As a fat woman, I think I’m often expected to hate myself. At the very least people don’t expect me to actually like myself. One example specifically comes to mind; I was studying with some friends, walking between studying locations during finals season, when somehow the topic of beaches or swimming or something related to swimsuits came up. One of the people mentions feeling insecure in swimsuits and how that’s normal for a lot of people, she then looks to me as if she wants me to add to the conversation my own instances of feeling insecure in a swimsuit. The problem is, I never have and more than likely never will. While I am human and have had my moments of feeling down on myself, it’s not a major part of who I am or my existence. Part of this stems from my belief that the concept of not liking something about yourself is capitalist propaganda created by our corporate overlords. Literally anything you could hate about yourself can be traced back to an ad campaign. Hating how you look is a societal condition, not a human one. Not only can a lot of concerns over human features be linked to capitalistic endeavors, they can be linked to fascist ones as well. I understand feeling the pressure of being a human with a body, but listening to outside voices about how you should feel about your stomach or body hair is allowing for our capitalist, fascist overlords to win. This is not self-help advice, this is an argument; liking if not loving yourself is the most radical thing you can do.

In July of 2025, James Gunn’s Superman hit theaters. Not only was it a visual harkening to the comic books, it was a thematic one as well. In recent years, especially cinematically, Superman has become a kind of aura farming edgelord due to the misinterpretation of the character by Zack Snyder. It might be a controversial concept, but I don’t think the Clark Kent who grew up in a rural town and loved his mommy and daddy would allow for a bomb to blow up an entire courtroom. Even if he couldn’t hear it, he wouldn’t stand there forlorn whilst not even attempting to help anyone. That is why Gunn’s Superman is so refreshing, he won’t even let a squirrel die. He doesn’t even want a creature that is actively destroying a city to be killed, and if it was necessary to make it as painless as possible. One of my favorite interactions that Superman has is with his love interest, Lois Lane. The scene is set right after a video of Superman’s parents is released, which is telling Clark to take over earth and have as many wives as he can. Clark is sitting with Lois talking about their youths. Lois is talking about how different they are, how she was a punk kid from a bad part of town and how he is literally Superman. He counters with how he was punk too, listing bands that she later calls mainstream. Her main point is that she distrusts everyone and he thinks that everyone he’s ever met is beautiful and trustworthy. He finishes the argument by stating “what if that’s the real punk rock”. Not only do I think that that is a correct statement, that’s also how I feel about radical self acceptance. The society we live in is constantly trying to knock us down and compete with each other. It wants us to think that we are less than and should accept whatever crumbs are given to us. Punk, or any counter culture for this argument, is directly trying to go against mainstream culture. Being kind is one of the most profound ways you can fight against the oppression we as everyday people face. In that same vein, hating yourself is playing into what mainstream culture wants! They, as in the proverbial “man” , want us to hate ourselves and hate each other. Because not only do they get to turn us on each other, but then they get to turn us on ourselves. One of the easiest ways to fight against mainstream culture is to love yourself. When fascism rises, body size decreases. That’s why the current trend of being as skinny as possible isn’t just a coincidence, it’s intentional. Fascism wants to erode our self worth and turn us into a self doubting mass that’s easy to control. Loving yourself is a necessary step to fight not only fascism, but to also counter capitalism.

Capitalism is the largest purveyor of insecurity. While there has always been a desired hairline or waist size, nothing has created bodily problems or concerns like capitalism. From body hair, being too small, being too big, boob size, nose shape and size, and literally any other bodily feature has been targeted by someone trying to make money. As industrialization progressed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so did the hunt for untapped markets. With these new heights of production and income, companies were trying to milk and squeeze every spare coin out of people they could. A great initial example of this is women’s body hair. For the entirety of human history it was the norm for both women and men to have armpit hair. Throughout history there have been various trends of removing certain kinds of body hair or augmenting certain things, such as plucking hairlines higher or waxing legs, but they were never sweeping or permanent beliefs about body hair. Men had had multiple shaving products targeted to them for facial hair and the largest company at the time, Gillette, saw a missed opportunity by not targeting women. While some women have facial hair, every woman has armpit hair. So, Gillette started targeting women and their armpit hair. This then started the ongoing boulder that is the hair removal industry that is still thriving to this day, and now its not just armpits; its legs, arms, upper lips, chins and any other place that hair naturally grows. While men do have hair removal targeted towards them, it is nowhere near the level women get hair removal targeted to them. If you walk around any medium-large size city you will walk by multiple wax centers with huge photos of frolicing on a beach pushing the idea that you need to be hairless to be in public. It is inescapable for women to not see hair removal ads targeted to them. Having body hair is so repulsive that in historical movies or tv shows or zombie apocalypse movies, women are almost entirely devoid of body hair! Because this has been shoved down women’s throats for generations, women obviously have internalized that their natural body hair, the same body hair that men have, is disgusting and wrong even though this entire concept was started by a boardroom in the early 20th century. While this is a great example, I do believe that this is the case for everything else that women are self-conscious about as well. Could weight-watchers become a company worth over $100 million if they didn’t prey on women’s insecurities? Would plastic surgeons exist if women weren’t constantly being fed images of women whose job it is to be hot? Making people insecure about things about themselves that are normal and natural is a multi-billion dollar industry. I don’t want to minimize how people feel about themselves, but I would argue the vast majority of insecurities are rooted in marketing. I don’t think someone would be self-conscious about their body hair if there hadn’t been anti-body hair marketing for decades. Or that someone would hate their nose if the small euro-centric nose hadn’t been pushed as appealing by mainstream media. There are clearly other factors at play; racism, colonialism, and sexism to name a few, but all of these factors go hand in hand with capitalism. While I do think capitalism is the main creator of these insecurities, I cannot say that ideas about how bodies should look have only existed since capitalism has been around. Obviously there has always been the baseline attraction people have to each other, and therefore the adverse things that people aren’t attracted to. What I am arguing is that these people who didn’t have someone attracted to them weren’t then fed ads that tried to sell them something as a fix to the problem. Someone in Tudor England wasn’t given an ad about hair removal after being dumped by someone. Anne of Cleves didn’t think about getting a nose job when King Henry VIII wanted to divorce her. Every era has had certain things that are appealing or attractive, but they were always created by the masses, not a boardroom. With that people thought each other were unappealing but capitalism had nothing to do with that! They didn’t find fake boobs attractive or hate themselves because they had arm hair because an ad or commercial brought up an insecurity. The ad campaigns that have created these insecurities are so successful that they have completely embedded themselves in the collective consciousness that even children disseminate these beliefs without even realizing that they are perpetuating beliefs founded in capitalism.

