queer person in or around Buffalo or Minneapolis. After many years of seeing novels and movies that are very bad be marketed on the basis of them containing a Type Of Guy, I have beef with representation as an end unto itself, but Sydney’s potential existence—all of their existence— motivated me, as I’m sure it did countless other queer kids, to perceive a future where we were just living our lives, even when we were pretty suicidal. What if someday you met someone hot who was lovingly obsessed with you and also made you furious, and you lived a life in which you and your friends had parties and dinners and fought sometimes but nobody was being abused, or was homeless, or undergoing a psychotic break? That would feel good.
Oh, and then life could be normal.
I recognize that my ability to picture myself in DTWOF has to do with this ability to imagine myself in a gradual comfortable-uncomfortable assimilation to American white middle-class norms on the order that Bechdel envisions. Other people I know find this comic alienating for its near-exclusion of weirdo leatherdykes, drug users, political zealots who can’t let their causes go, trans women (except the odd token), or people who experience harm even within chosen queer family and communities.
Saying “it’s enough that they’re ordinary people, they kept me alive” is to sidestep something. Like Harold Hill, Sydney is a free-wheeling self-interested actor, prone to philandering and domineering. She’s kind of a bully. She’s part of oppressive academic institutions that pressure her and others not to oppose the Iraq War (which she goes along with). She is passionate about buying things from online catalogs, sells her sext logs to “Panthouse” magazine, and we get many hints that she carries on an affair with her old flame Madeleine without regard for Mo’s feelings. Mo, in her turn, is pathetic, self-interested, passive-aggressive, and facile. But Sydney’s seduction of Mo and subsequent commitment brings Mo balance, at least within the fictional world of the comic, where we all get tenure and everything turns out okay. Does Sydney bring Mo into a darker, more ambiguous world, where she is less in touch with her own black-and-white sense of right and wrong? Unclear; it does appear that Alison Bechdel’s own politics have gotten considerably fuzzier on praxis post-2008, if her comics in 2016 are anything to go by. But Sydney’s seduction-- being drawn into argument with your queer lover who later 1999 email-sexts you that she wants to fuck you in a tableau involving office supplies-- is the sexiest slippery slope I can think of. I may be saying this because I too know and love a Sydney.
I still struggle with how much desire governs me-- would I believe or do something repugnant to me if a hot person told me to? I’ve learned the answer to that. Did Otto or Mo ever really mean anything they said about freedom for the working people of the world? Did they mean it, and then forget, either because of Scarlett’s delicate little face or Sydney’s long fingers? When white queers fall in love, do we forget revolution? Do we only remember the histories that make us feel safe?
What do we owe to the people we transform, or who transform us?