This lack of advantages might be what makes Ejecta so compelling and convincing as a character—despite being an abstract persona, she’s not without flaws; she’s marked by a feeling of vulnerability, being a woman without any inborn knowledge of her surroundings or sense of direction. And although she is a newborn, her body is still aged: “She’s still a 30-year-old woman. Or, someday I’ll be a 40-year-old woman doing it.”
What if you started over but you didn’t get a clean slate? That’s really what Ejecta is.
Stripped of any sort of clothing or adornment that might imply fetish, Ejecta attempts to avoid being sexualized. But—maybe due to a lack of publicity for Ejecta’s story, maybe due to pure bias—this hasn’t stopped commentators from making presumptions about the Ejecta character. Macomber doesn’t hesitate to express that nudity upsets people. “I’ve had people accusing me of being sexist, which I find so funny, and I’m like, I think I get to decide, you know?” she says. “People see female nudity and they just shut off.”
But she insists that the shock of female nudity, the discomfort that it so often evokes in audiences, can be a tremendous asset to an artist. Back when she played in a rowdy punk girl band, she and her bandmates would wear handcuffs, mustaches, and be in various stages of undress onstage. After a show, a male friend who was into hardcore music criticized her, asking in earnest why women were always getting naked onstage. It was as though he was presuming that there was something inherent to women that makes them want to, or feel like they need to, bare all for audiences when performing. But, as Macomber explains, “It isn’t really that we’re getting naked, or that women have this overwhelming desire to be naked onstage, and I’m not even trying to say that we’re trying to be one of the boys by doing it because, like, ‘they can take off their shirts, why can’t we’… I think that there is a really interesting vulnerability to play with when you’re a woman, naked, and it simultaneously can be very powerful. So it’s like this really strange, like you shock people, get everyone upset, but then they can see that you are just a human, just a woman, just a little girl, or you’re scared … Or the next minute, you’re a fucking monster and you’re taking over the room.”
