Kanye’s mocked for taking himself so seriously. Kim is seen as frivolous to a fault. The truth, of course, is each is always both: he is really playful, and she has incredible drive. In deed and word, they are powerful—if not perfect—forces for racial, gender, and LGBT equality. You’ll note that only one half of the couple receives any real recognition for it. It’s not a coincidence that he’s the one with the frowny face.
“Kanye should lighten up” and “I can’t take Kim seriously” sound like different critiques, but they’re both centered on the idea that one must attend to every matter in life with the appropriate degree of gravitas. It’s a value judgment that’s so instinctual and self-evident that it’s easy to mistake for a matter of fact. When our values don’t align with someone else’s, an easy way to diminish or discredit their perspective is to suggest they should be talking about something else. Something more worthy of consideration.
You’d think the world of comics would be sensitive to this brand of condescension since it still has a chip on its shoulder about being Serious Adult Art. But many of the same people who have built their lives around the idea that comics are Very Important see no irony in telling people to lighten up about issues surrounding racism or sexism. Consider this piece on representation in Avengers toys, which was described by one prominent comics critic as an “aggressive article about culture war,” and as “fannish overidentification” by another. Those guys aren’t going to say the author of the article is wrong—heavens no!—but they sure do think it’s odd that anyone would care so hard about something as soulless as corporate merchandise. Around the same time I saw another comics blogger who dedicated three paragraphs of a Very Special Post to her observation that people should talk less about Sansa Stark and more about Boko Haram. Fortunately, she’s doing her part to engage with the problem of rape by directing readers’ donations to…a random Paypal that funds computers for orphans. LOL?
The notion that lowly fandom distracts us from meaningful political engagement is not new, but it seems to me it’s been gaining traction lately, particularly among nerds. Simon Pegg recently criticized science fiction as an opiate of the masses, going so far as to invoke the patron saint of People Who Need You to Know How Hard They Give a Fuck, Jean Baudrillard. “There was probably more discussion on Twitter about the The Force Awakens and the Batman vs Superman trailers than there was about the Nepalese earthquake or the British general election,” Pegg writes. (Cluck cluck!) His point about the monetization of nostalgia wasn’t wrong, but that post was maybe half as smart and humble as he thought it was.
“Talk more about earthquakes, sheeple.” –Baudrillard
Meanwhile Freddie deBoer’s out there pushing his critique of media types who indulge in what he calls “performative love of black culture”—e.g., praise for Beyoncé and The Wire—in lieu of meaningful, challenging political discussions. Beyoncé thinkpieces aren’t going to build a better world is more or less his point, and you could object to it for any number of good reasons. For me, it resonates, though I don’t quite agree. Sure, there’s any number of more pressing matters one could choose to talk about. And yes, there is a certain sameness across publications that makes for an unhealthy critical landscape. I too perceive a flatness in tone…the vague detachment of clever people talking about clever things…the sound of content shedding its skin.
Recently deBoer put forward yet another iteration of his Beyoncé argument, a critique of The Toast that garnered him pushback (especially from women), strong praise (largely from white men), and untold fame and fortune (also, presumably, from white dudes). It was based on “Books That Literally All White Men Own: The Definitive List,” a post written by one of The Toast’s founders, Nicole Cliffe. DeBoer used it to illustrate his longstanding complaint with white media types who are progressive, but not quite political, arguing that her piece is “indicative of a growing exhaustion, with desultory, rote online writing”—much of which functions to make white people feel less white under the guise of promoting equality. He describes the thought process behind that piece and its ilk: “‘Hey, you guys like lists. And you love calling other white people white. Here you go. Eat your slop. Enjoy.’”
Heaven knows there’s plenty of slop out there! But it’s worth noting that deBoer wasn’t the only white guy who had a serious problem with this particular slop; plenty of other dudes hated it too, and his reaction can’t be divorced from that context. Like those other guys, deBoer mistook the post as a failed indictment of white male liberal arts students. But his more serious mistake, to my mind, was writing thousands of words about Nicole Cliffe’s feminism in a post that totally failed to mention Nicole Cliffe or feminism. “We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020,” he wrote, holding up one unnamed woman’s joke as an instrument of the impending apocalypse. “If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.” (my emphasis)
This last bit is an especially curious directive, couched as it is in a post that, for all intents and purposes, conflates Nicole Cliffe with Mallory Ortberg, a joke post with political discourse, and the agenda of a for-profit website with that of the progressive movement, whatever that even is. It’s this third mistake that gets my goat. The Toast is a vital feminist force, not because its content is political, but because it was founded on the radical notion that two women can publish whatever they want—whether it’s about Harry Potter fan fic, fitness, Ayn Rand, or motherhood—and people will read it. They were so successful in that venture that they launched a vertical where Roxane Gay publishes whatever she wants. This vision—an empire of sister sites in a media landscape where networks like the Awl and Gawker dedicate a single site among many to lady stuff—is even more radical than the one on which The Toast itself was founded.