When I was a child I was bullied multiple times and all for the same thing; being fat. I was targeted by a variety of children and in a variety of ways. One time a boy, who I might add was also fat, kept harassing me and that culminated in him throwing a bottle of glue at my head and him getting slapped with the equivalent of a restraining order so he couldn’t come anywhere near me. I so clearly remember after he threw the bottle at me I ran over to him and grabbed him by the collar and got in his face yelling “what the fuck have I ever done to you, why me!” while pointing my finger at him and angrily crying. I think a lot about childhood bullying, mainly where children get the ammunition from. Bullying is not some inherent biological trait, it’s a learned behavior that is reinforced by social structures. Not to sound like Rousseau, but I do not believe that people are born evil, I just think they can be socialized to be mean towards each other. I know I sound like a broken record, but I again think this loops back to capitalism. I think the concept of bullying is rooted in the concept of competition that capitalism is based in. Capitalism needs us to view each other as a direct threat to our own success and well being because if we worried about each other we would spontaneously burst into socialism. Bullying is the social repercussion of being raised in a capitalist society because it’s easier to pick on the person that is different from you to superficially raise your social standing and seem superior, thus gaining social capital. Capitalism also informs bullying by giving bullies ammunition. The same ads that create insecurities are embedded in the psyche of children as they grow up. We are socialized with these beliefs to become the perfect consumers. Whilst internalizing this information, children then start viewing differences between each other as negatives and things to exploit for their own social capital. My point with this philosophizing is that why should you let something a child said continue to get under your skin all of these years later? I have met so many people who are still affected by childhood bullying and it makes no sense to me. I understand that at the moment, it is deeply affecting to be targeted by one of your peers and how it can affect your own self image as an adolescent but as an adult? I picture it the same as if a child came up to you today and said the exact same thing, (you’re fat, your nose is big, you have acne) would you still let it affect you in the same way despite it literally being a child? There are clearly exceptions to this rule, bullying that was insanely violent, racist, homophobic or anything deeper than surface level remarks about physical appearances are something I can’t even speak about how psychologically affecting I imagine that can be. I am talking about the run-of-the-mill bullying that I know I can speak on. I just have never understood letting something an uninformed child who was basing hateful remarks off of information that was engrained in them by commercials and mainstream media still dictate how you feel about yourself as an adult. Do I let the random mean comments from a preteen about my weight/looks affect my 25 year old perception of myself? Of course not. I know so many people, even family members, who still allow for this type of bullying from their childhood to affect their own self image or confidence! At some point you just have to move on. You can’t allow for some mean thing that a random child or teenager said to you however many years ago continue to affect you so deeply! I find it a tad ridiculous to be honest, especially when considering that the things that bullies typically went after were creating fodder for the capitalist industries capitalizing off of insecurity. It’s really a perfect system when you consider it. Industries create these ads which then lead to people having issues with their own physical appearance. Whilst that is happening people are soaking up this information, either consciously or not, and continuing to disseminate it throughout our culture. This extends to children which then use these ideas to bully their peers and create this negative body image that has them turning to the exact industries that helped create these problems in the first place! I know women who were bullied, specifically by boys, for how small their breasts were when they were younger and later got breast implants when they were older, but who created the concept of needing a bigger breast size? The same people who sold the boys on this supposed need for large breasts! The concept of negative body image is a self-fulfilling prophecy where the companies who create the problem also sell the solution.

Hating yourself is really stupid. More importantly, hating yourself helps capitalism and fascism. As humans we are constantly being told that at least one thing about us needs fixing, a fixing that we can buy that will solve all of our problems. These companies have sold to us that things that are perfectly natural and normal are issues that need to be solved. By selling us these solutions and advertising to us, these companies have permeated our consciousness as a society to where people now do the pushing of these ideals. Women’s body hair is viewed as disgusting, whereas prior to Gillette pivoting to also advertise to women body hair was seen as a normal part of your body. Companies want us to hate ourselves so we buy whatever cream or pill or surgery they pitch to us so they can turn the insecurities they created into money that goes into their accounts. I don’t believe in pushing some self-help manifesto that is trying to empower you into some divine feminine bullshit, you should not hate yourself because hating yourself is inherently pro-capitalist. In other words, you should like yourself because the basis on which a negative body image is built upon was completely created by capitalism. A lot of people have negative thoughts about herself are founded from childhood bullying. While there are cases where bullying is genuinely traumatic and I understand holding onto that, the vast amount of bullying is name calling or pointing out something about someone’s body. I think that as adults we should not let the words of children impact us and affect us so negatively, especially when the topics that are common for bullies to pick on are things that are only thought of as negative because of the ads that are fed to us from such a young age! Even when considering childhood bullying, hating yourself is feeding into the capitalist systems that are wanting to make bank off of the insecurities that they created! You don’t have to love yourself, hell you don’t even have to like yourself but for the love of anti-capitalism stop hating yourself.

In Anglo-European culture women’s pleasure has never been a consideration. In ancient Greece women were thought of as misshapen men and were good for nothing other than children, often being ignored for what was considered the more “pure” relationship between an older and younger man. In Victorian era England sexually repressed or frustrated women were called hysterical, which ironically enough led to the invention of the vibrator as a treatment method for hysteria. In post WWII America, women were fed various drugs to make them at peace with the fact that they were seen as nothing other than housemakers, servants, and sex toys for their husbands. For the vast majority of European civilization, women were always viewed as good for nothing other than breeding and housework. Until the second wave of feminism in the 60s, women were never thought of as people with the capability of sexual desires, and if these desires were discussed the women were ostracized and suffered from voicing them during that time. Even in that era of second wave feminism, women’s sexual needs still came second to mens and they suffered from fates that men could escape. I would argue that even in our current time, a relatively sexually liberal time, the vast majority of heterosexual encounters end with women being unsatisfied. Almost every woman who has sex with men has heard the dreaded “was it good for you” after they were flopped on by a man who doesn’t know what or where a clitoris is. While women still aren’t having orgasms, the scene has gotten even worse with the current rise of the “manosphere”. Men in that sphere have renewed the idea that men actually shouldn’t like women or value their wants at all, with figure heads of the manosphere such as Andrew Tate saying that having sex with women for pleasure is “gay” and you should only have sex to have children. The reversion in sexual liberation with this movement is insane and we can see the effects its having on western culture. With this ideology, there is a rising inverse of these beliefs, at least on social media. In this case it has been the boom in “real eater” content creators, or male creators who in some way try to cater to what they perceive as women’s sexual wants and desires. But even through this attempt to serve the female gaze, they are still imposing mens pleasure over womens. No matter what their intended goals are, they are still pushing the concept that male pleasure is more valuable than female pleasure. That they give women head because they get off on it, with the women getting off on it being a secondary benefit. Men being at the forefront of the “real eaters” is comical because yet again men’s voices are speaking over women. In this essay I will not only discuss the growing prevalence in giving head to women, but how women’s pleasure is being co-opted by men.

Women have always expected to be givers. To give their time, their bodies, and their freedom to whomever asked for it. Women’s liberation, the movement that helped create what we consider modern day feminism, coincided with the free love movement in the 1960s. While at the core of these two topics and the issues they were addressing were very different, they did have overlap on a single issue. Women’s liberation, the second wave of feminism and a continuance of the women’s suffrage movement, was focused on tangible issues of women’s everyday life such as women not being able to open or have credit cards on their own, have their own bank accounts, and could not rent an apartment on their own. The concept of bodily autonomy was also incredibly important to the movement, with topics such as birth control, abortion, and sexuality being at the forefront. The free love moment intersects with the women’s liberation movement on the topic of sexuality except with significantly less nuance. While women’s liberation was tackling sexuality through the lens of equality and women being able to pursue what they would like without repercussions, the free love movement was literally just about being able to do what you want with who you want. The free love movement was created in the early 19th century and was aiming to separate the state from personal matters such as adultery, for the promotion of sexual relationships and pleasure for both men and women, and claimed that marriage was a form of state sanctioned oppression. I think we all probably hold a very similar image of the free love movement; 1960s San Francisco hippies living in a run down house on Haight-ashbury. One of my favorite accounts of the free love movement comes from Joan Didion. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she recounts her meeting with hippies in Haight-ashbury. While this essay mainly discusses the drug usage and overall aimless lives that people were living during this time, it highlights the fact that the free love moment not only exclusively benefited men, but that it still preyed on the cultural oppression of women. In these essays we still see women doing the domestic labour. They were in no way empowered but instead having to rear the children that they have been stuck with by men who used them and then proceeded to abandon them. These women were oftentimes incredibly young and ill prepared to not only take care of themselves but the infants they now have. On top of this, sexually transmitted diseases and infections spread rampant during the summer of love. For example, gonorrhea and syphilis rose 165% during the summer of love and women statistically suffer longer and more than men do when it comes to STD/Is. Women were the party facing repercussions from the free love movement, not men. Women were told that sexual liberation was good for them and good for society, but in reality it only benefitted men and still kept women in the same positions that they had been for generations. Within the free love movement, women’s pleasure or livelihood was never actually considered or at the very least a primary concern. I would even argue we didn’t see a woman actively pursuing her own sexual pleasure and liberation until Looking for Mr. Goodbar in 1977. In this movie we see Diane Keaton play Theresa, a woman going through her sexual liberation after seeing her sister get a divorce and start numerous affairs. We see a woman going after what and who she wants in the exact manner she wants in a way that had never been portrayed in mainstream cinema. But even then, she is still raped and murdered at the end of the movie so I’m not sure its the best piece of media in support of female sexual liberation, but it is still the one of the first times we have seen a woman shamelessly pursue her own pleasure. A year later we had Halloween, a movie where sexually active women were brutally murdered, so I would definitely say that at this time sexually active women were still being punished in the public eye and that women’s pleasure was not at the forefront of the conversation surrounding sex. It is safe to say that while womens liberation achieved some of their goals, womens liberation and free love did not accomplish anything meaningful or lasting when it came to womens sexual liberation and that women were still being judged for being sexually active. I would say that that mentality has never fully gone away, but women’s pleasure is at least more or less being considered now. I mean the vast majority of women still don’t have an orgasm during sexual encounters with men but women’s orgasms are at least no longer taboo, even until the early 2000s giving women head was considered a taboo or fetish. Like in England, until a decade ago giving women head was not considered the norm until mainstream rappers and musicians started singing about it and brought it into the public sphere. But even then, it doesn’t mean that men suddenly became expert snatch eaters or even want to do it. I would believe that the vast majority of men either don’t give head or if they do they’re only doing it on principle and aren’t really putting any effort in. I mean, we all saw that the only thing DJ Kalid apparently doesn’t eat is pussy even though it’s the 21st century. But, if I am such a proponent of women’s pleasure, then why on earth am I hating on men discussing giving head online?

