Sects in the City

This is an excerpted transcript from the second episode of Are.na Radio, an audio experiment with Montez Press Radio where four people share their Are.na channels, describe what’s been collected, and reveal the threads of thought therein.

“Hello. My name is Shelby Shaw and I’ll be talking about my Are.na channel “Sects in the City,” a diaristic repository of my dating experiences. I should say first that the channel is behind on updates, and it’s currently still chronicling the drama of December 2023, so be aware that it’s being brought up to speed at the moment, which is June 2024. There was a bit of a major plot twist that I’ve had to wrap my head around, but I won’t say more about it because it’ll be coming up soon in the channel anyhow. So you can just stay tuned.

“If you’re thinking the title is a pastiche on the HBO show Sex and the City, you are partially correct, and it’s important to the origins of this channel. That show, which I last watched when I was 23 years old in 2016, made a heavy impression on me for two reasons: the first being that it’s an incredible anthropological record of the late ’90s and early 2000s, as we see the characters drink from a Starbucks cup for the first time, own their first mobile phone, and do a Google search on someone’s girlfriend. None of these things were inherent to the characters’ lives and had to be written into episodes, conscientiously introducing them (and probably some audience members) to these concepts at the time. The show is wildly dramatized and fictional, but I was interested in the way life was depicted. The second reason I am fond of the show is for the content, which revolves around a woman in her 30s who writes a column on the sex and dating lives of her and her friends in New York City. The show discusses things that I couldn’t talk about with my own friends at the time, either because we hadn’t experienced all of these things ourselves, or because some people just weren’t comfortable talking about them. I’ve always been open and curious about sex, so I value being able to talk about it with people whenever I can, and the show acted as a kind of big-sister proxy for me in that way.

“With my Are.na channel, I wanted to similarly capture my experiences with dating again, as a woman now in her 30s back in New York. It would be a record of my choices, decisions, fears, and frustrations. I was curious, when starting the channel, if other people might also relate to me — me, who notoriously overthinks everything — and knowing that maybe nobody would ever stumble upon the writing or read it chronologically or completely.

“The channel starts in April 2023. At the time, I was 30 years old and had four exes, some of whom would appear later. The very first line is: ‘He urges me to move from app to texting, so for 2 whole days we text.’ Barely any of my history with this person, whom I dubbed Match No. 1, is recorded in the super condensed depiction I proceeded to give of my involvement with him. Similarly, Date No. 1, three blocks later, has even less history recorded since I hadn’t even included our two weeks of conversation off-app. These inconsistencies with what the channel was versus what it is today are consequences of having started the project shortly after I had already begun dating. I downloaded Hinge in April of 2023 and was working on “Sects in the City’ just a few weeks later, at the same time as starting my channel “Dating Online,” which is an ongoing archive of user profiles that stood out to me. (That one began for laughs, but has served a lot more purpose since then.) Originally I thought I’d write a lot of sparse and brief quips about my dates and the characters I was meeting, but I also thought I’d be going on a lot more dates, which is not really what happened. By Match No. 12, the first to have a multi-part entry, I had ditched the idea of “short and sweet” to instead write more fully about my whole experience — as much as I was willing to reveal.

“Writing in a diaristic style in a public Are.na channel might seem daunting for some. But writing about myself, and especially about my relationships, is neither new nor off-putting for me. I actually find it difficult to not include myself in my writing, which is my primary medium in a multidisciplinary arts practice that is constantly evolving. With “Sects in the City,” I​ questioned not only what I would want to analyze about myself, now back in the dating pool, but also what I would want to read from someone else’s experiences. I don’t use social media​ (unless, of course, you count Are.na), so I’m usually pretty out of the loop when it comes to things like celebrity lives (I think Kim Kardashian has four kids?), slang terms like “cap” (which I think means “false?”), or who Timothée Chalamet is (he was in Wonka?). I don’t really know these sort of contemporary factoids unless they happen to cross my orbit, or someone directly shares them with me. (I do have my few sources for pop culture, just to be clear, but largely I’ve leaned on chance discoveries and word of mouth recommendations for the past six years.) So I wanted to create a project that I would want to find, but wasn’t sure existed. And I figured if I would want to find this, perhaps someone else would too.

