Pushed away: Make-Up

It keeps passion and sexuality at a distance and finds the erotic not merely uninteresting but faintly repellent, with its own body and its own attractiveness handled as embarrassments rather than as assets. It comes out of parenting that was possessive, rejecting or exploitative around exactly this part of the person, in some cases including sexual harm, and where desire first arrives as something being done to a person, the whole register gets filed under threat. What it asks for is to find out what wanting is like in a room where nothing is being taken.

Desire in a room makes me want to leave it.

It echoes Gerdr in her father's hall, courted with threats until she agreed, for whom the first approach of desire arrived as something that would be extracted whatever she said. The form implies a task: to be asked by somebody with nothing to threaten.