Ronbledore wants YOU to join his feminist army.
The Toast has a strong identity amongst its increasingly indistinguishable brethren, which is not an accident. It’s because the site doesn’t approach feminism as a generic movement. It explores it at the micro level by talking about our public personas and our most secret self-images, our successes and failures, our political stands and our throwaway jokes. It cedes the floor to one voice at a time—an important methodology in a world in which feminism as a movement has historically failed (and is still failing) to accept and celebrate different ways of being a woman. These voices aren’t necessarily as loud as Lindy West’s or Caity Weaver’s or Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s, or as weird as Edith Zimmerman’s or Mallory Ortberg’s. They rarely, if ever, offer takes. Instead, they amble in and out of conversations about identity in a world where there’s a tendency to whittle women down to their best or worst qualities, ignoring any part that’s not convenient or a means to an end. In this context, promoting a spectrum of voices—and making money doing it—is a remarkable political act. Mistaking that for solipsism or putting on a show is a fundamental failure to understand the stakes.
In describing the appeal of Broad City, Amy Poehler once said, “The rule is: specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked.” This is advice worth considering with regard to the urgent work of building a coalition on the left. In my experience (in life and in politics), watered-down beliefs aren’t attractive. Nor is informing people that their interests are insignificant in service of propping up your own. The way to promote engagement and build community is not to ask people to assimilate in the name of the greater good; it is to meet them where they live. To be successful, you have to have the confidence and the conviction to meet them there honestly, as yourself. Incidentally, that’s precisely what Nicole and Mallory have done. Their audience is comprised of people who support the project I just described, not undiscerning fans who “will call anything [they do] a work of genius no matter what,” as deBoer wrote.
For a long time I wondered why deBoer seems to class everything written by media types as political discourse. The answer, it occurs to me, is simple: because that’s what he does. I think that’s cool; sometimes I even think it’s admirable. But promoting progressive unity shouldn’t be about remaking other people in your own image. If there’s any truth to the idea that the left is eating itself, I’m far less suspicious of callout culture and lazy writing than the Serious Men who demand that everyone engage with the issues on their own narrow terms. Meaningful change requires diversity in both background and approach. It requires room to let people pursue their particular preoccupations.
Meanwhile, the notion that we supplant real political engagement with blog slop and mindless entertainment is bunk. There’s not a writer in the history of the Internet who thinks his Beyoncé thinkpiece is going to change the world, nor is there a single nerd who thinks that Sansa Stark is more important than real people. Have a little faith that you’re not the last person on earth with a sense of proportion. Moreover, recognize the power of pop culture to propel political discourse. You can complain all day long about white people’s relationship to The Wire (which, by the way, has officially replaced liking The Wire as white people’s favorite way to distance themselves from whiteness), but the fact that its hero was a black gay vigilante has had a real, if not measurable, impact on the ways in which Americans think about race, justice and masculinity. David Palmer helped get President Obama into office. Almost a decade after his last appearance on 24, the American public still trusts him so much that he’s the face of Allstate Insurance. How crazy is that? If anything we’re desensitized to how crazy that is.
A deep abiding truth I’ve come to understand through the work of Lynda Barry is that identity is not just who we are or what we have. It is also who we can imagine ourselves to be. Stories are not an escape from our real lives; they are part of them. The imaginary past—the stories we read, the dreams we dreamed, the options we considered, and the stuff we dismissed out of hand—runs parallel to every action that’s fully realized. It constitutes an authentic contribution to our lived experience, impacting how we see the world and everyone’s place in it. It also affects how we envision the future—an act of imagination that is central to the liberal agenda.
from What It Is by Lynda Barry
One of the reasons I love the Internet so much is because it’s the natural habitat of writers who convey a strong sense of what their own two eyes see. It also showcases my favorite thing about criticism: how our smartest thoughts can be about stuff that seems stupid or inconsequential. Anything is inherently worthy of conversation. The old dichotomies of high/low, content/ads, IRL/online and art/merchandise are increasingly meaningless, for better and worse. If you want to analyze Internet culture with an eye towards improving it—a project that overlaps with how to promote solidarity on the left in curious ways, as deBoer suggests—you can’t just gaze upon its treasure. You also need to root through its trash. Forget Hazlitt essays and impeccably researched longreads. I’m talking Buzzfeed quizzes and the archives of TMZ. Anything. Everything. All of it. I’ve learned profound truths about this life from reading Gabe Delahaye on bad movies, Samantha Irby on irritable bowel syndrome, Jacob Clifton on Gossip Girl, Michael K on celebrity culture, CNN dot com, troll comments on Youtube, and Rusty’s most odious tabs. One of the wonders of our strange human brains is their capacity to find meaning in viral videos and silly vampire novels. It’s a sad and small-minded mistake to treat that as anything other than an opportunity.
