A close reading of "Sin Eater" by Penelope Scott
rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated
There’s an online game called The Campaign Trail — which, like many things, I discovered via the quizbowl community — in which various historical presidential elections are simulated via multiple choice, text-based actions.
The scenarios themselves are pretty barebones. Some are quite rudimentary, some are easier to “win” than others. Of course there is a thriving modding community (there is a whole subreddit), with many mods including more complex gameplay mechanics, background music, or ahistorical / alternate history scenarios.
One such mod is 1964 - The Eighth Crisis; its premise is that Nixon receives the Republican nomination in 1964, rather than Goldwater. (This isn’t too far out of the ordinary — Nixon famously lost in 1960 to JFK, but in our timeline he ended up making a political comeback in 1968 anyways. Besides, who else could unify a party that counted both Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater among its idealogues?) The scenario is not particularly easy to “win” — and there are several achievements which can be gotten.1
The mod’s creator, in an interesting move, chose for background music the song “Sin Eater” by Penelope Scott. The song is temporally anachronistic — it is of rather recent release, and would not have been around during Nixon’s lifetime — but its vibes are surprisingly close to what one would expect from a story about Nixon.
The song also kinda hit home for me, a person who is notably not Richard Nixon. Not to be melodramatic, but after listening to it a few dozen times I think I’ve identified a bunch of stuff I’ll need to think about.
There are a number of themes to be drawn from this song’s lyrics. First and foremost, as dril would have put it, “This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender.” Penelope Scott is not subtle about her symbolism. From the very first verse, we get lyrics like:
Your tight, virgin soul has never taken any damage
When you finish getting nailed, it snaps right back into place
You love all of your buddies, you don't need to get to know them
You just figure if they knew you, they would love you anyway
It’s hard to interpret the first two lines in a way that isn’t, to some degree, sexual. But that ignores the second half: why, exactly, does the narrator “love all of [their] buddies” but doesn’t need to get to know them? They are confident that their “buddies” would still “love [them] anyway.” For what reason?
This song — it becomes apparent — can be read as a critique of martyrdom, of self-sacrifice, of being (literally, as some later lyrics put it) the sin eater. Our narrator has taken upon themselves the sins of their friends. They accept spiritual (and possibly physical) damage on their behalf. They are confident in being loved because of their sacrifices; who wouldn’t love someone who takes on the sins of the world?2
I will elide over the pre-chorus and interlude, whose precise words shift subtly between verses. Suffice to say that they emphasize “holy mother G-d” whom the narrator implores to “love me like a fawn.” I think, in this context, the song is not asking G-d to love in the manner of a fawn, but to love the narrator as if the narrator were a fawn — a creature which is prototypically innocent and trusting, and which has lent its name to the trauma response of “fawning,” which is exactly what it sounds like.3
The song continues:
You're the holy mother G-d and I aspire to your goodness
But the only thing I have inside to offer is a pit
I suffer just to moan, I scratch my itches to the bone
I keep confessing 'til I hit the spot from which the guilt emits
Again, the imagery is not what we would call chaste. Which makes for an interesting point, that martyrs in the Christian tradition are often known for their chastity, and are generally not seen as sexual beings.4 This verse, though, begins to hint that the narrator may not be as selfless as we imagine. They offer themselves up, not just because they’re trying to help their “buddies,” but because it feels good to perform this kind of penance. The image I get here is something similar to a secretly masochistic wandering flagellant, seeking to prevent misfortune by self-mortification.
Hold on a second while we experience another moment of gender.
I'm only as divine as dirt
No more human than peace on earth
Before I was a woman I was crazy first
Give me your worst
At least one of the currently visible YouTube comments recognizes what I immediately recognized — “before I was a woman I was crazy first.” The line goes hard, as the kids say.
I don’t have much to say about the chorus, in which we get the title drop, but I’ll put the words here for the sake of completeness.
I'll be your sin eater, laugh if it's funny
Lose your mind and keep your money
Sweet and sticky fly trap honey
Do your worst
Does sin taste sweet? The poets might well say it does. Remember that our narrator is not consuming her own sin, but that of others.
Let’s continue to another verse.
I bet your tight virgin mind is working just like it's supposed to
It holds on to good ideas and it lets the evil fade
While my eyes look like dog eyes in a picture that was taken
Late at night with the flash on by a child in seventh grade
Once more, the lyrics reference the concept of virginity, another characteristic of our somewhat heterodox martyr. This is also the first time that we see our narrator compared to a dog, who can be relied upon to eat anything5 — even sin.
And you're sitting there on Photo Booth, you're angling the camera
To prove to G-d and everyone that you can be a girl
And I'm scarfing down a carcass, entrails paint the bedroom walls
And I'm stuffing down the blood and I won't stop until I hurl
Here the narrator has more to say about gender — and like the earlier line, “before I was a woman I was crazy first,” we get a thought-provoking bit of commentary on what femininity means. Is the narrator meant to be transfeminine, reaching for something beyond the circumstances of her birth? Perhaps — and that is very plausible — but I think it is a sentiment shared among cis women as well. Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Many cultures portray womanhood as something monumental to be assumed, exciting and simultaneously dangerous. At some point, the narrator — “a child in seventh grade” — may have come to the realization that society now expects some level of performance which will follow her for the rest of her life.
