happy mothers day to perhaps the most concentrated audience on the internet of people who have kind of a weird relationship with their mothers! hope you’re doing well <3
this week’s roundup includes a comprehensive analysis of the material role of language when talking about reproductive rights (both charlie & i have been called neolibs for talking about this — solidarity!), a short essay about anti-communist prosecutor roy cohn and “clout theory”, a criticism of internet darling ziwe’s talk show (that i read more as a conversation starter than a final word on the issue), and a review of promising young woman that will, unfortunately, remain relevant for as long as that godforsaken movie does.
BONUS READ: my essay on the dissociative pout for i-D, which — in a matter of days — has spawned an enthusiastic following, a landslide of vitriolic hate, a slew of memes, a copypasta selfie trend, and an Instagram repost from ACTUAL ERYKAH BADU that is truly indecipherable in tone. say what you will about me, but i get the people talking. (ultimately, my greatest mistake was thinking an audience of two million people would read the dry, inherently zeitgeist-critical tone intended in the phrase “lobotomy-chic”.)
i generally stand by what i wrote in the article, but i do regret that i didn’t explore my core thesis in longform instead of in a trend-focused & word-limited piece (that i had to write overnight because the deadline fell on the most overwhelming week of my life!). i wish that the “dissociative pout” had been one observation in a larger analysis of the current cultural tendency to perform detachment as a response to entropic social conditions, and as much as i tried to do this in the article, it seems that it certainly didn’t end up reading that way. ultimately, i can’t control how people interpret my intentions — but i hope any people who were disappointed with the nature of that piece stick around to see me write something more interesting.
in a larger sense, i think it’s always pretty debasing to capitulate to a wave of misguided, off-base criticism by validating those criticisms with response, so i’ve never been the type to try to prove every individual critic wrong — as a rule, i try to only engage with criticism that i respect as a real failing of my work. (saying that nomenclature-focused trend thinkpieces are annoying and unnecessary = great criticism, very true, genuinely noted. saying that my wording is dangerous because “in the era of roe v. wade, we shouldn’t be reminding the government that lobotomies exist” = not quite.) i don’t think it’s necessary to explain why that article wasn’t shaming women for engaging in The Pout nor saying that everyone who does it is actively, purposefully nihilistic, or to lay out the variety of reasons why using the term “dissociative” in a non-clinical context isn’t glamourizing or commodifying the identity disorder. i do want chloe cherry to know that i love her. an erykah badu story repost is an all-time career highlight. and i truly appreciate the many people who read & enjoyed the piece. xoxo
this short piece about american anti-communist prosecutor and closeted homosexual ray cohn was referenced in the cringe piece i link below, and it’s a quick read that’s also quite interesting. i really enjoy Hannah Black’s diagnosis of what she calls “clout theory” in the “post-woke” left (speaking of cringe — using the phrase “post-woke” makes me want to punch myself in the face.): “He would have appreciated the clout theory of politics that prevails in the art world today, which can only imagine political commitments as social strategies. If you take out the possibility of real material, spiritual, or collective commitments—really existing in that they make experience real—all of history, indeed, starts to look like various forms of striving for the corniest forms of recognition.”
i won’t inundate you with the specifics of my own experiences, but i do always think it’s interesting that many of the most radical in-person activists i know — people who have been arrested countless times, who spend months sleeping on the front lines of invaded territory, who dedicate their lives to direct action and care for their communities in a way few of us can even imagine — would 100% be called terminally online cringe liberal virtue signallers by a certain subset of the left if they decided to post their opinions online. obviously, this experience is not even close to a universal or definitive one, but it does make me laugh sometimes.
“Other Trans People Make Me Dysphoric”: Trans Assimilation and Cringe
this is a sprawling, ambitious article that really deftly analyses pretty much everything surrounding the lgbtq/cringe/sjw/“blue hair and pronouns” network of ideologies, and provides one of my favourite definitions of cringe itself: “Cringe is the gap between how others see you and how you want to be seen, opening up the tricky ambiguities of how you see yourself.” it’s a really great piece that transcends its specific subject matter — for instance, it incorporates the clout theory piece above to talk about post-leftism and the trap of embalming yourself in an aesthetic-focused internet paradigm. “Instead of seeing the pursuits of validation and social justice as two journeys whose side quests sometimes interlap, the clout theorist just sees striving.”
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