“My background is in film, mainly with experimental artists’ moving images and independent and art house cinema. It’s where I had a career for ten years before leaving New York to get my MFA. One of my favorite parts of film is what you don‘t see: what’s not caught between the frames. Film as “a moving image” doesn't exist: it’s just a series of still images, which in themselves are representations of something real, made of lines and light​, and this concept was a ​​major factor ​in my graduate work. In a movie, what we don’t get to see is omitted usually for the sake of moving the plot along. Think of every scene where two characters are talking in a car on the way somewhere — we usually end up cutting from their car talk to being at the destination, rather than riding with them the whole way. ​But I'm the viewer who’s wondering what they kept talking about it even as the next scene plays on. Was the car ride awkward? Did they put on some music? How long was the rest of their trip? In the space of the cut, the viewer can and sometimes must resort to using their own imagination to “fill in the gaps,” which is what I am drawn to doing in my own writing. I am telling you the truth, but I am not telling you everything about it. I look at this maneuver as a form of creative privacy, since I am sharing so much of myself​ in my work already.

“This is evident in every block in “Sects in the City,” but perhaps it is especially visible for the first time with Date No. 4, who is Match No. 30. The writing is very short, and we follow the date from a restaurant into a museum where I’ve happened to find a work area not intended for visitors, where he and I trespass into regardless. As I wrote in the block:

We enter the makeshift hallway to regard all the install tools and equipment that have been stashed out of sight. “Want to shut the door?” he asks. When we emerge from the hallway-closet, we learn the door was never actually closed, which explains why the slow trickle of visitors to the exhibit on the other side of the wall had sounded so clear to us.

“What should be obvious here is that something happened between me and Match No. 30 inside the hallway-closet at the museum. But what exactly passed between us is omitted from description, although alluded to in later blocks. This was in part due to not wanting to scandalize the channel (and today, only a few of my friends actually know what really happened at the museum with Date No. 4). Eventually though, I brought in NSFW content with​ someone I’ve dubbed Unexpected No. 1. He isn’t from​ Hinge but rather is just a friend who leveled-up to being more than “just friends” with me, and we do a lot of NSFW sexting. It​ was important to me to include it ​​somehow, to show our ​evolving relationship and the contrast ​with other Matches​, but I ​​never wanted to ​disrespect the personal intimacy that I have with this friend, or become a pornographic channel per se. He’s not an Are.na user, ​​​although he knows I have this channel, and while it can be sexy to be the voyeur — or to be the one being viewed — that is not my goal with “Sects in the City.” Writing publicly about sexting and having sex is one of the ways, though, that I most enjoy playing with omission here.

“There is also a dark side to the origins of this project, which​ I debated discussing in this, but it feels wrong ​for me to ignore. I had been going through an onslaught of loss and rejection after ​getting my MFA, including the end of my connection with my former longtime partner; having a different relationship continuously crash into flames unexpectedly;​ and losing my identity in the film world when I resigned from the role I held for nearly a decade, due to being refused a living wage for my work​. On top of that, I was being turned down or ignored from dozens of jobs opportunities. I suddenly had nothing and nothing was going for me, and I felt like I was disappearing​ or being erased. For almost a year​ I descended into the darkest depression I hope to never experience again, until my therapist​ got me an urgent psychiatrist appointment. But I never followed up about the medications she wanted to give me, because I had found some hope at that point… through dating. To be clear, it wasn’t the matches I felt uplifted by, and nobody should ever look to another person to be their savior.​ What threw me a rope in the darkness w​as the simple act of connecting with people who wanted to talk and ask me “How are you?” “How was your weekend?” “What are you reading?” Suddenly I existed again, and ​I realized how isolated I’d unconsciously been keeping myself for a long time, between leaving New York for grad school, leaving my longtime relationship and apartment, and now living on the outskirts of the city I had for so long called home. The weight of who I felt like I was supposed to be now that I was “back,” wasn't weighing on me with strangers who didn’t know anything about me. Dating played a huge role in saving my life​ at the time. It moved me out of the dark space between​ the frames of my life, and creating “Sects in the City” helped me commit to that. This is the background to many early blocks in the channel, although I’ve omitted the weight of its presence.

“As I record this in June 2024, I am less than a month away from turning 32​, and there is still a lot of content to update to “Sects in the City.” I'm having fun with it, so we’ll see how much longer it carries on for. But let’s be honest, it would be kind of fun to wrap this project up and move onto something new.”