I know I’ve posted about this before, but seriously: what is it about Matt Yglesias? The dude mostly just posts mundane, obviously-correct center-left takes all day long, but there’s this segment of the Pundit Class who is convinced that he’s Satan von SuperHitler.
He takes the Clinton ‘90s as the refoundation of the Democratic Party seriously.
There were two recurring themes some editor at Salon – around say ‘96 when it and Slate kind of were for-internet print media – was fixated on.
One was a child-liberationist one, like “parents can have people abduct their 'problem children’ to offshore reform camps like Tranquility Bay, and also often backwater areas of various states use 'Person In Need of Supervision’ structures to apply the state to control teens on parents’ behalf AND THAT’S FUCKED UP”
The other was “oh yeah remember how there was once a rich subculture of female Star Trek fans writing 'slash’ fanfiction?”
And it was honestly surprising to me it was the second one the culture ended up picking up as a major subplot.
“this meeting could have been an email” but instead it’s “this video tutorial could have been a post with less than a hundred words”
In fairness there really were a lot of vidya walkthrough sections that turned out to be a lot better as 2 photos or 15 seconds of video than they had been as 3 paragraphs on GameFAQs
Think there's room for interesting analysis of gender based on the highly divergent development of the archetypes of "girl is attracted to guy, gets disappointed when he turns out to be gay" and "guy is attracted to girl, gets disappointed when she turns out to be a lesbian".
How was hearing a story with the message “in your foremothers’ time sometimes men would be abusive but we’d be Goodbye, Earl lesbians about it” supposed to help the woman with the boorish galoot husband in the Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) frame story, anyway? Maybe it made more sense in the book.
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.
It’s actually pretty impressive that Ghost in the Shell (2017) and Alita: Battle Angel (2019) beat Bungie’s 2001 Oni for most outdated take on mid-90s anime by so far just a few years ahead of 90s retro kicking off for real.
The ‘90s, when straight men first picked up anal sex from gays but mistook the defining thing as “the guy fucks his partner in the ass” and not “the guy’s partner fucks him in the ass”
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.
I used to have these old guidebooks of London and Paris that had paragraph blurbs about every establishment on particular streets. That probably doesn’t exist now because it’s a bad idea: as far as a guidebook it’s pretty useless since it will get out of date so quickly and covers such a small proportion geographically. But I used to love those books and just read it for fun totally not with the intention of going to Paris or London but just to get that sweet, sweet specificity.
yeah I occasionally unearth books from the 90s back when they put a lot of stuff in print because how else were people going to find out about it?
I had a book detailing which pokemon cards were worth about how much money and so on (I didn’t buy any pokemon singles, I think I just liked looking at that kind of stuff). and while I’m sure the market moved enough that that book was a bit out of date by the time it hit print, nonetheless, I’m a bit nostalgic for an era when the world moved maybe just a little slower, such that it was even plausible to someone that this was the sort of information you might be able to get from a printed book
InQuest magazine was a thing in the 90s for basically doing that with CCG cards every month (after the model of the same publisher’s Wizard, which did it for comics)
