"She still loves recording herself and often thinks of her life decisions as things to debut on a platform...."

"But the memoir ends with a declaration of intention to protect, if not necessarily her privacy, then perhaps her interiority. 'I’m trying this new thing where I keep certain things to myself,' Ms. Mulvaney writes. 'Little yummy womanly moments just for me.'"

From "Dylan Mulvaney Dreams of Privacy. Really. Her bubbly video diaries about her gender transition were once a study in oversharing. Now on the other side of a nationwide boycott, she sees the value in keeping some things to herself" (NYT).

What are you doing, just for you? Is it manly/womanly... and how would you know? Is it yummy? Is it bubbly? When you're in there, in your interiority, can it be bubbly?

How is your interiority? It's the NYT writer, Maggie Lange, not Mulvaney, who's using that word. I was moved to ask Grok: What kind of people use the word "interiority"? 

I'm told: "Writers, especially novelists and literary critics, use it a lot when dissecting characters or narratives—think folks analyzing Dostoevsky or Woolf for their deep dives into the human psyche."

And maybe also NYT writers helping very lightweight pop culture figures promote their memoirs. 

"Interiority" is showily contemplative. "Everyday people don’t typically say 'interiority' unless they’re parroting something they read or heard in a niche context."

I wondered if — in the 21 years of this blog — I'd ever used it. Quick search. I see it appears 5 times, but each time, I'm quoting someone else: 

1. "Writing about the aggressive nature of man’s penetration of woman, [earlier translator] Parshley felicitously translates a Beauvoir phrase as 'her inwardness is violated.' In contrast, [new translators] Borde and Malovany- Chevallier’s rendering states that woman 'is like a raped interiority.'"

2. "Everything about the act of writing seems to invite [substance] abuse — its solitary nature, its interiority, the misery of sharing yourself with an often indifferent audience."

3. " At first, I was drawn to specific guests, hoping to learn more about the interiority of David Beckham (the Stone Roses, Elton John, Sidney Bechet)...."

4. "[T]he fact that the mystery was medical only amplified the usual effect: To wonder what was wrong with the First Lady’s health is to think about her internal body, her interiority."

5. "The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world."

Click the number to get to the old post and see who wrote it.

Generalizing from those 5 examples, collected by me over the years, I'd say "interiority" is a feminism word. You see that in ##1, 4, and 5. #5 might be unfeminist, but it's still on the landscape of feminism. 

Example #2 shows that the word can be used seriously and appropriately by a non-niche writer.

Example #3 is humor.  To say "the interiority of David Beckham" is like saying "the depths of the shallows." Maybe I should give the NYT writer credit for humor. The word sets up that quote — "Little yummy womanly moments just for me" — and contains the judgment that Mulvaney's memoir does not find dimensionality in the interiority.

And I'm not talking about a vagina!