Clarissa's Blog

In Kevin Lambert’s novel Querelle of Roberval, there is a character called Jézabel who is willingly and eagerly planning to end her family line of several generations of organized labor. The memory of workers demanding better working conditions will be erased, and it will take no violence or even expense to do so. Jézabel will self-immolate willingly. She will happily give up any hope of wealth accumulation because she has received something that she values more in return. She has received social approval to substitute wealth, family, children and future with a string of one-night stands. Yippee for her and this amazing feat of liberation:

Yes, she loves to screw someone from time to time, bringing home a guy or a girl at the end of her shift at the bar, but to commit to one person to the end of her days, that doesn’t interest her. She wants nothing to do with a shared bank account, a dog, children, all that stuff.

This is the niftiest trick that has been played on working-class Jézabels. They won’t procreate, so crowds of new citizens can be brought in as a substitute. They will very specifically be culled from places where there are no worker rights, so they won’t ask for much or even know that it is possible to have better working conditions. Selling this self-erasure to people as some sort of an extremely important freedom has been absolutely masterful. Hilariously but not unexpectedly, the people who have tricked Jézabel and Co into adopting this meaningless lifestyle that invariably leads to addiction, jail time and/or death don’t value this freedom much. They all have bank accounts, children, pets, and lots and lots of stuff that they can maintain while fleecing stupid, gullible Jézabels.