3/12

mo daviau
on
afghan whigs, “gentlemen”

(march plaidness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

I got married last year. To a wonderful man. A real mensch, as they say. He is kind, loving, and attentive, and as I write this from our home in Portland, he is in the kitchen making poblano mashed potato tacos for dinner.
He and I met up at a pizza place in Atwater Village six months after this essay ran. People will tell you dating in Los Angeles is a hellscape of pain and futility, but I met a handful of decent, interesting men who weren’t trying to date models twenty years their junior on the apps during the two years I lived there, including this one, who took an immediate shine to me. I held back a little—I’d been through some shit. He won me over, though, by being so, so fucking normal. He had no need to hurt me or mess with my head to make himself feel bigger. It was always a yes with him. I said yes back, and it was easy.
My husband and I were watching the Nan Goldin documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and the photo that inspired the cover of the album Gentlemen popped up on screen. I didn’t know about that photo when I wrote the essay. There really is an adult version of that cover! In a way, then, I had nothing to be ashamed of for seeing my adult self in that photo, or for any of my dating journey, which is now, mercifully, over. 
It never really bothered me that none of my Xness essays made it past the first round, but I’m really happy that this song and this essay are getting a second chance. —Mo Daviau (March 2025)

mo daviau on “gentlemen”

The following is not an accurate representation of indie rock history, but bear with me for a minute.
In the beginning, there was Beat Happening.
     And this baby indie band was a very innocent baby.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a teenager in, say, 1993. And you find the first Beat Happening album, with the yellow cover with the drawing of the cat in the rocket ship.
And you, tender and green and so, so young, hear Calvin Johnson sing this:

To me
The best part of sex
Is walking home holding hands
After swimming in the lake

You are probably white. You probably laugh and feel uncomfortable when “Baby Got Back” comes on the stereo in your mom’s car. You will go to college and DJ at the radio station, and your sex life for the sum total of those four years of good grades and late nights with friends at the 24-hour diner will be just that: walking home holding hands after swimming in the lake. Your music—your life, really—speaks of heartbreak and wistfulness and a self-awareness that will take you decades to realize doesn’t serve you for shit.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and in your horny middle age, you will drop the needle on an old Afghan Whigs album and ask yourself why the only indie band of your youth that fucked were these guys.

The cover of the album Gentlemen depicts two children, maybe around nine or ten, fully clothed but assuming the very adult positions of post-coital consternation. That girl is about to get slammed with a world of hurt. You know it. I know it. But she’s not the focal point of the photo. The boy is. 
Who posed those children for the photo, and what was said to that girl to make her make that face?
He’s about to dump you and deliver some long-winded, high-minded monologue as to why, but really it’s because he’s fucking someone else.. 
Look like you don’t know that yet, except you do but you’re hanging onto a shred of hope that he really does love you, or at least this isn’t yet another fuck-and-run.
Look like you’re waiting for him to say something you want to hear. 
Look like it’s the nanosecond before you know without a doubt that you’re going to die right there on that bed if you don’t hear what you need to hear.
I understand that Gentlemen, the album, in its entirety, is not about her experience.
Frontman Greg Dulli’s goal here isn’t necessarily orgasm, his or any woman’s, or the shared transcendence of sensual union, but some nebulous self-actualization achieved through sex. The woman isn’t the subject. She isn’t even the thing that is desired, per se. She is necessary but fleeting, an occasional obstacle, an inconvenience.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life trying to explain, using the insufficient medium known as the English language, the psychological motivations of men and women in their pursuit of…what? Sex? Avoidance of death? Self-actualization? The divine?

A few years ago, I traveled to Italy to promote the Italian translation of my novel. I was invited to an English language book club meeting in an apartment in Rome, and when I arrived, after noting the wine and the box of freshly-fried supplì on the kitchen table, I watched each of the Italian readers buzz around the room kissing each other’s cheeks hello. But when they got to me, the American author and guest, they stopped themselves, straightened their backs, and offered their hands for me to shake. “Hello,” they said with a cold formality. “It is nice to meet you.”
What have you heard about Americans? I wondered. I knew. We don’t kiss each other’s faces. We don’t do that, and the Italians knew, and maybe felt sad for us.
Americans are totally repressed about such things.
There was nothing sexual about any of this kissing business, but someone had told someone to not kiss the cheeks of the American author. Or they knew. All those healthy Italians, with their olive oil and fresh tomatoes and their oxytocin from their daily supply of face kisses. I wanted them to kiss my face, and a few times, to certain Italians. And some of them did, but I had to ask for it. But sometimes asking for it felt just as strange and dirty as if I were asking for a finger up the butt from a stranger in the bathroom at a nightclub.
We’d be healthier if we were a people who kissed each other’s faces. But we’re not. And that’s why we have songs like Gentlemen.