Also, we see once again the literal consumption of sin. The narrator, in the guise of a dog, devours bloody offal to the point of vomiting. Sin may be sweet, but in most situations it is not pleasant.
The pre-chorus and then the chorus appears again, although the chorus is extended by another four lines:
I'll be your sin eater, I'll let you see me
Takes a village of monsters to feed me
There's nobody like me, so I know that you need me
Give me your worst
Is that a healthy way to attract friends? To assume the role of sin eater, because otherwise you fear being abandoned? “There’s nobody like me, so I know that you need me” — well, we know now why the narrator thinks that their buddies would “love [them] anyway.”
If you’re listening to the song while you read this (and you should listen more than once), you may note that there’s plenty of repetition as the chorus and pre-chorus are deployed. But something should be said about the song’s final verse, or the final bit before we hear “sin eater” again and again:
So if your natural state is guilt, you think you're living for relief
Say you're sorry, say you love it, say you're evil underneath
When you rip open the stitches, you'll discover only mammal flesh
And then you have to justify why you think you're a beastSo spill all your toxic sin into my shallow doggy food bowl
And I'll stuff my face down into it and gobble every bite
My sticky mind will fidget with the evil doggy kibble
And my gummy soul will swell with any tragedy I find
Apart from the fact that the narrator describes sin-eating in more explicit canine terms — purposefully self-degrading6 — the song finally confronts the listener with the assertion that sin-eating is not inherently altruistic. If someone is acting the martyr, they may be doing so for selfish motives. As John von Neumann said, “some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”
This is not to discourage sin-eating! There are jobs that someone, inevitably, has got to do. But perhaps one should examine one’s motives: are you really doing this for your “buddies,” or for yourself?
If they knew you, would they really love you anyway?
Getting back to The Campaign Trail — I think, instinctively, that this is a song for Nixon. It’s a little hard to put into words.
Okay, some of it might be the meme factor. There are plenty of semi-ironic Nixon stans who suggest that Nixon could’ve been trans, or otherwise queer, which was almost certainly not the case in real life; the humor, I heard it explained once, is the idea that Nixon — an emotionally constipated paranoiac who spent his final days in office drunkenly rambling to the portraits on the walls — who kept his tape recordings as a way of journaling his feelings or of talk therapy — who suppressed parts of himself as part of his singleminded drive to power — could be interesting in that way. I mean, heck, Nixon was the guy who in our history may have committed actual treason to win an election.7 This was the guy who, while courting his future wife Pat, went so far as to drive her to dates with other men, supremely confident in the ultimate outcome (or determinedly repressing himself with an eye on the long run).
And this was the ultimate sin-eater of the United States, too. American politics in the 21st century has fallen to where Bush is remembered with rose-tinted nostalgia, simply for not being the Republican Party’s current figurehead. Reagan is seen with sympathy, and that man was a monster. Nixon? The guy who created the Environmental Protection Agency? His malfeasance, in retrospect, seems almost charming in light of a certain other political figure’s actions — which the Supreme Court all but legalized. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon said, and heck, lots of people think they’re beyond the law…but Nixon? That man believed.
If Nixon were alive today, who knows what he’d think.8 Maybe he’d like Penelope Scott’s music. This was the guy who (half-jokingly?) suggested that if he hadn’t gone into politics, he might have been a rapper.
Maybe he was genuinely the president America deserved. “As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road.” So wrote Hunter S. Thompson. “There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard.”
Honestly — at this point, for me, it’s a simpler thing to think of Nixon than it is to think of gender.
Those who are too impatient to play out every combination of choices and figure out the achievements via brute force may consult a fan-made walkthrough for the correct sequences.
Put a pin in that, because we will return to the subject.
While “fight or flight” is often used to describe instinctual responses to bad stimuli, “freeze” and “fawn” are often added to the mix.
There are, to be sure, historical martyrs who were married or otherwise sexually active prior to their death, but Christian tradition, and Catholicism in particular, has a whole subcategory of martyrs who died to protect their virginity.
I know enough puppygirls on Twitter to know that it isn’t necessarily bad to view oneself this way, but the narrator of the song is really taking things to another level.
Well, technically treason is very specifically defined as a criminal offense by the Constitution, one of the few crimes so defined. It is also a state-level offense in certain states, but — with a few very noteworthy exceptions — has not often been charged on a state or federal level. More accurately, we might suggest that Nixon and company potentially violated the Logan Act, but even fewer people been charged under that law.
There’s a Wikipedia-famous Twitter account, though, that allows us to imagine the possibility.