In recent months I’ve seen a lot of discussion on social media about giving women head and it’s all been from men. It’s never a productive or informative conversation, it always gives the air of performance. A grandiose “Look at me, I’m not like other men. I don’t give head cause I have to, I give head cause I love it and want to gain followers” In a similar light to the men on tiktok who talk about how much they love dating fat women, displaying this by showing themselves lifting weights and increasing them by large amounts and how easy it is for them to lift fatties. Just like these self proclaimed fattie lovers, these self proclaimed munches go on and on about how much they just love going down on women. While the message these two profiles are pushing is not the same, their goal and methods are. They have found the golden ticket to internet popularity; making claims that no one can possibly or reasonably check. No one can check if the heavy duty weight lifter actually dates fat women and no one can reasonably check if Mr. Pussy actually gives head in the ferocious manner that he states!

They are weaponizing women’s insecurities, wants, and needs for their own social and monetary gains. This trend of men becoming the face of topics related to women is jarring and unproductive. Why should I care if a man likes to go down on women? Matter of fact, why is his pleasure more important or prominent than the woman he’s supposedly eating out like an all you can eat buffet? We hear about the frequency but never about her opinions on his oral skills. For all we know he could be bad at giving head and inconveniencing her with bad head throughout the day. We will never know because we are hearing about what is supposed to be a pleasurable experience for women from a man, it is inherently flawed and benefits no one but this man. There could be the argument that this man is spreading knowledge to other men, but why would a man be following another man to hear him talk about going down on women? It’s not like this man gives advice, just makes loud videos talking about head. A cursory scroll through his followers confirms that his audience is mainly women. His videos are entirely for the purpose of creating and building a female audience. But if you watch his videos, you can tell that he doesn’t entirely care about women. In one video he states something along the lines of “yes it tastes like pennies sometimes, I don’t care”. If you really cared about women, why are you contributing to the harmful rhetoric around vaginas? The logic behind making your entire image around giving head makes no sense to me. Like do the men who make this content just want their comments full of women praising them for supposedly doing something that they have no proof that they actually did? The only clear answer is that their main priority is to gain followers and an audience. Because despite the fact that women getting head is an act that is focused on female pleasure, it is men getting the pat on the back for talking about it and taking part in the dialogue surrounding women’s pleasure. I can’t think of a single female creator whose entire brand is talking about oral sex outside of the sexworker sphere. Playboy recently put out The Rise of the Real Eater, which discusses this trend at length and pokes the same holes in it, no pun intended. They bring up the point that “real eaters move in silence, which I agree with. Anyone trying to raise attention to themselves via mentioning or discussing some taboo is more than likely just doing it for ego strokes. But yet again, why is a man being interviewed in this article? They interviewed one of the creators at the center of this discussion, but why are we talking to a man about female pleasure? Why do we care that he gets off on this? Playboy did interview a woman for this article, and she brought up the exact same points I have; why do we have to hear about men’s pleasure in relation to getting a woman off? If they’re really so selfless and love it so much why do they have to plaster their love for it in their digital footprint?

Women do not cum enough, and men are directly responsible for this. To be fair, women have historically never gotten enough orgasms from men so it is not a new issue, but it is still an ongoing issue. The free love movement and the second wave of feminism both attempted to address women’s sexuality, but I would argue that while the second wave of feminism made huge strides for the sexual safety and liberation of women, the free love movement made women more vulnerable to predatory practices from men. Women were the party that were stuck with unwanted pregnancies and suffering long term from STD/Is. Even after the free love movement, women’s pleasure and sexuality were still demonized in mainstream media and generally failed at all of its goals. Even when women’s pleasure became more mainstream, women still aren’t having orgasms like men are. On social media there has been this new wave of men getting online and talking about how much they love going down on women but it gives the vibe that they care about gaining followers not making their sex partner have an orgasm. They talk about female pleasure entirely from their own perspective and take part in rhetoric that is actively harmful to women. Men have somehow gotten to the forefront of discussing women’s pleasure online simply by being louder. The entire performance of it in no way gives the impression that they actually care about women having orgasms because they only talk about how much they want to give head, not how much she likes it. Men should never be at the forefront of women’s issues and this silly example proves that. Like great you live giving women head, lets keep that an inside thought and not dilute women’s conversations online with your own wants. I am obviously pro women having fulfilling sex lives, that doesn’t mean I want to hear about that from a man’s perspective. Ideally I would never have to hear about anything from a man’s perspective but here we are.

sources:

https://www.playboy.com/read/sex-relationships/the-rise-of-the-real-eater?srsltid=AfmBOopC4LCpFeIUuPUMljepZ76e0HTHDWn25RpV_2Wsyj9KsnfjNaYO

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Hysterical-Victorian-Women/

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19053382

https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2017-10-12/from-summer-of-love-to-superbug-gonorrhea-rises-again-in-san-francisco

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3329016/

For almost the entirety of my 20’s I have been living with the constant threat of excruciating pain. Until recently, it has felt as if an anomalous force has been corroding my insides. Every couple of months for the past four years I have had a week where I have pain so severe that I can barely move my legs, barely move, barely walk, and can hardly get out of bed. It started randomly, there was no sudden fall or accident, it happened one day walking back to my apartment after classes. At first I thought I was dying, there was no other explanation to being in so much pain. I obviously had tried to figure out what was wrong with me, but to no avail. Throughout this period in my life I have seen four doctors, three physical therapists, two massage therapists, and one chiropractor to try and surmise what is wrong with me; and all it took was a 12 minute MRI. I know this term is often over and misused, but I was gaslit for the better part of these 4 years. I was told that the pain I was experiencing was “normal” and that there was nothing they could do about it. Call me crazy, but pain is never normal, especially in a relatively active 21 year old. I generally feel like the medical system of both the US and UK has failed me and I have suffered because of that. I know I am not alone in this suffering, it is a systematic problem that primarily affects women. Throughout this essay I intend to reflect on the relationship between pain and women and the failings of the healthcare system.

Pain unfortunately comes hand in hand with being a woman, even when it’s avoidable. Not only do our bodies just suffer through pain just by living, but it’s regularly ignored when mentioned. Like stated in one of my favorite fleabag quotes, women have pain baked into us. But, the medical system does nothing to help any of the pain we suffer through. When I was in my early teen years I was having excruciating periods, with cramps so bad I was missing school. Instead of pursuing any tests, my doctor decided to put me on birth control and have me skip 3/4 of my periods every year. Because it worked she never pushed the issue any further. I am still on this regimen because I know that if I do end up having something like endometriosis or PCOS they would still just put me on birth control because there has been no research done to further our knowledge or approach to these conditions. But it’s not just periods that the health care system doesn’t care about in regards to women; women having a heart attack are more likely to die than men are, women weren’t included in clinical trials until 1993, and women are just overall not listened to! I know a woman who was bleeding so severely from her period that she literally almost died, her iron was less than half of what it was supposed to be, and it got to that point because the doctors were not listening to her. They often joked that women always thought they were bleeding to death, and when they found out she was in fact bleeding to death her doctors never even apologized for not listening to her. It’s so frustrating to be reliant on a system that quite frankly does not care if you live or die. I understand that primary care doctors are heavily restricted on the time they can spend with each patient, but time doesn’t restrict the tests you can order or the amount of sympathy you can give. While there are outliers to this problem, generally speaking doctors do not care about the pain and suffering of women.

