“Good Value Diet Soda,” Essay, Mauve Perle Tahat.
The following essay is by North Meridian editorial board member, Mauve Perle Tahat, PhD. She is a scholar of cultural studies and the author of “Ecologies of Incarceration: Carceral Discard Studies in the Anthropocene” (2024) and “Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place” (2026). This essay is part of a new anthology project on the topic of Subtle Body Horror. To read more about the anthology and submit please see our call for papers.
Skipping school in 2003, I watched Michelle Williams’ Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek reruns in my mom’s living room. 22 years later I’m watching Williams as Molly in the streaming show Dying For Sex. The premise of the show is a woman (whose doctor, years earlier, neglected to order a mammogram after she complained of a specific type of pain) has overcome cancer only to be told it is back now at stage 4 and she will soon die. Many reviews point out the show doesn’t take a conventional approach to death arcs, and rightfully so; the show’s tenderness is backed up by a fierceness which incorporates bodily humor in a charming way [think deathly serious Jenny McCarthy-style fart humor]. One of the ways the show cultivates our feelings on the body is through Molly’s desire to finally have intimacy and orgasm after her childhood trauma has blocked her from such an experience for all her known sexual life. But as I sat with the show, watching a woman around my age, 38, struggle with trying to suck up every last bit of bodily pleasure she could feel, I felt the subtext was more about the oft cited adage that women are “used up” beyond a certain age, and thus “dead to the world.” It’s not the show’s thesis, exactly, but it’s in the air we breathe while we watch: mortality twinned with menopause.
Here’s the paradox I can’t let go of: women’s pain is always already aestheticized in our culture, rendered legible through beauty, trimming, narrative, yet when women author that aesthetic themselves, they’re punished for it. Raw pain is “too much”; stylized pain is “inauthentic.” The accusation that a woman is “aestheticizing pain” is not a neutral critique; it’s a disciplinary tactic.
Williams recently and memorably narrated Britney Spears’ autobiography, The Woman in Me, and how apropos to this topic.
When labels styled and sold Spears, her dancing was iconic. When Spears posted her own dances in her home on Instagram, the same movements were read as pathology. People called her unwell, embarrassing: language that locates the offense not in the image but in the fact that she made it. The punishment isn’t for dancing; it’s for full authorship.
In many ways I feel I am just rehashing ecriture feminine as praxis, or, The Body is Not an Apology. But I just find the evisceration of women so much more palpable than I used to.
It started long before Instagram. I can still see that photograph you may remember of Spears crying in a diner in 2006, holding one child and pregnant with another while the cameras fed. A postpartum body doubling into a pregnant body should have summoned tenderness, privacy, help. Instead, her body was treated as spectacle. People loved to watch her “screw up,” the reddened, teared face, the baby in her lap in the diner. You wouldn't forget it. As a mom, I now know the most painful thing is people hoping you will fail while themselves failing to help. Britney’s pain was aestheticized for her, cropped and sold. A caption told us she had just tripped over a paparazzi and almost dropped her baby. There was a shot of a poised Spears with her child next to another shot of her inside a diner unsuccessfully hiding her pain.
Ben Affleck recently said on a podcast he used to watch the paparazzi's moves around Spears specifically and said it was like “poking someone with a stick” which yields reactions that wouldn't normally happen [ala “It's not clocking to you…”]. I don't even feel that's exclusive to celebrities or camera people. Often I feel the gaze of people who hate when children exists out in the world. I feel it in the grocery store when both my kids are whining to get nothing in particular and people roll their eyes at me. Instagram ads are trying to sell me fidget toys that will “get rid of tantrums in 5 minutes” because that is what is expected of me, even if it’s not “developmentally appropriate.”
We’re not taught this version of mothering where we are now a nuisance in public. We are taught these tidy arcs—without instruction for the mess. But in my first birth what I remember most is the blood.
The floor of the delivery room was slick with a velvet, glittery maroon sea of my own resilience and pain. My first child lay in a crib beside his father as doctors worked on me; then they wheeled me to surgery in the hospital basement. While almost passed out from losing a quarter of my blood, I was asked to sign a paper consenting to surgery and, potentially, death. In near death euphoria, I signed. No one had prepared me for this version. If I describe it clinically, it becomes a statistic. If I write it as I lived it: strange, terrible, glittering, mine, then I am accused of aestheticizing pain. That is the bind: the culture wants the image of motherhood, not its instructions or solidarity. While the attending physician was trying to stop the bleeding, before they took me to emergency surgery, I looked at her and asked “Hey, how’s it going?”
Reading incarcerated women’s accounts of OBGYN trauma made the bind structural. Their testimonies carry what I can only call the rhetorical flourishes of palatability. The writing isn’t ornamental; it’s strategic. To be believed by courts, clinicians, advocates, the pain must be arranged…edges sanded, sentences balanced, affect managed. Palatable pain. It’s not that these women chose to aestheticize suffering; the system required it for legibility. Toni Cade Bambara, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers have long shown how visibility and invisibility are distributed unevenly, how Black women’s suffering is spectacularized, consumed, or erased; how even sympathetic frames can re-inscribe harm. My readings of Williams’ performances and Spears’ life in public describe one branch of the apparatus, white femininity’s frames, while other branches carry different weights and punishments.
Adrienne Maree Brown’s writing on pleasure and joy, along with the Nap Ministry’s reframing of rest, offers a contemporary context for my thinking. I’m not trying to reproduce their frameworks so much as write from where their insights leave off, in the mess of lived mothering. Their ideas on pleasure make my passing references feel milquetoast.
Which brings me back to Jen Lindley. As a teenager I felt the show’s unease with her: sexually frank, emotionally tender, not built for the triangle’s moral geometry. On rewatch, I see how the narrative resolves its anxiety: Jen dies quietly of a heart condition in the finale, leaving her daughter behind. Her death functions as a lesson for everyone else. A final, tasteful sacrifice. She is converted into absence so the others can grow. Compare that to Dying for Sex, where Molly insists on pleasure as an anti-erasure practice. Two scripts for women at the threshold of forty: disappear for the moral of the story, or take the story back and be told you’ve done it wrong.
It would be easy to say that aestheticizing pain is the problem and leave it there. But the truth is uglier and more honest: women’s pain will be aestheticized either way. They are punished not for suffering, and not even for turning suffering into art, but for claiming the right to decide how their suffering looks, sounds, and feels like.
After surgery I sometimes joke that I’m fake now, stitched from the inside, an assemblage of repairs. But maybe that’s the truest thing I can say about a body in this culture: sutured, revised, ongoing. The question isn’t whether the seams show; it’s who narrates them. If everyone else is permitted to make my pain pretty so they can bear to look, then I am permitted to make meaning from it. Not because pain is entertainment, but because authorship is survival. Aesthetics are the battleground through which women’s pain is made legible or illegible.
In the end, Dying for Sex completes the thesis it sets out in the very first episode titled "Good Value Diet Soda." For context, Molly abruptly leaves a therapy session with her husband, Steve, to visit a bodega and get what she desires: the cheap stuff, the generic yet always flavorful, Good Value Diet Soda. Steve doesn't understand and she doesn't want to make him understand anymore. She doesn't care if he "sees" her or not (he most certainly doesn't). She just wants to sit there and enjoy something.