4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Sex, Sloth and Shoplifting: Notes From a ‘Sloppy' Girl
SLOPPY: Or, Doing It All Wrong, by Rax King
Alt-weeklies are missed for their muckraking and saucy classifieds, but also because they were platforms from which brilliant female humorists could swan-dive on the regular.
Cynthia Heimel in The Village Voice. Caroline Knapp in The Boston Phoenix. Sandra Tsing Loh in Buzz magazine. (OK, that was a monthly, but it had the alt-spirit.)
The young writer Rax King is continuing this column-y tradition, despite being a creature of the internet who first logged on to AOL Instant Messenger at age 10. AIM was 'like a swingers' club for middle schoolers,' she writes in 'Sloppy,' her swaggering second collection of essays about bad habits and good intentions and being beta-popular (or in 'Mean Girls' terms, a Gretchen Wieners, not a Regina George). It's a welcome and relatable piece of slang for a woman who feels she can't quite hold it together.
There are pieces of varying length and wallop on sloth, stripping, shoplifting, overspending, suicide and light virtual sex work to raise money for Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. 'I'd rate fifty penises in an hour, and I'll admit now that I rated few of them honestly,' she writes of trading nude-photo appraisals for political donations. 'Look, corners were cut.' (Flashback to Heimel in 'Sex Tips for Girls': 'Just for a moment here, let's all join hands and thank the Lord that we're not men — that we never in our long and lovely lives have to worry about the upkeep and care of erections.')
King's well-received first book, an appreciation of low culture also in essay form, was called 'Tacky,' and one can imagine an entire grown-up Little Miss series of naughty pejoratives. ('Little Ms.,' she'd probably correct, having undergone a fairly hilarious feminist awakening in high school after discovering a copy of Bitch magazine in the aisles of the Bethesda Barnes & Noble when she was trying to pick up boys.)
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