F L A U N T
Rachel Rabbit White subverts the reality of the worst year with the promise of a highly indulgent escape in the form of her latest book of poetry—plus an accompanying perfume.
The confessional poet, love expert, and sex journalist-turned-purveyor of the Girlfriend Experience (GFE) launched the expanded Paradise Edition re-issue of Porn Carnival on December 1st, exactly one year after its original debut. Only this time around, White’s ode to the realm of erotic labor has internalized the possibilities and limitations of a new, socially-distant world. Both the poetry collection and its eponymous perfume took shape in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, too, did her whirlwind romance with fiancée Nico Walker, the infamous ex-con author of Cherry. (FYI: Walker is, veritably, the romantic muse behind her new love poems.)
As economic devastations unraveled, which left small businesses (including countless independent bookstores) struggling to stay afloat, digital pre-orders were made available on the website of White’s publishing company, Wonder Press (which has, most notably, published Flaunt alum Juliana Huxtable’s first book of poetry).
Highly emotive, sultry, and unbridled, this new edition of Porn Carnival is a decadent fountain of texts written in ephemeral, premeditated verbiage. Like any of White’s previous work, the poems hedonically abandon self-censorship. Each line pulsates with real pain, real love, and an unabashedly candid dissent towards identity crisis as a byproduct of sex work. In the anecdotal, full-length collection, White artfully shines the spotlight on the conclave of drama and beauty emblematic to falling scrunchies-over-stripper-Pleaser’s in love. She does it, unsurprisingly, through the revolutionary lens of an archetypical Mistress of the Night.
White also canonizes the notion of romance as a proverbial state of anxiety, all while addressing her own troubles in a pandemic-driven free-for-all that has, effectively, decimated her industry. Readers are invited to peer through a rare and intoxicating window: from a Rolodex of wealthy clients to moments of true intimacy with her fiancée, and everything in between, White lays everything bare.
The Paradise Edition perfume, meanwhile, is White’s lovechild with the perfumer Marissa Zappas, who has formulated and bottled scents for the likes of film photographer Lindsay Warner, the fashion house YMA, and Redamance, her own niche fragrance line. The duo will donate 30% of all proceeds to G.L.I.T.S. (Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society) as a nod to their mutually impassioned advocacy in the Lefist socio-political arena.
“It was at a party in Manhattan back in February [right before lockdown became a reality in NYC] when Rachel told me about the new book,” Zappas recalls. “I pitched the perfume idea to her immediately. Not long after we started working on it, I went through her perfume collection to get a feel for how we would best capture her olfactive preferences and the lush spirit of her poems into a wearable olfactive medium. After six months of collaborative tinkering, the perfume was born.”
With a scent that sways the senses from dusk to dawn, the perfume opens up with a highly sensual whiplash of heady white Jasmine. Even the iridescent bottle conjures a dream, featuring freshwater pearls that emulate a kind of floating-on-a-bed-of-clouds-like trance. Adorning, perhaps, nothing, but voluminous pigtails (ostensibly fastened with giant satin hair bows), diamonds, and stripper Pleaser’s. With an ice cream cone in one hand and a glinting bowie knife in another, the product is effervescent and feminine to its core, alchemizing an innocent Playboy fantasy with a dollop of White’s quintessential femme fatale mystique.
In an exclusive Flaunt feature interview, White waxes brilliant poetry, philosophizes about Paradise Edition and the phenomenology of romance, resigns to her addiction to freedom, and shares her thoughts about heteronormative structures, the politics of sensuality, the aesthetics of perfume and poetry, problems with traditional work, and more–all from the comfort of her luxe Williamsburg waterfront condominium, where she houses some of the best literary works you’ll ever get your hands on, and the refreshments, as one might expect, abundantly flow. Read the complete conversation below.
The “Hooker Laureate of the Dirtbag Left” is quite the trademark and epithet to uphold. What does your role entail as incumbent?
I feel like I’m a cheerleader for the left even if I’m not a recognizable figure among online leftists. I’ve definitely been read more by sex workers than by leftists. If my role as “hooker laureate” entails anything, I want to write openly and honestly about sex work when I can. It’s fraught for any sex worker to simply have a separate vanilla or “civvie” life online. To have a personal Instagram or Twitter or Facebook is to know you could/probably will be outed. You definitely can’t have a public social media as your clients will at least find you, stalk you, etc.
Naturally then a lot of sex workers have only one online persona—their work one. Post SESTA/FOSTA, and now even more during Covid, being your work persona online has become a 24/7 job. No one is their job but in sex work you’re supposed to appear authentic, to really be the “real you”. There is always a gap between a persona and the rest of you. But in sex work that gap can be especially painful because it’s the clients who drive the norms and rules that create the advertisement persona… which is somehow to be the “real you”.