In the ‘90s indie pantheon, you could have angst (as evidenced by Nirvana and its antecedents), you could bop around the room to two chords to celebrate your extended childhood (Beat Happening and its heirs), or, very rarely, you could bear witness to the musings of a virulent horndog whose sexual conquests were predatory and desultory in equal measures (The Afghan Whigs). 
But what set apart Dulli’s angst from the angst of his labelmates and contemporaries was the depth of disgust he allowed himself to express, both to himself and to the emotional trainwrecks he left behind. While The Afghan Whigs were certainly grunge-adjacent, based on their status as a Sub Pop band, their sound was audacious, influenced by R&B, big and brassy and full of flash, did not sport the clichéd plaid flannel. This is a sound that wears a suit. And indeed, the Whigs wore suits and gold rings on their fingers, with Dulli gazing deep into your eyes, as if he wants whatever is at the bottom of your soul and knows he’s going to get it.
When Dulli begs his listeners to understand, understand, he’s a gentleman, it’s raw and real and uncomfortable. He plays both the villain and the victim. He knows he’s both and he needs you to understand how conflicted he is about that. There is a moment in the middle of the song, when the tempo of the song decreases, (“I waited for the joke/it never did arrive”) as if the band needs to take a breather in the middle of so much exertion, where the demons relent just a little, but then Dulli’s back in the ring, punching even harder as the sound battles towards its end.
Listening to an R&B song made by a Black artist, I would feel a little more loved and cherished than I do in the Dulliverse. I guess if you, as a woman, are going to fuck the well-fed white boys, you better know the psychodrama. I’m not getting roses from his man. This song is not about the glory of my ass. This is all about him. I think about all of the hours of Joni Mitchell’s sadness I have nodded along to, knowing that my role as a heterosexual woman is to grieve and endure and never ask for too much. I think about how many times in recent years that I have lied on the bed with that exact same frozen anticipation on that little girl’s face, only with the burning shame that I am now older and should know better.

I found myself pondering something that the last guy said to me on his way out the door, about the women who go for him, the women he chooses, being “submissive women.”
LOL.
You’re not a Dom, I wished I had said. You’re just tall.
For most of the last decade, I lived in Portland, Oregon, where I wrote and ate ramen at cramped wooden counters and, for a time, attended the Southeast Portland Munch, a weekly gathering of people interested in kink and BDSM that met at a gay bar that made especially delicious nachos.
At that point in my life, I sometimes called myself a Domme, but I also knew that I was just tall.
In Portland, I learned that the proper answer to “are you submissive?” is “you tell me.”
Because I may be a six-foot tall woman in middle age with a streak of gray in her hair, but if you are a gifted Dominant, gifted enough to not demand a partner that is small and young and inexperienced enough to make you feel bigger and stronger than you actually are, then I am yours, Sir.
You tell me.
You show me. You show me not by the size of your body or the tone of your voice in your commands, you show me not by calling yourself a Dom out loud in a room full of other men doing the same. You show me you have earned the right to call yourself that when you see into me. When you are so emotionally present with a woman that you can intuit her needs in the moment. When you see your position not as a self-given title or a quick fix for a fragile ego but as an enormous responsibility. When you know that you know that her submission is a gift, that a woman is trusting you with her physical and emotional safety, that when you agree to take someone to the darkest of places, you do so with love and care and concern for that person’s well-being. Show me that you know how to protect me. Show me that you know that a selfish Dom is a dangerous Dom. Show me you’re coming from a place of strength, not weakness. I’m not young anymore and I can smell weakness. I have seen it so many times on men who will choose to destroy a woman rather than put out their own internal trash fires. And if that’s the case there, well…
Then you don’t understand me. And damnit, I am worth understanding.

The thing is, though: if you read the online histories of Gentlemen that came out around 2014, when Rhino Records reissued the album and it got a fair bit of press, you’ll know that Dulli actually was a gentleman in the way that an older relative might understand that word to mean. In Spin magazine at that time, he wrote, “When you’re sad or angry or things aren’t going well in your life, and in your mind you’re looking for blame placement and shooting all the rounds at everybody else — that’s a slippery moment. That song [What Jail is Like] is blaming other people for my problems, and I had yet to examine my own culpability, and full-stop examined it on that one.”
I understand, Greg. I understand that exact moment where, despite what the culture tells men about what they are owed by women, that you stepped the fuck up. You saw yourself, cooties and all, and called bullshit on your own damn self. And that is so little to ask, and so much, too. And the rage behind it. The roar of those guitars and the crash of those drums will force you towards your darkest corners, your most hideous shadows.
In my mid-forties, I’m still smashing my trauma against the trauma of men who hide behind sex and big words to protect the tiny, scared little boy cowering inside. Why did my last lover, his bigger-than-mine body on top of mine, consider the thinness of my wrists as he fucked me, and how he very easily could have broken them? And when he took those skinny wrists and held them down over my head, as if I were actually going to try to get away? What, of all the broken bits inside of him, was he trying to heal in that fleeting moment? 
His trauma won, though. Or that’s what it felt like to me. My redemption versus his freedom. My trauma required his compassion, his responsibility; his trauma demanded my disappearance, my irrelevance. 
The cover of Gentlemen looks a little different when you replace the kids with actual damaged adults, still playing that shit out. And, I wonder, as I listen to the ancient wailings of Greg Dulli again as a grown-ass woman, if I were ever the type to merely be happy with walking home from the lake, what my life would look like. What less pain would feel like. Where does my anger get to go when a lover throws me over to smother his fears? I listen, though, as Dulli demands from my stereo that I understand him. He’s pretty sexy when he does it. He’s a gentleman. He’s ashamed and it burns. And I still listen. I listen in hopes that this time, finally, it will be different.

Mo Daviau is the author of the novel Every Anxious Wave. Her essays have appeared in two previous Xness tournaments, as well as The Rumpus, The Offing, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Nailed Magazine, and others. Nowadays, she is a bookseller in Portland, Oregon. Her second novel, Epic and Lovely, will be published by West Virginia University Press this fall.