__________
Follow Kim O’Connor on twitter: @shallowbrigade.
‘A deep abiding truth I’ve come to understand through the work of Lynda Barry is that identity is not just who we are or what we have. It is also who we can imagine ourselves to be. Stories are not an escape from our real lives; they are part of them.’
Excellent. Though of course this suggests a different argument for being dogmatic about what people are watching: If the stories we pay attention to partly make us who were are, then they better be good stories. (Or at least there better be some sufficient amount of good mixed in with the bad.)
‘the patron saint of People Who Need You to Know How Hard They Give a Fuck, Jean Baudrillard.’
Ha! Beautiful.
I liked the characterization of the Toast as a site for women to write about whatever they want to. HU is pretty much a site for people to write about whatever they want…though what we want to write about tends to be less interesting to most people, if my traffic stats are anything to go by.
I think of “the left” as people who oppose things like the the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Bush’s torture programs, Guantanamo, US funding of the Israeli occupation, drone strikes in Yemen, NSA spying, corporate domination of US politics, the drug war, the prison industry, inequality in education, “the new Jim Crow,” global warming, and nuclear proliferation. Is there a lot of overlap between those people and people who write about the gender/racial/LGBT politics of pop culture? I know that a lot of pop culture is worth thinking and writing about (The Wire is probably in that category, from what I’ve heard), but I don’t think that people who seriously care about important issues are likely to care about Kim Kardashian, too.
Also, I seriously doubt that you can learn profound truths about life from studying Buzzfeed quizzes and the archives of TMZ. This morning, I learned a little bit about life from starting to read that NYT story about New York nail salon workers who live in virtual slavery. I’d probably understand the world a lot better if I spent more time reading NYT and/or visited the websites of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International every day. But I don’t think Buzzfeed quizzes and TMZ have anything to teach us except “America is getting dumber.”
“I don’t think that people who seriously care about important issues are likely to care about Kim Kardashian, too.”
DeRay Mckesson, one of the most high profile Ferguson activists, and somebody who reports on police brutality tirelessly, also regularly comments on pop culture (he’s talked about Iggy Azalea quite a bit, for example.)
I know lots of folks on twitter who protest and organize and also care about Beyoncé. I mean, I write about pop culture and also about social justice issues around police brutality, sex work discrimination, etc. The idea that somewhere there are “serious” people who don’t care about the culture they and everyone else lives in is I think really bizarre. I’m not maybe quite as enthusiastic as Kim about TMZ or Buzzfeed quizzes, but I can tell you for sure that many people who care a lot about serious issues also care about Kim Kardashian. Why shouldn’t they? Because it makes it easier to sort people into boxes? I think people of all sorts tend to have lots of different interests; that’s human, not a contradiction.
The Kardashian family’s fame just strikes me as a totally crass ploy to get people to watch t.v. commercials and buy celebrity gossip magazines. The other people mentioned above (even Iggy Azalea) are at least artists.
I’ll give you an example of what I’m trying to articulate–I used to be totally obsessed with a feminist blog called iblamethepatriarchy.com. The woman who writes it it has views that most people would call very radical; she’s pretty doubtful that women can consent to heterosexual sex, for example. And a lot of her blog is devoted to critiquing sexism in pop culture and what she calls the “entertainment industrial complex.” But the more you read her blog, the more it becomes apparent that she watches a tremendous amount of television every day. So she’s positioning herself as this marginalized, radical bad-ass, but from another perspective, she’s just a typical American consumer/couch potato. I remember her saying that she couldn’t stop watching Breaking Bad because “That’s some hardcore culture-of-domination shit.” So the rest of us are watching it because we enjoy seeing Walter White kill people, but she’s doing it to examine America’s patriarchal culture of domination. It just seems like an excuse for vegging out.
I don’t know, Jack. That just seems kind of ungenerous to me. Interacting with art is something that humans do. It’s one of the things that makes us human, arguably. If this woman was interested in what Breaking Bad was saying, why does that make her a hypocrite? Like, Breaking Bad is supposed to be about culture-of-domination, and even a critique of it.
