round-up: 8/10

housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.

Aug 11, 2024

Happy Saturday!

Here’s what I have for you today:

Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations

& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.

Things to read/watch:

Housekeeping:

I made myself a necklace this week—

dbouts

A post shared by @dbouts

What I’m listening to:

What I’m watching:

What I’m reading:

Quotations:

Romantic breakups are an accepted part of life, a rite of passage with familiar rituals—a dramatic haircut, eating ice cream and crying to rom-coms, rebound sex, nights out with your friends. But there’s no such formula for dealing with the end of a friendship, no roadmap that recognizes the grief of such a rupture and simultaneously assures us we’ll get through it. And having to actually say any version of “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore” felt overly dramatic, even childish. Who says that after middle school?

-Lily Dancyger

Beauty standards are constantly shifting and thus you’re thrown into this never-ending delicate dance of achieving and maintaining beauty.

-Zeynab Mohamed

While beauty is often said to be subjective, beholden to the eye of the beholder, how subjective is it when founded on constructed ideals? These foundations, underpinning beauty standards, are entrenched in mechanisms that reinforce sexism, racism, colourism, and other forms of discrimination. Despite global variations in beauty norms, Western colonisation has propagated Eurocentric beauty standards worldwide.

-Zeynab Mohamed

The thing with pretty privilege is that it’s conditional and not an equal playing field. It’s not extended to women who are trans, Black and Brown, disabled, and/or fat. Pretty privilege is a very specific type of pretty, and it’s synonymous with being thin, white, and able-bodied.

-Zeynab Mohamed

Dykes have been throwing sex parties for far longer than I’ve been alive, but most that I’ve encountered have not done what Jade and Daemonumx are doing with Bawdy, their queer bathhouse party, and Bruise, their public leatherqueer party, which is establish as a social baseline an integration of dyke and fag approaches to consent, cruising, and safety. For many dykes, there is a learning curve for public sex because of the restrictions—as well as the protections—of so-called “female socialization”³. To boldly reconfigure one’s understanding of safety in order to attend a sex party organized by people who refuse to entertain gender policies, requirements for government names, and STI monitoring is no mean feat⁴. But to cruise necessarily means exposure to unexpected people, unreciprocated desires, complicated feelings and conflicts, activating situations and environments, and, enmeshed with all these, breathtaking possibility. To cruise is to be more free, and freedom is always undertaken as risk.

-David Davis

But Ratajkowski gives a convincing performance. She’s no Kendall Jenner, whose own performance of interestingness amounts to nothing more than vacuous aestheticization and reminds me of the movie Ingrid Goes West. And yet, I think Jenner believes she has us all fooled because she’s fooled herself. That’s high-level self-deception on par with Caroline Calloway, who, on a recent episode of the podcast “Girls Rewatch,” said she’s a “Jessa,” when she’s very obviously a “Marnie” — the patron saint of interesting girls. You know who else are Marnies? Jack Antonoff’s menagerie of interesting girls, most notably Lorde and Taylor Swift. But Lorde strikes me as having awareness around it — maybe even pride, while Swift is on the record as a self-identified “Shoshanna,” which is plausible, but still false (yet not aspirational enough to make anyone raise an eyebrow). The thing about girls like Caroline Calloway who say they’re Jessa is that they’re playing in our faces. They’re confidence artists. Bullshitters. They know they’re lying, and they know you know they’re lying. But that doesn’t faze them. They care about perception more than integrity. They want to appear aspirational because they’ve conflated it with worthiness. The goal, for them, is to be an object of envy, someone worth imitating — because that’s the only way you know you are good.

-Delia Cai

According to Renée Girard, genuine innovation only arises from imitation. However, due to the algorithm, we no longer pick our aspirational models. Instead, we imitate the same lowest common denominators of "cool" and “interesting.” Anything that deviates from that model becomes the coveted "it." Yet, over time, this perceived uniqueness inevitably reverts to uniformity because the algorithm is engineered to standardize. It’s hard to be singular when sameness is what rises to the top in the attention economy.

-Delia Cai

The congratulatory echo chamber dilutes and flattens any legible point-of-view, but for the interesting girl, marketability, likeability, reputation, and relatability outweigh this concern. For the women writers truly transacting in this ecosystem, the objective isn’t necessarily to write with authority, but rather to passably demonstrate "knowledge" and "taste" to a cool-girl buyer persona — a fictional representation of the ideal cool-girl customer as defined by the market. This buyer persona is envisioned in a projected personae, delusionally, hence it's no surprise she's also usually a Jessa. It’s fascinating, though, that with all of this emphasis on appearing like an assemblage of high-consecration tastes and literary knowledge, there isn’t a preoccupation with craft and style.

-Delia Cai

Vulnerability is to show wounds, it’s to expose yourself to more effective attacks, to reveal your weak points.