hello, world?
by Anna Poletti
Puncher & Wattmann
Nothing like going to the other side of the world to be with a significant other, and then finding yourself abandoned. This is what happened to Seasonal, who followed their Dutch partner to the Netherlands after leaving their job and their home in Australia.
Seasonal (which was the pseudonym Anna Poletti first used on dating apps) turns to the internet to have conversations with strangers who have a lot to say about desire and demands that are longing to be filled.
“People say hello to each other and the demands begin: dominate me, fuck me, give me a sense of novelty, confirm to me that I exist and that you see me.”
Even though their life is falling apart in a foreign country, Seasonal is propelled by desire to bring fantasies of playing with power into reality. They are particularly interested in dominance and submission and how it works in gendered forms of power.
It was a matter of meeting someone with compatible perversions. Seasonal meets a bisexual Hungarian named László, and they exchange intellectual texts about his desire of wanting to be a male sub with a dominant guide … something he can’t do within the relationship of his marriage.
The novel is a highly erotic exploration. Seasonal moves away from their indoctrination while growing up in working-class, small-town Australia, where men were seen as threatening, and she personally experienced their violence. She tries to reverse the gender roles and László discovers freedom when he had expected to feel constrained.
Rather than just being pornographic literature, Poletti intends her exploration to be a vehicle to analyse internal patriarchal biases. The lovers separate sex from love, attempt to unlearn everything they know about intimacy and try to relearn the association between pain and pleasure.
Poletti, who has researched how media shapes the meaning we attach to lived experience for over twenty years, has used BDSM and erotic imagination to try to deconstruct patriarchy. I don’t know whether she succeeds, but the journey was interesting.
Lezly Herbert