Again, people can be interested in multiple things at once, and there are lots of reasons someone might be interested in something. Kim Kardashian for example—I haven’t watched her show, but I’ve seen people talking about how her status as sex symbol with a not-model-thin body has been meaningful to them. The Kardashian family has been part of putting Caitlyn Jenner in a place to be a very high profile trans woman in a culture that has few of those.
I think one of the interesting things about the Kardashians is how they stand in for “trivial”. Why do people feel the need to hate them so much? What’s with that?
I’m not really into Buzzfeed quizzes or TMZ. Part of my point is that something…intellectual elitism, I guess…causes a lot of people to conflate quality and cultural influence. Criticism is more about how you engage with something than its inherent worth.
@ Kim
I would say some quality, of one kind or another, is a prerequisite of cultural influence. (Though of course not everything good is culturally influential.) Which may be why some people actively hate the Kardashians, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, and so on: They remind them that there are kinds of quality that don’t fit their idea of what quality culture is supposed to be (which often isn’t actually all that good either).
@ Jack
I once saw it suggested that Russian women are less receptive to second- and third-wave feminist rhetoric than Americans because, unlike the Americans, the Russians assume that the way you live is actually supposed to be consistent with what you say.
In response to Jack, I’d argue subject matter and discourse are not one and the same. I’ve read vapid essays on important things and works of unusual power on pedestrian or disposable culture.
I’m not saying all topics are equal. Some more easily resonate with depth because they connect to ideas/emotions we consider transcendent. Which isn’t always the same as actual substance, but the sense of it often indicates the other.
Take celebrity gossip: it feels less like a waste of time if it’s a death than leaked nudes. The one readily connects to transcendent concerns, the takes effort to look past the prurient. If one has been contemplating shame and body politics, however, the latter may inspire deep engagement.
Humans can be simultaneously frivolous and serious and both are often merely vehicles for communication which extends beyond what’s being said. Talking about the weather is the smallest of small talk but weather is a significant force and a universal which permits other social transactions.
The familiar and limited in scope, like pop culture, can be a handy vehicle or starting point for intellectual exchange. One might be fully aware of a war, but the nature of the topic may inspire concern about having something worthwhile to contribute. Initiating depth/connection over a three minute song may be more reliable than a conflict with 30 years of history.
As for I Blame The Patriarchy, Jack’s quoting a side gag in an essay about Maria Popova’s theory of internet curation:
>>Fifteen hours! The last time I spent fifteen hours on anything, it was a “Breaking Bad” bender, which enterprise, it should not surprise you to learn, failed to enbiggen anyone’s intellectual horizons… I’m pretty sure some auntly neurons went on permanent hiatus, because day-um, that show is some effin hardcore culture-of-domination shit. Lard help me, I can’t look away!<<
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/08/28/you-are-a-member-of-the-sex-class-and-the-only-way-out-is-feminist-revolt-by-jonah-lehrer/
In 2 years of output (70 posts) a fraction of the blog centered on TV, the rest jumping from underwear to graffiti in Austin to Kale. Breaking Bad is rarely mentioned. IBTP is performative, serious themes conveyed via glib shtick and pop culture references. In 11 years, of course TV is going to be a frequent reference.
This points to an aspect of importance I often find wanting: more emphasis on seriousness of topics than practice. A serious, yet still brief, inquiry into Jack's assertion about "Blame" uncovered lager context for the half remembered Breaking Bad quote and questions the idea Twisty is a couch potato using sexism as rationale for consumption. Her subject is the pervasive, mainstream nature of patriarchy , so of course the commonplace is addressed.
To me, one takes the work seriously but not necessarily oneself or subjects. DeBoer and others fail because they usually do the reverse, which makes it difficult to parse meaning due to being overly concerned about the weight of the words.
“DeBoer and others fail”
I enjoyed deBoer’s brief Mad Max discussion. It’s helped by the fact that he thinks the subject is worthwhile.
I appreciate your point and obviously I’m a DeBoer anti-fan.
But his rant about the Toast strongly implies DeBoer didn’t read the tags at the end which all but overtly explain the joke: “Tags: books, i own most of these books myself, men, undisputable facts”.
Perhaps DeBoer found the surface conceit so infuriating he was unable to absorb the other cues. Or he tuned out once he saw grist for his all to frequent screeds about Political Correctness Is Ruining Everything And It’s Serious, I’m On The Front Lines.
