CUCK, Dr Liam Macdowall
The Second Letter
Dear Bella,
As a result of the Eat-It-Too hacking, two people are known to have committed suicide. One man, Massimo Quadrelli, hurled himself off a bridge, got his foot caught in a railing and dangled there for ten minutes before his Nike gave way. I wonder if Massimo changed his mind as he swung wildly in the wind, if he forgave his wife for breaking her vows and was clawing upwards when the shoelace broke. A friend of Colin McTighe lost his business. It’s been The War of the Roses in that house: the social has gone in. In hundreds of families, addictions and depressions have taken hold, and in ours, you died. The blast radius of that hacking is still growing, it will for years, for generations. It has increased in size since my first words in this letter to you, ‘Dear Bella’, only moments ago. There is a good chance that since I began writing, someone has poured a drink and it is morning time where they live; there is a very good chance a child is crying because Mummy put Daddy in jail, and the odds are high that someone is making a better plan than Massimo Quadrelli. Three years ago today, at 9.00 p.m., three thousand names and addresses were published online – three thousand from all over the world. Yours – Isabelle Duff, 24 Harris Place, Glasgow – was just one of them, and look at the damage that caused. Imagine, Bella, imagine if the other two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine have, or are to be, as harmed as us.
I am just back from counselling with Julie, and we have both concluded that I was not authentic with you. After our first dance at the Union we walked to your flat because there was no way I was going to take you to mine, and I was already pretending to be all sorts of things I wasn’t. It is hard once you’ve misrepresented yourself. You find you must take the next step to prove to yourself that you’ve not really told a lie. Perhaps you do like Cezanne and kitesurfing, you think. Why wouldn’t you like those things? I pretended I liked James Taylor, and because of one of many momentary teenage misrepresentations I had to listen to him in the car, in the kitchen, and in our bedroom for a decade because I didn’t want to admit that the man you fell in love with does not exist.
Back to our first date: we were walking along Dumbarton Road and you turned your attention to a billboard that offended you – washing powder, I think it was. I pretended to care, and I didn’t. I was seventeen and I liked breasts, yours in particular at that moment, which is why I went further than pretending to care, referencing several sexist advertisements that were outrageous and should be banned.
I kept that up for years, Bella. Just as you pretended you didn’t mind me earning less than you, like you didn’t mind being with a man who put up shelves that fell down again, a man who sometimes wanted a woman to make the first move, a man who sometimes couldn’t get it up, or couldn’t come, who liked pornography, like every other man. I’ve talked to dozens of men in here, and we all feel the same: we had lost our pack out there, believed it a mythical thing, but it is real. We have been hiding in here, thriving in here, all this time. Outside we all feel like nothing – liars, pretending liars. But it’s changing, we will not pretend anymore, we are coming out. I hate James Taylor, Bella. I love advertisements with breasts in them, I love pornography and I love you.