On Something Shameful, Sarah Meth addresses the mess of casual relationships

Too often I cave in to Meta and revert to the mindless thumb-swinging that dominates so many of our lives, but every now and then a smart piece of writing gets lodged firmly in my mind. On a recent occasion, one such piece was The Cost of Casual Sex by Erin Williams of Critical Intimacies. I couldn’t tell you what drove me to this corner of Substack, but I’m glad I ended up there. In the piece, Williams discusses the emotional and social toll of casual sex in heterosexual relationships for women in late-stage capitalism. She suggests that the stereotype of women catching feelings – a perfectly justifiable and normal reaction to intimacy and by no means an exclusively female phenomenon – is laden with contradictory binaries: be liberated but not too bothered, be easy-going but not careless. The result is a sense of loss after a casual encounter that is too often difficult to put into words. All this was at the forefront of my mind when I sat down with Something Shameful, the confessional and insightful debut LP from London-born artist and producer Sarah Meth. Folk music was a significant part of her initial creative drive, but the album, inspired by a fateful encounter in New York, ...