I am one of the lucky few who has a doctor that cares about them. But even while I consider the doctor I currently have to be very caring and very helpful to the point where she often ignores the 30 minute limit that is enforced, it still took years to convince her to let me get an MRI even after I had tried everything else she had prescribed for me. One time she even told me that my back was perfectly fine even though it had been ongoing for years at this point. This January I finally strong-armed her into putting in the referral, and after being on the brink of a claustrophobic panic attack for the entirety of the MRI I was told I would hear back about my imaging in a couple of days. Imagine my shock when literally 30 minutes after said MRI that I was getting a phone call from her personal phone number. I thought I was dying because her message had absolutely no useful information in it. I thought that my fears of a tumor on spine imbued in me by Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails was finally coming true, where the author’s brother complains of some back pain whilst working out and it ended up being an orange sized tumor on his spine, which eventually killed him. That image had been floating in my mind since the pain started and I thought it was finally coming to fruition, that I would have to make peace with the fact that I actually was dying and had been for years. Five minutes later she texts me that it’s not cancer, she knows me and my fears of cancer so well. A couple hours later she calls me and tells me that I have a severely bulged disc. A bulged disc so severe that when the MRI tech saw it and saw my age he panicked and called her. She told me that I would need physical therapy, to go to a pain clinic, and to meet with an orthopedic surgeon. She told me I might not need surgery, just steroid injections into the disc, and that I’m most importantly not dying! I made it through the call, which happened to be in the middle of a volunteering shift where I had to act like a normal person for another hour and a half. I then went outside and called my mom and immediately burst into tears. I felt so much relief that I finally had an answer and that I wasn’t going crazy, because for the past 4 years that’s how every medical professional has made me feel. The severity was confirmed when I got a call from the scheduler for the orthopedic surgeon less than 24 hours later to make my appointment. A week later I was in a doctors office, where I was greeted with their shock that I wasn’t paralyzed and could still walk normally and feel my legs. It was jarring to have my pain validated to such a degree so quickly. It was almost overwhelming to have both reactions so closely together. I went from being crazy and over reactive to being looked at like a medical miracle. The surgeons told me that they wouldn’t even recommend me getting spinal injections, or as I keep accidentally calling them “back shots”, and for me to instead get surgery immediately. I was perfectly okay with this because the concept of getting knocked out and sliced open is more appealing than being put on fentanyl and having a needle shoved in my back whilst I am awake. I was then given another referral to a neurologist. About a month later I was meeting with my actual surgeon where it was finalized that I would in fact be getting spinal surgery at the age of 25. The next day the surgery was scheduled for about 6 weeks later so I could be a bridesmaid without the risk of throwing off the even ratio with the wedding parties. Now I think I am the only person in my life who was not worried once I found out about the spinal surgery, even though my doctor prescribed me beta blockers in a preemptive attempt to address her presumptions of my imminent anxiety. In my defense, it is a relatively chill surgery, and I have someone who goes around the country teaching this surgery as my surgeon so I am in very good hands. Despite this chillness, I still have to compose an advanced directive and a will to have this surgery, which again adds to the panic of my loved ones. I also have not been helping this panic by asking said loved ones what items they want me to put them down for in my will. But my chillness isn’t apathetic, it’s because in my opinion nothing could be worse than the pain I’ve gone through. There are no words to describe the pain that I feel when a flare up happens. The feeling of being in so much pain that you can’t sit up or move your legs, crying in pain while your mother is staring at you in shock trying to decide whether to call an ambulance or not is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. To have your own autonomy and ability to move stripped from you by your own body is a debilitating feeling and even the threat of paralysis pales in comparison to the constant threat of immense pain. In a lot of ways this pain has put my life on hold. There are activities I haven’t been able to do in years, I haven’t been able to bend over and pick something up in years, and I can’t even remember what it feels like to wake up and not be in some kind of pain. I have been held stagnant by this condition for most of my 20’s and nothing can really compare to that.

During this period of time, I wasn’t really telling people what was going on with me. Part of it was because I didn’t want to seem like a medical attention seeker, but also because I was trying to make peace with this chapter of my life. 44 days. That is all it took to actually figure out what was wrong with me, yet it took four years of my fighting to figure out what was wrong with me. It’s so infuriating that no one took me seriously. Nurses, doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors; none of them gave a fuck about me or the pain I was going through or even cared to try and find the root of the problem. All of my fears and concerns were swept under the rug simply for being fat and a woman. After this diagnosis I’m honestly shocked it didn’t come sooner. Cheerleaders are at a high risk for a bulging discs, if your parent has a bulging disc you are 75% more likely to get one as well, and if you are a bigger person it raises your risk as well; these are all things that may have contributed to my disc problem that they could have asked me at anytime and could have pointed them in the right direction of what was causing this pain. But instead I was just just told to take advil and to do physical therapy, which in the long run was useless because they didn’t know how to fix me! It was an endless cycle of being sent somewhere new and doing nothing for me and then being sent somewhere else; they were literally more willing to do anything other than give me an MRI to actually see what was wrong with my back. In a sick way I’m a little gratified by the reactions of my surgeons, like yes, I actually have been suffering for the past four years. Thank you for being horrified and impressed that I can still walk and feel my legs. It helps heal the wound of being made to feel like I was crazy and validates that my pain was and is real. It helps cool the burn of the physical therapists who’ve put their hands on me for 2 seconds and felt confident in saying what was wrong with me who were obviously never right. I can’t help but be so angry over this era and the continual dismissal of my pain and women’s pain all over the world.

I have been in pain the vast majority of my 20s, and this is not shocking considering how little the medical system cares about women and our suffering. The medical system continues to not make any major improvements in addressing the pain associated with being a woman and continues to minimize the suffering women inherently suffer. Women are still being ravaged by endometriosis whilst another erectile disjunction pill is being tested and put onto the market. Medications are still being prescribed to women that didn’t even have women in their test groups when they were made. In general, women are still more likely to die in hospitals compared to men, even though we have a lower mortality rate comparatively. My suffering is not unique or an outlier, it has been systematically set up to happen that way. I think about how much money I have sunk into countless doctors appointments, physical therapists, chiropractors, and massage therapists and wonder how much of that could’ve been avoided if they had actually listened to me, because my pain is very indicative of bulging discs and I fit the exact profile of someone who would get one. But they never asked me anything outside of if I fell or if I’ve tried losing any weight or if I’ve tried ibuprofen and an ice pack. My pain was completely avoidable but no one cared to try and help me. I have been very privileged in the fact that I have the time and resources to have pursued this to completion and actually found the root cause and I think of all of the women who have not had the same opportunities to pursue every possible cause. No one should be in pain, pain is never normal, and yet the amount of women who have pain in their lives is innumerable. The medical system has failed us and there is nothing we can do about it other than be our own advocate and to annoy everyone we can.

Image via Dillysfiberworks on R/Antifascistknitting

A lot of people in life have no interests or hobbies anymore, or at least that’s the general consensus from the people I’ve asked this question to. People feel like it’s a coin toss for if someone they’re meeting will actually have hobbies or if the only thing they’ll talk about is sports betting and video games. My hot take is that what most people consider hobbies are actually just forms of entertainment, not something that enriches your life. Watching sports is not a hobby. Social media is not a hobby. Watching TV is not a hobby. Video games are not a hobby. While there is obviously a threshold for some of things becoming hobbies, some video games require research and a base of knowledge that I would argue ekes it into hobby territory, but the average level of consumption is based on entertainment and not enrichment. But I am not blaming the average person for not wanting to take on some new, complex hobby, especially if they work a draining full time job or have children or are in school. In a way, the system of our work culture is made for the worker to not have a fulfilling life. It is instead made to make you an overwhelmed, overworked person who has no room for anything other than basic needs and work, and even then the basic needs are flexible on what they, the companies, think you need. I wouldn’t blame the person working in an amazon factory who has to pee in water bottles because they can’t even have restroom breaks for not knitting when they get off the clock, and if they instead scroll on Tiktok until they go to sleep. This design is intentional on both parts, and this is done to benefit fascists and capitalists. The decrease in hobbies and skills and the increase of worse work conditions and scrollable social media are intrinsically tied in my eyes. Throughout this essay I will explain the historical decrease in skills and by proxy hobbies and how this directly aids the spread of fascism through decreased attention span and social networks.

