Is Romance a Currency?
Recently, for reasons unknown, I can’t stop thinking about the disastrous Four Seasons Total Landscaping conference. Though was it a disaster? This is what I mean - the event’s ambiguity is part of its allure. Perhaps it’s because November marked four years since the bizarre occurrence, which took place during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. Maybe it’s his reelection stirring this peculiar memory from the depths of my consciousness. I don’t know. To me, this conference is so many things: tragic, triumphant, pathetic, iconic, incidental, calculated… and romantic. It’s almost mystic, at times. Trump mistakenly booked the windswept car park of a family - run landscaping business, neatly situated between a sex shop and a crematorium, instead of the Four Seasons luxury hotel. Rather than admit his mistake, he chose to protect his ego by holding the conference right there, by the side of the road. An interesting dimension to this moment in time is the - often overlooked - possibility that this was orchestrated for slyer purposes. Whilst the aforementioned interpretation of the morning’s events opens up a lot of ideas, was Trump’s team really so bumbling and careless that they booked the wrong location? And couldn’t they have amended this? At the time, Trump was the still the most powerful person in the country. I’m sure he didn’t have to publicly accept this fate - wouldn’t the desired Four Seasons have accommodated the then President? Perhaps, this ‘disaster’ - as it was viewed by the general public, being endlessly joked about on Twitter - was not so much a disaster but in fact a triumph, in that it’s ridiculous nature distracted the general public from the contents of the meeting. After all, Daryl Brooks, a convicted sex offender, was invited to speak at the conference, alongside Rudy Giuliani, former attorney for Trump and mayor of New York, himself accused of sexual misconduct, wide - ranging abuses of power and wage theft. Whichever explanation you believe of this strange event, the fact remains: between 11:30 and 12:07 a.m (the conference lasted 37 minutes, 21 seconds), Trump lent a sense of romance and importance to that sad, windswept place which it had never experienced before, and would never experience again. This makes me feel an emotion I can’t put into words. And there is some invisible thread tying this weird, dusty moment in history to something that happens all over the world at all times - something to do with the way straight men fuck. Straight men - who exhibit, overall, higher rates of permissive sociosexuality than straight women - will play into their sexual partner’s fantasies if it makes for better sex, even in one night stands. Meaning, they will contribute to the illusion of romantic sex if that is what turns their partner on. Begrudgingly, they will ‘lend’ a sense of romance to a situation in pursuit of personal gain. For example, saying ‘I love you’ during sex, when it is not meant. I have been trying to answer the question - is romance a finite source? Do we, or should we, feel precious over it, and stingy about giving it away?
User: Alice Bunny North
13 Dec 2024
