Desire Digest 001

Notes on "hawk tuah," the beauty industry's idea of sexuality and more

Sometimes I have thoughts and opinions that are, at best, only worthy of a tweet or two. If I’m lucky, I can extrapolate a selection of these into a longer essay — as I often do here. But I’ve been wanting a place to collect some of these ideas, half-baked anecdotes, life updates and minor news bits to share with you all in a more organized form. Inspired by the newsletter stylings of writers like

Emily Sundberg

’s daily emails and

terry nguyen

’s recent Weekender series, I’ve decided to play on the form myself with what I’m calling my Desire Digest. My big hope for this is that it allows me to be a bit more consistent with posting here, and have a little more fun and freedom with the form. Some topics that appear here might end up as longer essays, too.

here’s me about to go eat some oysters. hello.

June is my probably favorite month of the year. As I alluded to in my recent sundress essay (which was also adapted for Washington Post this week), I also think it’s the sexiest month of the year. There’s such a rich sense of possibility to it, knowing that all of summer has yet to unfold before us. Yet I find it to be a somewhat of an addled time, too. What am I doing for the 4th? What am I doing for my birthday five days after that? What am I doing with the rest of my youth and whatever time I’ll be granted onward? Who knows. At least there are plenty of oysters and martinis and long, sweaty walks to distract myself with.

On “Hawk Tuah”

In case you missed it, much of the Internet has been obsessed with this brief viral clip of a young (probably tipsy) pretty woman in one of those off-the-cuff street interviews explaining her one move that makes a man “go crazy every time.”

@iamdlaney😂 #funny #fy #foryoupage #foryou #lol

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“You gotta give ‘em that hawk tuah,” she said, mimicking the sound of producing spit from the back of your throat and letting it fly. “Spit on that thang, you hear me?” It’s gotten so big that there’s now “Hawk Tuah” merch being sold, and she’s said to be signing with a talent agency.

While I find it a bit gauche that this is all getting branded so heavily both by men who adore her and women who want to signal their own hawk tuah abilities, I do get why it’s so beloved. This is just some random girl plucked off the street who has proclaimed her interest in sloppy oral to the world for no apparent benefit. She had no idea this clip would go viral, and she previously had nothing to market. It’s not a covert porn ad. She’s just a hot chick who likes giving head. It’s refreshing to hear someone be organically enthusiastic about sex. Naturally, it’s getting flattened to death into yet another means of signaling hypersexuality online, but it’s still a little fun. Be a hawk tuah person without saying you’re a hawk tuah person.

Lip Products Are Getting Aesthetically Hornier

Last week, I contributed a quick blurb to

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino

to discuss my thoughts on the relationship between beauty products and sexuality. It was pegged specifically toward a new lip gloss by UBeauty and influencer Tinx, an ad for which features the quote “I wanted to make a lip color that makes you want to make out with someone.”

“It’s purely selling the idea of ‘feeling’ sexy while being detrimental to the actual acts of sexiness,” I wrote of the plumping product. “That, I think, highlights one of the other core ironies of our approach to desire. When we publicly talk about desire in these safe ways (i.e., in marketing copy) we are entirely focused on signaling desire rather than actually experiencing it.” You can read the rest of my take, as well as those from six other writers and experts, here.

This isn’t the only recent product to evoke sex in this way. Just this weekend, Glossier launched a new series of nude lip liners that they claim are “nipple-matched to perfection,” i.e. meant to make your lips the same shade as your nipples. I actually appreciate Glossier saying this part out loud: it’s long been theorized that women wear lip makeup in order to make their lips more evocative of their other sexual parts. But still, much of my criticism toward the UBeauty product surely applies here, too. I will almost definitely be buying the liner, though I won’t tell you whether it’s really a match or not.

Feeld Launches “Constellation” Feature

Feeld, a “dating app for the curious,” as they call it (basically, it’s for everything but traditional, straight, cis monogamous relationships), has added a feature allowing its users to link their profiles with up to five other people. The app has offered a partner feature for years, wherein couples could navigate the app as a pair or otherwise promote their partnered status. Now, they can do this with even more people. Moreover, the app has 20+ different labels its users can select to describe their “multidimensional” relationship.

Obviously, if all this works for your romantic life, more power to ya. What I’m most suspicious of, however, is this effort to neatly organize and categorize something inherently messy. Isn’t part of the fun of these unconventional dynamics the fact that they are unconventional? And why limit the app to five partners and 20-ish labels? It seems people are “freeing” themselves from the constrains of monogamy yet remain desperate for new ones to fill their place.

Book Updates

The proposal is finished and will be going out for submission in the next few weeks. If you’re an editor, please do hit my line. Or, if you have anything particularly nice and glowing to say about my work, now is a particularly good time to share. Not that there’s ever really a bad time for that.