My family is very unique in a lot of ways, but especially in the fact that we are all very crafty people. We build things, we sew our halloween costumes, and generally can make anything we put our minds to. I thought this was the norm for all families. That after coming home from a day of work everyone’s mom sewed them costumes or on weekends they built shelving for their garages. As I got older I learned that this was not the case for most people. When I was a child, I was the only one who knew how to sew. By the time I was a teenager I was using power tools. When my sister was a teenager she was the costume mistress for a local theatre company. We have always been a crafty bunch, but this idea has really been cemented to me when I became an art teacher. On weekends I teach sewing and embroidery. For my sewing classes I teach mending, like how to fix a rip in your jeans or a hole in your pocket. The hardest part of starting to teach was assuming that everyone has a base line level of knowing how to sew; how to thread a needle or how to tie a knot. But the reality is that most people in their 20s do not know this. Of course there is always one or two people who know the basics, but for most people this is their first foray into needlework. I understand why sewing is no longer an absolute necessity, but it should be. Since the industrial revolution, making things by hand has decreased. You could buy fabric woven on a machine for less than what you could weave it yourself. Things like machine embroidery and lace making led to a decrease in both of those crafts as well. Despite this, sewing, knitting, and embroidery were still common skills until the 1970s, which is when mass produced clothing became widely available. At this point, these skills no longer became necessary and became mainly used for pleasurable purposes. After this point, the knowledge of these crafts has ebbed and flowed. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, knitting, crochet, and embroidery were falling in popularity. At this time these crafts were popularized due to everyone being stuck at home, it is now popular for many reasons including an urge to become more self-reliant and to become more “analog”. This recent analog trend, which has ironically been popularized via social media, is a push to try and get off of your phone and to fix your attention span. People are even putting together “analog bags”, which are bags filled with books, both literature and games like crosswords and sudoku, as well as crafts and other things to fill their time. As someone who used to have a screen time of 8 hours a day, this is honestly a very good approach to quitting the addiction. Because that’s exactly what this reliance on cell phones has become, an addiction. When I first realized I was addicted to my phone I started researching the hardest phases of “recovery”, as dramatic as that sounds. In my research I confirmed exactly what I was feeling and it’s exactly what analog bags are about. Finding what to do with the free time you have after parting with the addiction is the hardest part. This boredom then makes you want to go back to your little dopamine device and creates the vicious cycle all over again. There is a beautiful sense of symmetry in the fact that the activity that can keep you away from hobbies, scrolling on your phone, is exactly what can fix your urge to be on your phone. I don’t blame myself or any other person who has been or currently is addicted to their phones, they are quite literally designed to be addictive!

The problem with researching hobbies is that the data is all over the place. Some sources say that only 18% of people regularly commit to a hobby while another says 83% regularly interact with a hobby. Some surveys say that 63% of people with hobbies feel as if they’re not giving them enough time. Another issue is that these surveys include things I don’t believe to be hobbies, such as video games or sports or even tourism in some cases. It’s hard to get specific numbers on how many people actually regularly partake in knitting or gardening. Even then, typically the number one hobby listed on these surveys prove my point that people consider entertainment their top hobby. Some surveys even list social media being the top leisure activity for 24% of the people they interviewed. There are simply too many numbers to say anything for sure, but I think it is safe to assume that the vast majority of people who have hobbies are not giving the time they want to to them, or they consider something a hobby that is actually a form of entertainment. But again, I don’t blame the average person for this. It is not their fault that the system of capitalism is made to drain them of all of their energy so that they don’t have the time or energy for every enjoyable thing in their lives. Capitalism not only drains the joyous parts of life away, but it also creates a prohibitive environment. The entire point of capitalism for the people on top to make money and the people on the bottom endlessly toil for a survivable existence. This just adds another hurdle to get over if you have a hobby, because crafting and hobbies can be insanely expensive and if you have to pick between buying yarn and buying groceries it is the sane choice to buy groceries. So you get home tired from work, you can’t afford a hobby, and the concept of ending your day by mindlessly scrolling your phone becomes more and more enticing. This system that has been created by capitalism perpetuates this joyless life because capitalism relies on you not having any battery left to fight against it, let alone to find anything happy in the minimal free time that you have. Capitalism, while being our current norm, separates us from the norms of human existence.

Crafting and making are inherent to the human species. One of the theories of how Homo neanderthalensis declined was that Homo sapiens had better dexterity and could sew better and thus had better protection from the cold. In MRIs flint knapping, the process of creating arrowheads, lights up the same part of the brain that speech uses. Crafting and making were without a doubt vital for the species to continue. In modern day humans countless studies have proven that making things, especially so called “granny” hobbies such as knitting and crochet, actively fight against dementia, depression and anxiety. Crafts are integral to who we are, and by not using the muscles and dexterity that has been honed over millenia is bound to create problems. The way we live life is not how humans were meant to exist at all. We are not meant to be strapped to a desk sedentary for 8 hours a day, where we go home and do nothing but stare at a screen for the hours we have until we go to sleep and then wake up and repeat it all again. It might be a generalization, but I would argue that this might be one of the most depressing times in human history for a plethora of reasons. Do I think that the fact people don’t do things with their hands anymore is the only reason people are depressed? Of course not, the oppressive fascist capitalist machine is behind that, but I think a lot of people would feel better if they made things. Knitting and crochet was used to help traumatized soldiers from WWII, it can help anyone. I think because life has become so intangible that having a physical project that you can see and feel yourself finish something is incredibly important for our own self satisfaction! Our brains have been trained to get gratification and dopamine off of these intangible things like likes or views, but because they are only these short bursts of dopamine your brain becomes addicted. But because it’s addicted to something that is not actually real, it’s a never ending cycle of scrolling and hunting for that dopamine kick that is never actually as great as you think it is because it’s not something tangible. As a product of this never ending dopamine loop, people’s attention spans have begun to suffer. I believe that this shortening of attention span is intentional and done with the intent to help fascist and far right regimes. Because who benefits more from people not remembering what the news was talking about a week ago? I don’t think hobbies have intentionally been targeted by these regimes, but I do think it is a beneficial side effect of the creation of these attention monopolizing apps. Like I previously said, the thing that can help increase your attention span, crafting, is directly impacted by how much you use these apps. There is another aspect that has been lost in the continued decrease in craft and hobbies that we should consider. For a large time in human history, crafting was used as a tool to create social spaces. Quilting circles and sewing bees were vital spaces for connection, especially for women, throughout multiple centuries. These spaces offered a sense of community and support that is hard to find nowadays. While I don’t necessarily think the so-called “fascist overlords” are to blame for the loss of these social spaces, I do think they benefit from it. Women congregating and speaking with each other has historically been bad for the people trying to control them. Quilting circles and sewing bees were used during the women’s suffrage movement and during the civil rights movement as gathering spaces for women to not only plan events but to raise income for these causes. As much as these spaces were social, they were also support networks and spaces of conversation. While men didn’t necessarily have a version of quilting circles, men did still have social crafting spaces. As I had previously mentioned, knitting was used to help with the rehabilitation of WWII veterans, and this rehabilitation was most often done in communal spaces. Crafts themselves are healing, but in a social setting they create a very strong community and it’s one of the tragic losses caused by the ever evolving industrial and social landscape. But, this landscape is ideal for anyone trying to drastically change the political sphere, because no one is easier to control than people who not only have short attention spans, but also have no sense of community.

