GINGER. Everybody knows that men
have much more respect for women
who’re good at lapping up shit.

Once the drag queens leave, Bongi meets a girl who is looking for a piece of shit. Her name is Virginia Farnham, but she prefers to be called Ginger. “It so aptly expresses me—brisk and spicy,” she genially explains. She is looking for a turd in a brown paper bag that has gone missing. “Not to be nosey, but does this turd have sentimental value?” Bongi asks, bemused. “Don’t be absurd,” Ginger snaps. “It’s for dinner.”

Ginger is Up Your Ass’s resident Daddy’s Girl. She worships her psychoanalyst, a “leading exponent of the doctrine that labor pains feel good.” At Russell’s office, where she is the only woman on staff, she is flattered by sexual harassment and loves to be thought of as one of the boys. “I’m completely attuned to the gripping dynamism of the male mind,” she tells Bongi breathlessly. “I talk to men on their level; I have virile, potent, sophisticated interests—I adore positions of intercourse, Keynesian economics, and I can look at dirty pictures for hours on end.” She proudly parrots men’s ideas; she is “flexible enough” to have “absorbed, not only Russell’s, but Phil’s and Bob’s opinions with equal facility.” She happily accepted being passed over for a promotion when her boss told her he’d be “lost without you.” She loves male artists. She writes poetry—“pure feeling, uncluttered by a single thought, attitude or idea.” As for the shit, Ginger just wants to serve it at the table to impress her guests.

In April 2016, comedian Jamie Loftus began taking videos of herself eating Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel by David Foster Wallace, and uploading them to her Twitter account. In an interview with Vice about the project—a blend of performance art, physical comedy, and pure shitposting—Loftus explained that she’d gotten sick of being encouraged by self-important men at parties to give the famously opaque book a chance. “Basically [they] told me if I tried to read it and didn’t like it, it was because I didn’t understand it,” she told the reporter. “I eat dog food on stage so I decided to do it as a joke and post it on Twitter after that.” Over the next year or so, Loftus, who had been working at a bookstore, would film herself eating pages from the book. In the videos, she puts pages in sandwiches, chases them with beer, soaks them in coffee like biscotti. She mixes them into spaghetti; she stews them on the stove. When she’s on the go, she chokes them down dry, mashing them into her face like a sweatshirt into a locker. She eats them at the mall, on the street, at her desk, in the club. She eats them at the Boston Gay Pride Parade. “I’m not gay,” she tells the camera on her phone, “but I am eating a book, though.”

Loftus told the Vice interviewer that she preferred to lube the pages first. “Only when I’m doing it onstage will I eat a page and swallow it and have that be totally dry,” she explained. “But with the videos I’ll usually create some sort of topping or moisten the page or it’s just gonna be 10 miles of bad road for your body.” The shift from reading to eating marked a sort of evolutionary relapse from vision to digestion: Loftus was, of course, stuffing the book in the wrong hole. What small percentage of print matter could be broken down by her intestinal system was being absorbed, uncomprehendingly, into her body; whatever remained was, of course, expelled as waste. A week or two into the project, Loftus called poison control to double check that eating Infinite Jest wouldn’t kill her: “They were sort of like ‘we can’t sanction you doing this’ but there’s a way to do it. I couldn’t be doing it too often, like I wanted to do a page a day but that’s just not feasible to do that and stay alive.”

At some point, Loftus made the decision to buttchug Infinite Jest. From what I gather there used to be a video of the event, but like most of the project, it has disappeared. (In February 2018, Twitter suspended Loftus’s account for making parody figure-skating videos in which skaters at the PyeongChang Winter Games appeared to perform to ironic subbed-in audio instead of music.) The Vice interview, thankfully, does include a picture of the act of anal ingestion. “I blended together five pages of Infinite Jest and a bunch of apples and made this thick sauce,” Loftus reports. “Then I put it into a turkey baster that I bought and then I put a turkey baster into my asshole and did a handstand and had someone squeeze the turkey baster until it was empty.” In the photo, Loftus is upside down, hands on the ground, feet in the air. She is wearing plain gray underwear and maybe a sports bra. Her friend is holding one of her ankles in one hand; with the other hand, she is holding the turkey baster. Loftus’s right thigh is obscuring whether or not the baster is inserted. Her body looks like a doll’s, or a mannequin’s. Her face is completely out of the frame.

“Absorbing ‘culture’ is a desperate, frantic attempt to groove in an ungroovy world, to escape the horror of a sterile, mindless existence,” declares the SCUM Manifesto, whose author never had anything but scorn for art made by men. “Lacking faith in their ability to change anything, resigned to the status quo, they have to see beauty in turds because, so far as they can see, turds are all they’ll ever have.” Loftus, a Daddy’s Girl in her own right, isn’t eating shit, exactly, but it sure feels like she is. The book is going up her ass, literally forced inside of her, in a kind of intellectual sodomy. Or rather, anti-intellectual: the project seems to have been as much a tremendous self-own as it was a critique of the cult of male genius. Loftus wasn’t just performing female stupidity; she was also literally being a stupid female. She remarked to Vice that none of the men who tried to convince her to read Infinite Jest could give her a cohesive summary of what the book was actually like. Instead, they were like her: too dumb to know the difference. “I dunno,” she told Vice. “It’s a silly thing.”