You can’t forget here that this work is criminalized, and as long as sex work is criminalized, clients are going to have more influence over what our work looks like, what services they can expect from a date, etc. Many kinds of work entail repressing your thoughts and feelings, your relationships, things that you care about, that bring you joy—but in sex work it’s not only when you’re working but also when you’re on social media, 24/7, when you’re interacting with your community. The resulting burn out from that can understandably become a place of resentment.
If I have a role, as a confessional poet, it’s to create something true to me or my experience. My poems often find themselves more in the vein of a “language poem” without the clear through line of prose poetry. I like it when the poem isn’t certain, it shifts, there is a hole in it—even when some lines read almost like a manifesto. In Paradise Edition, many of the new poems read as directly personal, more in the vein of prose or lyrical poetry: I’m thinking of one of my poems from the new edition, here’s a bit of it:
I say “the girlfriend experience”
like there’s a hidden meaning
what it means for you to love me,
whose job is to hide that I am someone’s girlfriend
I remember laying in bed
thinking all that gratuitous work to pretend
we’re forever available and available now
when of course, all along
they know the score
to be used against you
sabotaged
for a seemingly endless
labor
any fixed personality I once had
memory erases that too”
devouring the hour and the next
don’t stop until it will be okay
until one of us goes free
until one of us goes too far
tonight I am married/ to my heaviness
and to not knowing/ a thing about consequences
Wow. How would you say sensuality, which is front and center in your line of work, challenges the status quo as a political armament?
If we didn't want to eat, to hug, to feel safe we wouldn’t have politics. The fact that we have a body is what drives politics.
What socialism or Leftist politics have in common with sensuality and sex is they are both a project of unity. I do think that challenges the status quo. I don’t think sex and sensuality are inherently liberatory, but I think they can be. Sensuality is influenced by and explains how we move politically. If politics includes ways of our being together, both in our everyday life and the way that we come together to achieve certain ends, the ends for which we fight would not be understandable until we start looking at what we desire, how we live, what we dream about.
The ephemerality of your poems is inspired by the Greek lyric poet Sappho. How is perfume as an artform comparable (both aesthetically and epistemologically)?
Ephemerality is inherent to perfume. Music is ephemeral in that it sustains over a duration in time and the duration of a perfume is even less defined! A scent is vague which is why describing feels poetic. It exists in a vibe. At a certain point, you recognize that it’s there, you don’t know when it started, and at a certain point it’s gone. Similar to romance maybe. And like perfume poetry is vague. It’s a vibe. Poetry shows life at a slant as a life seen straight on has no charm. It’s a liberation from rationalism. Many of my poems are about moments I wanted to hold onto. Inevitably, the moment slips away, but reading the poems, it’s as if I’m back there, the same way putting on a perfume from a long time ago, can suddenly bring memories flooding.
In what ways is Paradise Edition different from the original Porn Carnival? Similar?
Porn Carnival was dedicated to Gabby Bess AKA Sachi Flower AKA Andy AKA Gigi, any other names this absolute angel is currently going by. This was the central romance in the book but it was caught only in highs of parties and deep friendship and weird sex. When I fell into a serious relationship, which began as a whirlwind romance, I began documenting it poetically, seemingly out of my control.
The first poem in the paradise section is called “Tunnel of Love.” It’s as if you enter Porn Carnival, go on all these thrill rides then midway through you’re taken on a tunnel of love ride, where you experience a panorama of the high dramas, falling in love, separation via incarceration, coming together, overdoses, rehabs, lots of sex of course, all the little quotidian theaters of learning to love someone.
These poems are different because I was setting out to write love poems, which is tricky! It's human nature to seek art and writing about love, this hugely mystical experience, but as consumers we’re distrustful, we’re savvy to how sentimentality has been wielded against us and how our emotions are manipulated. But I don’t think that we should let bad art—or marketing masquerading as art—make us become jaded.
There’s a different sort of play in these poems. The longest poem in the new edition is a retelling of Cupid and Psyche, which is basically Beauty and the Beast. I think I liked using a metaphor like that because I’m capturing these impossible highs, the full spectacle of love, but always twist around the problem of romance, remembering that to be in love is to be in a state of anxiety.
Explain to me the phenomenology of romance, and where you see it headed.
From the point of view of phenomenology, romance is a split object. It has a fantasy part and a Real part which is perceived by the lover as “Otherness”. In this is the understanding that objects can never be perceived fully. You can never see all six sides of a dice. In romance you cannot see these two parts at the same time. The fantasy is the narrative you make out of the relationship. It’s ways of joking, pet names, little private symbols and tropes. It becomes soothing. It’s an interface. We find ourselves in front of this Otherness that attracts us for reasons we don’t understand, but for mysterious reasons we don’t just want this person—we need them. So we map over them. A being who we don’t really know; who could be cold or warm, who we are scared will abandon us. With these little names, these stories, these habits to try to make them readable. To try to make our own desire understandable.