The attention economy is a concept founded by Herbert A. Simon, which postulates that companies are fighting for the resource of people’s attention, which is considered a valuable and scarce resource. This concept is put into practice by companies, namely entertainment companies, fighting to keep people on their apps and using their products for as long as possible. This is where apps like Tiktok and Instagram come into play. These are apps that appear to be giving us information and entertainment as the product they are selling, but in reality we the consumer are the product they are selling. Our data, our scrolling habits, how long we stay on different content, and how often we click the links embedded in the app is their main product. These apps not only sell this information to other companies, but use this information to make us more addicted to these apps and thus make them more profitable. To make the apps more addictive there have been multiple different approaches, the most popular being to make the content shortform. Tiktok perfected the shortform content consumption by creating their own specific algorithm that gives every viewer their own personalized experience. This algorithm capitalises off of a concept called intermittent or random reinforcement. For the sake of Tiktok it means that you never know when you’re going to get the next good video so you keep scrolling in an effort to get the dopamine hit of the good video. This is akin to slot machines, you never know when you’re going to win next. It has been proven that this continual random reinforcement shortens attention spans to a detriment. I believe that this is intentional for multiple reasons. For one, it makes these companies more money by giving them more data to sell. The second is that if you look at who the CEOs of these companies are and their mutual beliefs or political proclivities, they all really seem to like right wing policies and politicians. I think that these companies are not only intentionally trying to shorten the broader public’s attention span for their financial benefit, I believe they are also doing it in order to attempt to affect the policies they are hoping to change and to aid the politicians they believe are best suited to do their bidding . I believe this because no one would benefit more from shorter attention spans than the government who has had mouth pieces quoted saying “shock and awe” and “days of thunder” as descriptors for how they are going to approach their policies. The current government doesn’t want you to remember what happened a week ago or a month ago, so it would make sense for the CEOs of companies that want to benefit from this government to give the aid that is people not remembering or being able to pay attention to the news. I think that this is a joint effort between the billionaire CEOs and the government so that way the forces at be can enact whatever policies and constitutional violations with as little push back as possible. The term shock and awe was originally created in 1996 by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, but was really used by the American military in Iraq 2003. The term itself means to essentially overwhelm your target so they are unable to fight back or really keep track of what’s going on. While the government wasn’t planning on necessarily bombing the country to keep us overwhelmed, they were planning on releasing as many executive orders and lawsuits that we would ideally not know where to start or how to fight back. I wonder, what could bet the metaphorical cherry on top of this shit sundae? No one has the attention span or bandwidth to deal with this onslaught. I fully believe that this attention epidemic was intended and created to benefit the current political regime and has allowed for this closer shift towards fascism.

We are objectively in an odd era of human history. We have morphed into a solitary digital age where hardly anyone has money. Capitalism has allowed for fascism to run wild, and in a lot of ways has helped it flourish. With industrialization came a decrease in need and knowledge to practice crafts which led to their eventual decrease in popularity. Along with this came the attention economy where every company was not only fighting for our attention, but gradually shortening it with dopamine based algorithms that are essentially slot machines. Capitalism has now made it next to impossible to both make enough money and live an enjoyable life for the vast majority of people. This has led to the ideal environment for fascism to grow and spread. Most people have shorter attention spans now so they can’t even remember the news cycle, or even care because they are just trying to make ends meet. Capitalism has made it so everyone is so drained that they don’t have the energy to do anything outside of work, combined with the attention deficit, no one has hobbies or crafts they keep up with which just exacerbates the entire situation on top of everything else. It’s terrible! I don’t blame any normal person for this situation, it is almost entirely out of our hands but there are ways that we can fight back against this clamouring for our attention spans. The easiest is to decrease your phone usage as much as possible. To aid in this, pick up a hobby! Knit a weird scarf. Embroider something random on one of your t-shirts. Pick up a book. Watch a movie even. Essentially anything that isn’t mindlessly scrolling or watching tv. I have been there, where you just worked a 7+ hour shift, standing on your feet for most of it, and the last thing you want to do is use your brain or do anything other than lie under your sheets and scroll until it’s time for dinner. But I beg of you, please knit! The fight against fascism depends on it!.

Sources:

https://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/3463

https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/tiktok-and-the-death-of-the-attention-span/

https://www.humanetech.com/youth/the-attention-economy

https://www.editorialmanager.com/hima/default.aspx

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fascism-is-a-reaction-to-capitalist-crisis-in-the-stage-of-imperialism/

https://activehistory.ca/blog/2018/05/24/from-wanting-in-to-opting-out-home-sewing-and-fashion-then-and-now/

https://aytm.com/post/hobbies-survey

https://wsspaper.com/102274/opinion/the-death-of-the-hobby/

https://www.bondandgrace.com/lit-talk/threads-of-freedom-how-women-have-used-quilts-to-gather-resist-and-inspire

I don’t think Jesus would like a lot of modern Christians. To be fair, I am not a Christian and nor have I ever been but like most members of western society I have continually had to consume bible-based media. God and Jesus are so ingrained in American society that they are essentially unavoidable, even when you come from an Atheist hippie family like I did. But there is one thing I can confidently say; a lot of modern Christians have completely forgotten the teachings of Jesus and are anything more like Pontius Pilate and the Romans that had him executed. Christianity, a religion that is supposed to be based on philanthropy and loving thy neighbor has transformed into a hateful, insidious religion that is used as the ammunition for lawmakers to wrongfully control the masses. While I cannot speak for how Christianity has evolved in other countries, I can say that a shocking amount of Christians in America have replaced the concept of Jesus with the concept of white nationalism. Loving your neighbor has been replaced with reporting them to ICE. I am by no means trying to claim that all Christians are bad people, especially because I don’t believe that, but what I am saying is that Christianity in America has fundamentally changed and for the worse. I am not the only person postulating this idea, it has been happening across both social media and mainstream media. Through these examples, I aim to discuss how Christianity has changed in such a way that Jesus would not recognize these people as his own followers.

I am someone who was not raised around religion. There was the singular time my grandma on my fathers side brought my sister and I to church on Christmas eve and the other time my moms friend wanted to go to a megachurch Christmas show for her birthday and we all got dragged to it. Outside of that, I never really had a solid belief on what Christianity was about except for what I heard and learned from the media which to be fair was never great. It was all about the Duggar family and the Westboro Baptist Church and other weirdos. It was all hatred and bigotry and misogyny. I’m not going to make myself sound like some child religious philosopher, I rarely thought about religion, but when I did it wasn’t positive. I thought it was a group of people who wanted nothing more than to shove their own beliefs on to you. I don’t think as a child that I didn’t like every Christian, I don’t think I had the capacity for that, but I was definitely distrusting of the concept as a whole. But honestly, as time went on my distrust was never resolved. In high school I had a friend who I had known for years and she became a crazed Christian for a boy who didn’t even like her. She started spouting things from the bible and trying to get me to go to her youth group bible study. When I told her I didn’t want to go because I was not only queer but also of jewish heritage, she told me “Oh don’t worry, all sins are equal. Being gay is viewed the same as murder or cheating so I wouldn’t worry about it.” In what world is that supposed to assuage my fears? I actually ended up ceasing my friendship with her because she was becoming a right wing Christian and I just didn’t want to be around that, especially considering that she was an adultering hypocrite. But as I have gotten older, I realized the core problem wasn’t the religion, it was the people. I truly don’t believe any religion is bad, it’s the people who weaponize it for their own motives. For example, many Americans hate Muslims not understanding that what the news is showing them are extremist groups, not the normal everyday practitioners and that Christians have extremists as well. The Christian groups we often see touting hatred are extremely similar to the extremist factions of other religions. I cannot be the same as the people who hate all muslims just because of some extremist group, and I do believe that there are Christians out there who genuinely teach the gospel of loving the people in your community, I just think they’re being drowned out at the moment. I hate sweeping generalizations, they help nothing and are more often than not false. But I can’t help shaking the feeling that within american Christianity there are two factions: the hateful who use Christianity as a weapon and the faithful who actually follow the ethos of loving thy neighbor. With all that being said, I am not going to act like I am some all knowing person who is an expert in Christianity. I have never even read the bible. But what I have heard that is in the bible is absolutely insane and preaches a lot of terrible things. In college, I loved art history classes. My first class was on the renaissance, which heavily features religious iconography because anything else was considered iconoclastic. There is one sculpture that has stuck with me in the years since, which is a sculpture of Moses depicted with literal horns on his head. This is because during this time there was a mistranslation of the bible where the phrase “rays of light” was mistranslated to “horns of light”. This example highlights a core problem with modern Christianity, which is how do you follow a religion that very well could not be what was originally intended to be followed? A common belief is that the whole gay=bad belief is from a mistranslation about pedophelia, not a man should not lie with a man but that a man should not lie with a child. So not only are people not following the actual gist of a religion, but they could be following a concept that was intended to even be in the canon in the first place. The difference between people who practice this religion is what they chose to utilize and ignore. The people who preach hatred tend to use the instances of Jesus being a caring man and instead go for the stoning and death parts of the bible whilst those who preach Christianity as a loving religion tend to ignore those parts. Both parties do a “pick and choose”, one just does it to weaponize their own beliefs.

