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America loves to lie about itself, and Americans love to eat those lies up—anything that obliterates our sins, that tells us everything will be okay, that makes us the infallible, gallant protagonist in the story of Earth.
Bub’s infirmity drew us to her as much as her cuteness; she was frail, our furry Beth March, with Beth’s pure heart and unfortunate destiny to be the fulcrum for others’ growth. We were doing Bub a favor by loving her, weren’t we? Her face was ours to get over, to find cute in spite of itself, because we were so open-minded, so brave. But she was also just a cat, and that was our justification for fixing our gaze shamelessly on Bub’s differentness. In the most uncharitable reading of Lil Bub fever (a microcosm of the viral internet machine at large), we, her audience, do not come off well. We
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the only thing to do, when you are one speck in an ungovernable community of nearly eight billion people on this planet, is to always keep an eye trained on the deep why of things: Why do I like this? Where is this impulse coming from? Am I telling the truth to myself about myself?
Bub is a benign example of our propensity to flatten our objets d’entertainment into mascots, trading cards, so we can consume them without the complications of flesh and blood and history
our most catastrophic impulses often start small, banal.
The problem isn’t that people have latent biases that manifest in unexpected ways; it’s that we, as a society, are fundamentally allergic to examining those biases and holding ourselves accountable.
Americans are addicted to plausible deniability.
Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.
the abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a natural, inevitable by-product of the internet but a coordinated, politically motivated silencing campaign;
the problem is people weaseling out of the growth. We are addicted to not being inconvenienced by reality, even in the most mundane circumstances. We just want to have everything.
If we’re going to pull our country and our planet back from the brink, we have to start living in the truth. We have to start calling things by their real names: racism is racism, sexism is sexism, mistakes are mistakes, and they can be rectified if we do the work.
It is so normal for white men to fail upward that it skews our perception of what is good.
Often, when I hear men speak about home invasion, it’s not in the context of what an intruder might do to them but rather, in an almost fetishistic way, what they might do to an intruder. These men yearn to stand their ground, to have an excuse to use their arsenal, to find out what it feels like to kill another human being (and you know, in this morally bereft country, what color human being they’re picturing).
Likability is a con, and we’re all falling for it.
Institutional benefit of the doubt is monstrously powerful: any lie becomes an incantation, conjuring itself into truth. This is the foundation of Donald Trump’s power.
A person’s standard of likability is a reflection of his beliefs,
From The Smurfs I learned that boys can have seventy-eight possible personalities and girls can have one, which is “high heels.”
From pretty much all film and TV I learned that complicated women are “crazy” and complicated men are geniuses.
Everything is a product of its time, and the whole point of progress is to make the future better than the present. People make mistakes, and people grow, and culture grows along with them. I’m not so naive or narcissistic as to think that the media of my youth was deliberately trying to poison me or that there’s nothing of value in things that hurt me. This is an imperfect history, anyhow, because there were strong women all around me, too, on screen and off, but figuring out who you are is always a triangulation of what you know and what you see. I knew that I was not inferior, but I could
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Hollywood is both a perfect and a bizarre vanguard in the war for culture change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas embed themselves inside us in the first place.
What we really need from Hollywood is about a hundred years of phase cancellation. We don’t need neutrality; we don’t need “nice.” It’s not enough to just stop being terrible. We need new work that actively challenges old assumptions, that offers radical models for how to conceive of ourselves and how to treat each other.
Unseating a couple (or a score or even a generation) of powerful abusers is a start, but it’s not an end, unless we also radically change the power structure that selects their replacements and the shared values that remain even when the movement wanes.
Whatever your sphere is, however big or small, you get to make choices within it, and if you care about healing the wounds of the world I hope you become a real demon bitch about diversity and never let anyone sleep.
build a society that takes care of its members, to demand a better world.
Art didn’t invent oppressive gender roles, racial stereotyping, or rape culture, but it reflects, polishes, and sells them back to us every moment of our waking lives. We make art and it makes us, simultaneously. Shouldn’t it follow, then, that we can change ourselves by changing what we make? The movement can’t just disrupt the culture; it has to become the culture. Anything else is just a red herring.
There is no value in willfully ignoring hatred, and the lie that neutrality in the face of oppression is not a political stance is part of how we got here.
The extremely problematic class implications of making wealth a prerequisite of “wellness” would come up exactly zero times at In Goop Health.
Hold space for yourself. Be entitled. Take. At a certain point, it began to feel less like self-care and more like rationalization.
America’s original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart.
This deliberate spackling over of structural inequality—the death of luck—is the only thing that gives Donald Trump any authority.
our society conflates conventional beauty with health.
the Republican Party has shown itself to be the servile, invertebrate lapdogs of fascism,
This mental contortion came to be called “South Park Republicanism,” an ideology that we can easily recognize now as a sort of proto-alt-right—predominantly young white men who felt “bullied” by un-fun, po-faced liberals and chose to fight back not with vicious stereotyping and oppressive social programs like their GOP dads had done but with vicious stereotyping and irreverence (and tacit endorsement of oppressive social programs).
Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents.
Don’t you remember how you felt before you knew that things could get worse?
There is no cool version of conservatism, no ethically responsible version, no rational version ready to reclaim the tiller after Trump leaves office. The word itself betrays an inherent violence: to conserve is to avoid change, to embrace stasis, to freeze frame the now because the now is treating certain people very, very well. And those who aren’t being treated well under the current system? Better not complain. Wouldn’t want to annoy Matt and Trey. Remember: black men locked up for drug crimes and forced to do slave labor in for-profit prisons are the “exact same person” as the white
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the South Park guys are not mad at PETA for the things that actually suck about PETA. They’re mad at PETA for being annoying, for caring too hard about animals (however imperfectly). This is not some new, cool strain of conservatism—nor is the alt-right. This is the same old stuff. It’s Morning in America. Make America Great Again.
if we let trolls dictate the parameters of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable and what’s taboo, we end up with Donald Trump as president.
black people live in a country in which their community is so relentlessly stereotyped and flattened that they are regularly murdered by agents of the state and even the simple statement that their “lives matter” is met with frothing outrage from a heavily armed majority, is it “whiny” if they ask white people not to call them racial slurs?
To believe in nothing is to change nothing. It means you’re endorsing the present, and the present is a horror.
our news media could do this. Our government could do this. All of them are desperate to keep you away from the truth: that they could make their platforms safe, constructive, and non-Nazi-infested for all users, but they choose not to.
So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well intentioned but floundering, as though they are not the experts. You are the experts. Only 2.6 percent of construction workers are female. We did not install that glass ceiling, and it is not our responsibility to demolish it.
“Do you ever stick up for me?”
I need you to absorb that risk. I need you to get yelled at and made fun of, a lot, and if you get kicked out of the club, I need you to be relieved, and I need you to help build a new one.
“Common sense” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness. I moved on.
Art has no obligation to evolve, but it has a powerful incentive to do so. Art that is static, that captures a dead moment, is nothing. It is, at best, nostalgia; at worst, it can be a blight on our sense of who we are, a shame we pack away. Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores. They are letting obsolescence devour them, voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear. Falling behind is preventable.
You can choose to be permeable, to be curious, to be the one that didn’t die.
Stigma breeds silence, and silence is a vacuum that abortion opponents can fill with whatever stories they want.
As soon as we are baited into correcting our opponents, it legitimizes their argument. Once you are arguing from the defense, you’ve already lost.
There is no debate because we do not live in a theocracy and one minority group does not get to implement legislation that impedes other people’s freedom, period.
