So I’ll roll my eyes when thought-they-were-winning types whine about editors trying to commission their way into anti-wokeness happening, but it is really funny how much energy went into fluffing up the lower Manhattan thing when the vibe turned without them ever mattering.
Weird, largely uncommented unwinding-unto-backlash of repression playing out in sexual culture rn, in how after so long being oriented around the poles of partner-fidelity and the biological threat of insemination from pregnancy and then AIDS, the two big throughlines in today’s sexual culture seems to be creampies (or adjacent, breeding) and like “fuck my wife… please!”
(The latter of which seems increasingly shifting from “cucking” or even hotwifing where the unfaithful sex is at least kind of about the status of the official relationship to kind of a celebration of both how hot it is to have a girl who can pull dick and how satisfying it is to have a partnership that doesn’t inhibit her from self-fulfillment in like, using her cunt to experience the dick of the world, which is the exact kind of fucked-up processing of feminist social change I can dig.)
It’s kind of weird that it presents as a “goth” variant the same as mid-90s Hot Topic, but that that presented as the same thing as Victorian poetry queers listening to The Cure had been weird to start with. Still, it’s for the best that there’s now a popular idiom for young women to have a personality like a softened Jane from Daria and draw attention to how they look and act like really fuckable normies.
(Though stuff around the “big titty” thing makes clear that it’s really more in the lineage of the aesthetic that was passing as rockabilly for a while)
Going back to the 1970s, hearing a gay guy ask “What do they matter, who’s Christian these days anyway? We’ve got hot anonymous sex with strangers!” and wincing
internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner
there’s a person on twitter who’s a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, “when men have messy apartments I’m like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I’m a little freaked out and I judge them more”
I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn’t have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.
almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not “literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender”. And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you’re in some New Weird Sexism land, it’s still sexism and you should cut that out.
when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on “literally treat people the same way”. then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn’t possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology
I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men’s asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you’re relaying this so casually – don’t you want her banned? I will if you want.
And he just – didn’t. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn’t mind that much, and he didn’t want her banned just for fairness’s sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.
(Not that I’ve, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said “HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –”)
sigh. I’ll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I’ll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this
but. come on! I know this isn’t 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?
Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.
yeah. yeah. I kink hard on trad marriage, relationship as employment contract. that shit is so fucked up and hot. wife as maid + prostitute + bReEdEr, husband as bank account. ooooh yeah baby I want to be mutually dehumanized by the gears of capital with you.
part of what’s so hot about it is that there’s a clear dom role and sub role for whatever suits your preference, but also the power dynamics are kind of mixed. like yeah the husband is in charge, he has all the “hard power” by virtue of being a petty bourgeois employer. but also the wife has various types of leverage she can use, she has sexual and emotional soft power because of the intimacy of the relationship, and she’s incentivized to use it because of the adversarial economic nature of the thing. I mean it’s so fucked up but it’s so fucking hot. and then it’s all confusedly mingled with genuine affection for one another because, at least in a fantasy, you probably got into this marriage because you did actually love each other, and maybe still do.
holy shit.
@iridescentknife is this what you meant by “some people’s /d/ worldbuilding scenario got to be real life”?
in addition to being super hot if you’re weird like me, this is also like… one of the primary things that is wrong with society. so.
A lot of aspects of normie heterosexuality sound like an insane kink premise (because they are), when you just… Explain them. This is why I have no respect for the “heterosexuality is boring” position. No it’s not! It might be morally reprehensible (as commonly practiced), but it’s far from boring!
Going back in time to the 2010s to tell the people tearing society down that we follow up by reassembling it from first principles
Like, I always used to plan too long-term, in Spiderweb games (Exile/Avernum) I’d always clear out the first goblin caves and keep going back to pick up every least valuable loot, like the rocks that weren’t even ranged equippable until after Nethergate, to haul back to town and sell and then buy all the skills the pay-trainer offered up to full before I moved on
Which crosses very productively with the thing where I can game out contemporary trends to tell where they’ll eventually end up
Which is maybe part of how it works out that I am now more amazingly well-positioned than I could ever imagine.