Like most people with a Netflix subscription, I recently watched Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. For those of you who are unaware, Wake Up Dead Man is set in a small church in upstate New York and follows ex-boxer-turned-Reverend Jud Duplenticy starting at this church underneath Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Prior to the start of this movie, Reverend Jud had been removed from his previous church for punching another reverend for saying something he didn’t agree with. He is sent to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude to try and push back against the increasingly intense and isolating Monsignour Wicks. While in theory this movie is about a murder, it is more a discussion about religion; both in the believing and non believing but in the more traditional school of thought and this newer form of Christianity that is really rooted in hatred. This film is both overt and subtle in the comparison and conversation between these two beliefs. The entirety of this film is after the murder of Wicks, but his beliefs and the fear he imposed is shown through his pseudo-cult and interactions with people from outside of the church. We initially learn how much of a zealot Wicks is, but to the extreme. He abandons the teachings of love, philanthropy, and community to alienate and shame people out of his church. He gives intense sermons that turn away everyone but the most desperate. We see him tormenting Father Jud by him making up stories about masterbating in the shower despite physically not being able to. Monsignour Wicks is the personification of how the Catholic church uses religion to control, shame, and manipulate people; the complete deviation and straying from what Christianity is supposed to be about. Even down to his name, his goal is nothing but gaining power and control. The title Monsignor is a title given to you by the pope, much like the title of knight/lady is given by the king or queen of England. Many men who have been given the title of Monsignor choose to continue to go by father because it brings them closer to their congregation, so by him choosing to go by Monsignor it signifies he doesn’t actually care about relating to his congregation and that he wants to set himself above them. We see this level of control with the people he has in his pseudo-cult. There is Simone, a concert cellist who has given all of her saves to Wicks in an effort to ease her suffering from a mystery illness that leaves her in constant pain. There is Lee, a once popular author who has since become paranoid, right wing and is writing a mildly insane novel about Wicks. Nat is an alcoholic doctor going through a divorce. The adopted mother-son duo of Vera and Ty, who are f an ex-lawyer and failed politician turned ragebaiting alt-right social media personality. And to add to this Vera had Ty pushed on her by her father when she was in her early 20s. The collection of these people highlight the exact communities that are targeted by people who abuse religion. It is made extremely clear that Wicks uses religion for nothing other than to instill fear and gain control over the few people who stick around for his abuse and beguilement. That they can be saved or cured or have their problems fixed without any proactivity besides speaking with Wicks and giving him money. Jud on the other hand follows the more classical approach of loving and caring for your congregation no matter what. We learn that in his youth as a boxer he killed someone in the boxing ring, and in his words did it with hate in his heart. But through this he becomes a pastor that preaches love and acceptance. Throughout the movie we see Jud not only grapple with his own faults, but try to help people even when they are antagonizing him. One of my personal favorite examples of this is when he and Benoit Blanc, the literal main character of this movie but is irrelevant to my argument, are searching for clues to solve the murder of Wicks. He is on the phone with a woman at a construction-esque company and is getting increasingly annoyed. She keeps talking and talking, we the viewers are even supposed to be annoyed with her. But then, she starts talking about forgiveness and her sick mother and questioning if she said the wrong last words to her. We see the instant shift in Jud. We see him realize that helping this woman, Louise, is more pressing than the murder he is trying to solve. At this point it is incredibly clear that this is what Jud’s calling is, to help the lost and confused. While I could wax on and on about how bad Wicks is and how Jud is better, that feels like an elementary topic compared to the topic of each character’s relationship to Christianity. Wicks is in no way a Christian, or at least one that actually follows the teachings of Jesus. He does not love or care about anyone but himself and his own interest. He does not care about his little cult, he was getting ready to nuke them all with the dirt he had collected on them. In my opinion he represents how a large portion of white Americans interact with Christianity. They don’t care about loving and caring for other people, they care about themselves and their own interests. While I don’t believe all Christians in America are so insidious, I do think the rise in white nationalism in America is directly tied to the spread in this belief system within Christianity.

The hypocrisy of right wing beliefs and their touted Christianity has been discussed for decades, but the transference of idolizing Jesus to white nationalism has especially been in discussion in recent years. I am not going to try and claim that American Christians and Catholics have always been good people and only recently have become problematic, because they always have been for the most part. Slave owners were Christians. The people who committed genocide against indigenious people were Christians. What I am arguing is that at that time Jesus was still at the forefront of their religion even though they were taking part in the same white supremist beliefs that are present today. It feels a bit backwards to think this considering that during the founding of this country preachers were actively sharing sermons that encouraged the concept of racial inferiority, but even during this time they were still doing this under the guise of following Jesus Christ. I don’t think modern white Christians even care about Jesus or his teachings, they just care about the label of Christian because it gives them a sense of clout. Like do you genuinely think that Erika Kirk cares about Jesus whilst calling anti-ICE protests demonic? Of course not, it’s just another weapon in her arsenal. While I wish I had connected this shift on my own, I developed my thoughts on this through watching Victoria Therese’s video on America and Christianity. She makes the brilliant point of connecting how american Christians white washed jesus, how the KKK is a technically Christian group that hates Catholics for being too european, and how there are two types of Christians in america; those who worship jesus and those who worship america. She discusses how all of this is rooted in the protestantism that the founders of this country practiced and how it has grown into the hateful mega churches that we have today. While I had had these remnants of ideas, Therese connected the dots for me. On top of the video by Therese, there was also a trend that made me question the authenticity of a lot of Christians beliefs. Nikalie Monroe from Kentucky, called 43 different religious institutions pretending to be a mother in need of formula for her baby but couldn’t afford it. She would even play the sound of a baby crying in the background of these calls. She called dozens of churches, especially the megachurches notorious in the south, and only 5 white Christian churches offered to help in any way. In the end there were only 10 institutions in total that offered to help her, which were mosques, black churches, and Catholic churches. While this doesn’t have anything directly to do with white nationalism and Christianity, it does highlight how Christianity has completely veered away from what the religion is supposed to be about. A religion that was founded on philanthropy and love now features neither of those things. Do you think that the Jesus who was hanging out with prostitutes and the impoverished would like the Christians reporting people to ice and thinking someone should die because they’re a person of color or gay? Of course not. I believe these two instances highlight how different and how bad american Christianity can be and how as a religion it can do more harm than good if wielded by the wrong people.

Religion is unsurprisingly a complicated topic, especially when said religion has been relevant for thousands of years. While I don’t believe that all Christians are bad people, I do think that it is more than likely for a white American Christian to have some bad beliefs. In America, Christianity now worships white supremacy more than Jesus himself. They like Christianity as a weapon and a tool to control the masses. Christianity is no longer just a belief system, it’s a label used to justify oppression. Instead of preaching love and charity and overall just being a good person, a lot of white churches now preach hatred and bigotry. Because of this I believe that Jesus would not recognize these people as a group with a similar belief system to him. I am not saying that Christians are some amazing group of people who have been bastardized, Christianity has historically been a religion used to oppress the masses, but modern Christianity has since dropped the facade of following Jesus and instead follows the belief of idolizing white supremacy. People like Victoria Therese and Nikalie Monroe have extrapolated on these points by connecting Christianity and the KKK and the continued whitewashing of Jesus and highlighted how Christianity is no longer the religion it is supposed to be. To wrap up my jumbled thoughts; Christianity should be about helping your community and loving people, not being a bigot. Especially considering the fact that Moses had horns for a long time, so maybe don’t base your entire belief system on a religion that could be completely mistranslated.

