I’m one of those people who have both benefics in their chart in fucked up condition. Jupiter is not only in its detriment and in the eighth house, it is also retrograde and opposing Mars. Venus, for me, is both detriment and peregrine in Aries, and it struggles to bend the nodes of my Moon. When I meet clients who have both benefics fucked I sometimes wryly suggest to them that they do not believe in positivity and I usually get at least some laughter before we begin to explore what that may mean, precisely, for them as living people.

I always felt extremely ugly as a kid. That’s always been a part of my identity. I had these big dents in my teeth that made it impossible to brush, which means that there were these horrible brown spots on my front teeth. I never smiled and, if I did, people demanded an explanation for my dirty looking mouth. I wanted to wear jeans that fit me and I didn’t get to because all my clothes were from Goodwill or second hand. I didn’t care about brands or the like but I hated the way clothes hung to my body. My toys came from the local church, which meant that I had a barbie but that it was really ugly. The head would come off and the hair was a mess. It was a brunette. It only came with one coat. I played with paper clips instead.

Those of us who had a certain coming of age in the early 2000s will remember that old debate between the goths and the preps. I did not know what preps were. I thought that they were cheerleaders and the cheerleaders that I grew up around, because I did not grow up in a place with any prep schools, were the girls who wore cookie monster pajama pants to school and ate chips for breakfast. Goths, I knew well. Those were the white kids who went into and out of juvie and hugged each other when they saw each other during the fire drills.

These subcultures, now, are aestheticized. This means that they no longer function as a way of life, of choosing people and of understanding your subjectivity, but that they become a performance of the romanticization of self. Prep becomes dark academia. It’s more accessible and more ironic. It becomes a “look” instead of a class. The goths don’t gatekeep themselves so much anymore. Anyone can wear black and the new goths look clean and laundered. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to grow up in an era of contextless beauty, of aesthetic without environment or class consciousness, and then I remember that I’m still growing up.

Venus is a war god. So many of our most popularized aesthetics come straight out of the military. We forget that the first suits were considered streetwear and that the phenomenon of women wearing pants had to do with exercise. The military invented the suit and pants and the athleisure. The military imagines how we navigate space and beauty is about navigating space. It’s about freedom of movement. But the military doesn’t declare beauty. There are industries that do and then there are also people who do.

What is beauty without its industry? What is a beauty without the military—without imaginings around domesticity and banality and wilderness and civilization? What is a beauty that resists the civil? That resists its own image? What is beauty without the bureaucracy of design?

And then there is the fetishization, which has to do with war. Being sexually fetishized as a young asian person means that you are always looking at your body in two dimensions. The assumption around sexual fetishization is that fetishes are one dimensional, that they reduce a person to one thing. Fetishizes, like any feature of capitalism, holds the illusion of choice. There’s always the other option—the stereotypes of the geisha girl or dragon lady are dated and only men of a certain generation have expected that of me. Those stereotypes don’t fuck with you anymore, really, because they’re dated enough to be laughable. It’s really the unnamable ones, the new ones, that get in your head. There’s the anime waifu, the dolled up fresh off the boat, the ABG, and asian manic pixie dream girl with a purple streak in her hair.

We watch asian media for its violence—Squid Game, Oldboy, and Battle Royale. These are depictions of class struggle, though we know that most people watching will truly believe that this type of class struggle and violence can only exist “elsewhere” and not “here.”

The reason I mention what happened to the goth is because, I think, that it is harder to be a freak now more than ever. The cities and small towns are becoming suburbs and the internet is becoming a corporate entity.

There’s a certain power in being a young femme and choosing to become a freak. There’s a certain release that is really the refusal to compete with other femmes. You choose your alliances differently when you choose to be a freak. There’s an inherent freakishness to inhabiting femmeness, a certain form of understanding your body from the outside, that becomes voiced and satirical when you understand yourself to be a freak. You learn to rejoice in seeing yourself not for your civility, your success, or your idealization but for the falterings. You learn to see your weird feet, your body hair, and your uneven skin. You learn to see your weird fetishizes, the ways in which your desire doesn’t obey civility. You learn to understand that your desire doesn’t overlap with corporate success.

I like body neutrality, which is the act of accepting yourself not necessarily positive or beautiful but as simply there. I also like body specificity, which is the act of understanding that you are a freak. You are not beautiful because you are a freak but you are urgently and viscerally there as a freak.

To be a freak, you really have to become an obsessive. You have to be absolutely obsessive about your ideas and the stories and theories that make it possible for you to look at the world and see something. I learned this from my cat, who spends most of her day either sleeping and repairing her nervous system or grooming her furs. I often get self conscious when I groom myself because I fear vanity. Self care can bring us to our most existential selves. What are we trying to take care of ourselves for anyway? My cat is shy. She doesn’t really like to be looked at and, yet, she is obsessive about beauty.

I’m writing this in preparation for a Venus retrograde. I hope that I remember my freakishness this retrograde. I’ve always envied those who are absolutely obsessed with something. I want us to be freaks and I want us to be obsessives who can’t bear the idea of not letting a very specific desire drive us towards ourselves. There isn’t any one way to being a freak. There isn't a guidebook about how to obsess. There’s only you, reimagined and loved as monster and being.