In the narrative, you can choose what’s aesthetically pleasing over what’s true. Like how with Paradise Edition, I kept invoking Romeo and Juliet. Maybe it fits my aesthetic sensibility to see my relationships as doomed, as dangerous…even if that doesn’t end up as true…I vibe with that. My editor Elaine Kahn kept pointing out how brutal the new poems were, switching constantly between the fantasy of falling in love then dealing with the terrifying reality of the Other. With their whims, their past. Love merges our daily lives, our economic situations, our reputations. It’s terrifying. In a way, for me the new poems in Paradise Edition is a way to face and analyze and traverse the fantasy of my relationship. But also giving in to the fantasy as a record of falling in love.
In terms of where I see things headed, I enjoy the work of this philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. In his book The Agony of Eros, he elucidates how technology has made us more narcissistic—eroding the Other. But even if I find the analysis interesting, I always find it a bit conservative to focus on what is lost. And a lot is lost, I think. Contemporary relationship advice is about, like, how to structure your life together in optimal terms, yet we hear very little about how to engage in Otherness, in someone’s individuality, their being damaged or problematic, their uniqueness. The problem with nostalgic criticisms of the present, it can seem like the answer is a return to old forms. Not only does that neglect all the ways romance in the past was awful, but the fact that if the current situation is creating problems we can intervene and recuperate the intimacy we want. If data changes how we date, and people now date for very specific reasons and we find that a problem, we can try to change that in our personal lives and mold the situation.
Is the notion of true love and romance [from the heteronormative optic] sustainable in modern times as evolving gender roles threaten traditional heteronormative structures?
I did go through a phase where I felt I couldn’t fall in love with a man.
There’s a line in Porn Carnival, that Nico always reminds me about: “no poet should ever be straight.” But then again I’ve always been a dumb bisexual who truly has problems believing that straight people exist. A friend of mine says of sex work, “if you enter the industry straight, you’ll become bi and if you enter the industry bi, god help you.” I think there’s something about being a sex worker, and being bisexual, where you realize your relationship history has become defined by men because you relied on them in these more readable ways—I’m speaking financially, directly or indirectly. When, for me and my friends, all along were these other loves. The best friends we sometimes slept with or were in heavy emotional relationships with that didn’t end up defining our romantic past on paper… but when we look at it truthfully it’s like that was my love, that was my ex. You begin to mourn these relationships that were minimized.
But I think what sustains romance is an active fantasy. Maybe that’s easier for someone who is so far gone in herself as to believe no one is actually, truly, straight.
You’re of the mindset that the conventional workforce is not only fraught, but rather something of a death sentence. What are alternatives in the belly of capitalism?
Derrida said that the price for survival is death. Of course everyone is “born to die” to echo the line in Romeo and Juliet, made even more infamous by Lana, but if you have to survive you’re already threatened with death. It’s the most vulnerable populations that have death in their consciousness everyday, as they enact to stave it off. Capitalism creates a split grouping of people, ones that have to survive and ones that can just live.
I think of the line in Porn Carnival: “I would rather die than work”. That line has sometimes been misunderstood as signifying that working is worse than dying. Yet, I think it’s a reflection of what a lot of working people think: “I’d rather die than work” is probably one of the top thoughts of someone turning off an alarm on Monday morning. As for alternatives under capitalism, we have to do what is the only thing that will allow us to work less under capitalism, which is unionization. In criminalized work, like sex work, unionizing can have issues—but we can organize. So the answer is unionization and organization.
How has the pandemic shaped your workflow?
I’ve been writing less, but I don’t know if it’s because of the pandemic or my romance—which has also been shaped under the pandemic. I mean if we hadn’t been separated so much I also wouldn’t have written so many love poems!
I guess the pandemic and the honeymoon have a similar structure. They’re both a sort of “eternal return,” all days are the same, and like Nietzsche points out, it's in the moment of the eternal return that you choose your values, what you love and what you want. When you’re faced with this sort of eternity you see what’s tolerable. And sometimes what’s tolerable is writing less.
What’s better than sex?
Drugs. I feel people choose drugs over sex all the time, but it’s not like they don’t crave sexuality. Flirtation and the promise that there could potentially be sex, and a little bit of rolling around and getting high together is like the ultimate kink.
What’s better than love?
Nothing. I mean if anything was better than love… wouldn’t you just love it?
Photographed by Julia Comita
Makeup: Marc Witmer
Hair: Koji Ichikawa
Still Life Prop Stylist: Alex Brannian