Everyone has moments in which anticipation of or assumption about a point leads to missing the point. It’s just DeBoer is so often unserious in practice to push his preferred PC Police narrative.
One “whose scholarly work concerns writing assessment, applied linguistics, literacy education, and public policy” should at least realize 1500 hyperbolic words conveys meaning by volume and thus “I wish I was affronted politically or personally” tacitly concludes “and I TOTALLY WAS”. I think basic “textual processing” indicates the more vehemence and verbiage used to claim one isn’t offended in some way, the more it conveys one does.
I also like that Mad Max piece, perhaps because the list and topic sets limits on the process.
Okay, I’ll grant that critiquing bad pop culture can sometimes be worthwhile; I just think that, generally speaking, it’s the cheapest way to be a radical. Watching “Hoarders” and complaining that it’s exploitative a la Twisty allows you to be entertained while feeling superior to the other people who are being entertained. Taking a close look at where my clothes are made and how the animals that I eat were treated would probably be both boring and guilt inducing (if I were to actually do it, which frankly I haven’t). To a lesser extent, the same is true of taking a close look at how the U.S. government is spending your, my, and Twisty’s tax dollars while acting in our name. Overall, I just think that I’m a little more honest with myself about being a spoiled, passive sack of shit than she is. She may see herself as an oppressed “member of the sex class” who has nothing in common with privileged white males like me, but it’s worth noting that we all watch the same fucking t.v. shows.
Sorry if I’ve taken this a million miles away from Kim O’Connor’s article.
No; your point is one deBoer often makes. He doesn’t see critical engagement or writing about pop culture as sufficiently political, and argues it’s substituting for real political action.
It’s worth noting, I think, that *any* political act will be called insufficient or self-deluding by *someone*. BlackLivesMatter protestors are routinely told that they’re doing nothing worthwhile; voters or those who work to get someone elected are told that that is worthless, etc. Change is really hard and figuring out how any action moves the political process is hard to do.
As I’ve said before, art has long been a central part of numerous political struggles, in one way or another, and criticism is a longstanding art form (older than comics or television.) Maybe James Baldwin was an idiot for writing about the Exorcist. Maybe Freddie deBoer is an idiot for thinking talking about the Toast matters. But on the other hand, lots and lots and lots of people seem to believe that culture really matters; it’s something they pay attention to, identify with, think about. And where is racism (as one example) if it’s not in culture?
Those are good points. I guess a lot of it depends on the quality of the writing. Most Salon.com writers are not James Baldwin.
I think the Kardashians themselves are largely to blame for the fact that they’ve become synonymous with vapid, rich narcissists. I’m sure they get a lot of gratuitous nastiness thrown their way, but so do Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter, both of whom are still jerks.
“Most Salon.com writers are not James Baldwin.”
Truer words were rarely typed.
One “whose scholarly work concerns writing assessment, applied linguistics, literacy education, and public policy” should at least realize 1500 hyperbolic words conveys meaning by volume and thus “I wish I was affronted politically or personally” tacitly concludes “and I TOTALLY WAS”.
MrFengi gets at a point that I find really interesting. DeBoer clearly had a strong emotional reaction to that post, but he frames it as objective analysis (“Nothing personal here–just pointing out what’s good and bad!”) versus other readers’ biased hero worship. In this his critique resembles a lot of stuff I see in comics criticism where some dude who sees himself as the Voice of Reason totally overreacts to what he perceives as self-obsessed snake people.
If you’re interrogating someone else’s perspective on so-called identity politics, you also need to interrogate your own. There’s an illusion of objectivity or neutrality that comes with being a white guy with an opinion that seems to be a real barrier to this process. In that deBoer post you can see how it makes him careless. I’m having a hard time imagining him writing a media critique in which he mistook, say, Alex Balk for a freelancer or felt comfortable describing Choire Sicha as a victim of his own success. Why spend thousands of words on the frivolity of one (1) post by Nicole Cliffe when Alex Pareene–an actual political commentator–is currently serving as the Prince of Pranks at Gawker? Like, I’d feel a lot more inclined to examine the toxicity of political correctness if we lived in a world where deBoer owned that.
DeBoer has written a post sneering at Alex Pareene…I’m trying to remember where it is. It was more a passing comment than a whole post, but it was along the same lines as his criticism of the Toast.
I am ironically amused that directly after I made a comment on another article asserting that complex and difficult societal problems call for nuanced and diverse approaches, I come to this article.
I’d submit that whatever credibility problems Ms. Kardasian has, if she speaks up for justice and progress, there’s room for her voice in a very large and diverse world – she may reach a few people those with more impressive credentials do not.