Like, in 1999 I was like “anime, happy hardcore, JRPGs, and Daft Punk is the important stuff going on” and with the benefit of hindsight was I wrong?
Well, the sting of all these neo-hipsters reviving all the things from my young adulthood I liked not registering me as a peer is softened by the way that after the personality change charisma boost they seem to register me not as a sad aging guy who shouldn’t still be at the bar but as a tribal elder (and I suspect I’m eligible for the girls to register as “daddy” now)
Like I feel like I should pivot this into some sort of “it gets better” takeaway message but no, I can’t realistically promise this to anyone else, this is ridiculous.
“Oh in the ‘10s the culture’s courtship practices totally collapse, but decent autistic queer ones actually develop, and then in the '20s you turn queer and out to have been autistic all along” actually a pretty good synecdoche of my cultural whiplash lately
people like anita sarkesan, 4chan and other members of the gamer gate movement refuse, to even consider the reality. there is biblical evidence for video games. these people don’t want to believe that basic facts, adam and eve played the xbox which has been proven scientifically and is the word of god, plain and simple. denying video games = denying christ.
3rd century ecclesiastical schism over whether the Xbox came with Uno
God, I just realized that Anita Sarkeesian has totally fallen out of relevance
“gen z is so loud and rude and disrespectful!” good. they might actually accomplish something.
– Gen Z
Seriously, from over-drawing lessons from the 60s – and specifically, the 90s’ reinterpretation of the 60s to flatter and intellectualize the Boomers fully coming into their own as heirs to the country, and the lessons learned under later periods built on that 90s understanding – there’s this widespread youth sense that “if I’m not getting my way, it’s because I haven’t been enough of a brat about it!”
But that understanding could only bear so much weight, the 2010s was a festival of putting too much on it, and now it’s fallen through. And the rest of society has realized it doesn’t need to placate those brats, or win an argument against them, just stop taking them seriously and let it wither on the vine. You already saw it with “defund the police”!
And reimplement the pre-60s – pre-90s, really – understanding of things, which is, “you act in a way acceptable to the rest of society, and in particular your seniors running the established order, or the hammer comes down”
I suspect you could probably draw a line between those posts complaining that what’s being marketed as 1990s nostalgia is really just mislabelled 1980s nostalgia, and those posts remarking that it’s become okay to make fun of the 1950s now because the principal object of reactionary nostalgia is no longer an alternate 1950s with no civil rights movement, but an alternate 1980s with no AIDS crisis.
I think it’s more that the “lost golden age” has been updated from The 50s to The 90s.
Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!
Must be weird to be the guy going hard through my archives and like two days ago was the harrowing cultural crisis of the mid-2010s and now I’m just going on about my yard and how everything is awesome
I recall @kontextmaschine getting into it a while back with Anon over “you keep saying that Woke is gonna roll back but you don’t give examples”, and it occurs to me that the recent Target Pride thing is exactly an example of how it’s gonna go. Company brings out a Liggibettequeue-theme thing, Yay We Love Queers, and then Oh No There’s Complaints And Protests (which there’s precious little public evidence of, but, y'know, protests) and where in previous times the company would’ve kept going now they have Safety Concerns and the whole thing gets shoved to the back of the store and deleted from the website and never spoken of again.
And I just read a story about some kids putting on a play where Robin Hood is actually Maid Marian, and they had to do it in a garage because the school nixed the idea, and the interesting thing to me was that the school shut it down not after lengthy and vitriolic demonstration from angry adults threatening violence but after a couple parents phoned the school and complained. And sure, you can interpret that as “oh, the Right Wing is Ascendant and people don’t want to buck them”, but as late as 2020 I would have expected at least a little pushback from the school authorities, and from the language in the story it was less “someone has made credible threats” and more “we don’t want a bunch of people showing up and making a scene because we consider avoiding scenes more important than supporting queer stuff.”
“Somehow rebounding into a cockeyed reaffirmation of gender roles via rejecting 90s Strong Female Characters” is the kinda bullshit way these things do tend to resolve.
The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.
And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.