I can’t explain why, but it feels like mainstream media has a hard on for suffering. It feels like Hollywood is trying to push the concept of there being some form of gratification from sadness. One place that highlights this yearn for depression is with the Oscars. For the past couple of years it feels like the majority of the movies nominated highlight sadness, either directly or indirectly. In this past year alone, the three big contenders for best picture -The Substance, Anora, and The Brutalist- all highlight sadness and suffering with no real happy resolution. I would even argue that every movie except A Complete Unknown features suffering, because even Wicked is a tale of racism and the rise of fascism. While I don’t think every movie needs a happy ending, I find it bizarre that essentially all but one, again A Complete Unknown, start and end with bleakness. While there could be an entire essay on the widespread popularity of sad media, there is a more specific point I’d like to make. For the past couple of award seasons I have made the effort to watch every nomination for best picture nominee. This has introduced me to some amazing films and directors, but has also introduced me to some terrible movies. Every year there is at least one movie that should not have made the best picture list; Emelia Perez, Barbie, and Maestro just to name a few. But there is one movie that I absolutely did not like and feel like the only person who really disliked it. The Brutalist is without a doubt one of the most insulting movies I have ever seen. It was made in completely bad faith and is one of the most glaringly obvious examples of Oscar bait I have had the misfortune of watching. Given that it is about to be award season and I have been reading lists about prospective best picture noms, I wanted to revisit one of my least favorite movies that has ever been nominated. My beef with this movie is multidimensional but to give some concise points; I think Brady Corbet was being a hoe for the academy, Adrien Brody did this movie not because he should have but because he wanted a second Oscar, and this movie doesn’t actually care about the holocaust.

I love movies, but I didn’t always particularly care about movies. I watched them, but had no real thoughts or feelings about them for the vast majority of my life. I was a part of the crowd that would head to the movie theater for the new Marvel or Star Wars movie and the occasional film my friends wanted to see but I wasn’t really on-top of who was the next up-and-coming director or what film just won some award. Despite this, I inadvertently got a masters degree in film and became a film bro. Gaining this appreciation of film and the process of filmmaking was what started this tradition of watching every best picture nominee. Despite this new found taste and appreciation of movies, I still feel like my old tastes and beliefs when it comes to movies have stuck around. Call me old-fashioned, but I think movies should be fun or at the very least enjoyable or cathartic. While I want a movie to be artistic and beautifully shot, I am not willing to sacrifice my enjoyment for a beautiful movie. Which is why I feel the way I feel about The Brutalist. It’s a beautiful movie, the cinematography is phenomenal and the use of VistaVision literally takes my breath away but it is an overwrought, drawn-out, and tedious film. It is a technically perfect movie in terms of visuals, but essentially everything else in this movie was bad in my opinion.

There are many reasons why I think Brady Corbet was being a hoe for the academy. In my opinion, he wanted The Brutalist to be the certain breed of trauma porn that the academy foams at the mouth for. For one, he literally made up the story of The Brutalist. As both an interior design nerd and a fan of history I hate how he butchered the history of brutalism and I don’t even like it aesthetically! A brief history lesson on Brutalism; Brutalism started in the 1950s across Europe in response to the architecture of the 40s. It was mainly used to build the housing that was coming with the new public policy that was sweeping across Europe. Brutalism had a focus on quality materials and ease of building and how people will use or interact with the space. More importantly, it was a style of architecture that wasn’t just discovered by one person. This movie frames the titular brutalist, László Tóth, as the sole inventor of this style and completely strips the history of this style from any discussion within this movie and it doesn’t even capture the heart of the aesthetic. I don’t want to sound like a stickler for history, because I’m not, but if you are framing a movie as a historical epic you kind of need to stick to history. For example, my first time watching Captain America: The First Avenger was ruined by one of my sister’s ex-boyfriends because he couldn’t shut up throughout the entire movie about how none of this could have happened in the 1940s, which is completely ignoring the man with a literal red skull for a face. He sucked the fun out of it and ruined the fun of the movie. The difference between these two movies, well one of the many, is that Captain America is in no way trying to frame itself as a period piece. This movie tries to pass itself off as a historical epic tale of a holocaust survivor but somehow fails to accomplish any of these descriptors with any accuracy.

My biggest qualm with the historical inaccuracies within this film has to do with László Tóth’s back story, as well as just odd historical anachronisms they chose to have in this film. He is an architect who trained at Bauhaus and ends up in a concentration camp. He somehow escapes by jumping off a train, a scene we are not privy to, and makes his way to New York and then Philadelphia. We follow his journey through the constant barrage of sadness including getting thrown out after his cousin tries to get him to sleep with his wife, his wife returning and him being unable to sleep with her because of trauma and guilt around sleeping with a prostitute, getting addicted to heroin, getting his wife addicted to heroin, his wife overdosing on heroin, his bosses son assaulting his mute niece, and his boss raping him whilst he’s high on heroin in an alleyway in Italy. As you might be able to ascertain, The Brutalist is an incredibly depressing movie. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, where you experience the story and wonder what the main character did to get the author to hate them so much. In both stories, the main characters go through so many hardships it starts to feel comical and unlikely that the writer is actually trying to make meaningful commentary on anything. Like really, you had to write a script where your main character went through the holocaust AND got their wife addicted to heroin? I could understand if Corbet was following the life of an architect, but he fully made up the character of László Tóth. In my opinion, Corbet went into writing The Brutalist intending to write an epic. When researching brutalism he found that no architect had been interned into a concentration camp, especially because a lot of the architects who founded the brutalist movement were at the height of their careers and fled into cushy academic jobs in the States. The film makers went to an architectural historian looking specifically for Jewish architects who went to concentration camps and survived, but they found no one fitting that bill. Instead of doing what I think most people would have done and pivoted the story or came up with a new concept, Corbet simply made up a character to write about. To me, that’s what makes this entire concept something made in bad faith. He didn’t want to tell an accurate story, he wanted to tell the story that he had already come up with in his own head. He didn’t have to make a movie on brutalism with a fictional main character, he chose to. If he was so connected to the concept of brutalism, why not tell the story of Marcel Breur, an actual Hungarian brutalist architect who emigrated to America? Corbet states that because they couldn’t find someone to fit the history they wanted, that Tóth is an amalgamation of the history of real architects, an homage to his family’s background, and to honor the Jewish architects who didn’t make it out of concentration camps. Call me cold hearted, but I think this reasoning is bullshit and he created Tóth for his own dramatic fulfillment. I think he wanted to write this tragic period epic and wasn’t going to let something like historical accuracy stop him. On top of this ignoring of art history, Corbet just ignores normal history as well. He includes the term “significant other” in the script, which wasn’t commonly used until the 90s. To get even more nitpicking there is a scene where they are using a shipping container as an office space. This scene is set in 1953 and shipping containers weren’t invented until 1956! The filmmakers even acknowledge this but it doesn’t erase it from my mind. Normally I’m not such a stickler for historical accuracy, but to me the phrase “period piece” is a vow that binds you to accuracy.

On the note of accuracy, my attention now turns to Adrien Brody. I could get into his long rumoured history of being an ass but I’ll just give the footnotes; unconsensually kissing Halle Berry and doing a racist Jamaican accent that got him banned from hosting Saturday Night Live. But in terms of The Brutalist, I don’t think he or Felicity Jones were the right people for these roles especially given the fact that Corbet was trying to pay homage to Hungarian Jews. For one thing, Jones isn’t Jewish and yet has continually played Jewish women. While Brody does have Jewish heritage, he has stated that he has no connection to it. I know this is a very social justice warrior take, but I believe that if you are trying to pay homage to a very specific group of people, you should cast from that group of people. Sure, you might not be able to cast an entirely Hungarian Jewish cast, but you can definitely cast Hungarian actors so you don’t have to use AI to fix their Hungarian accent. “Bbbbut AI was only used to fix his accent while he was speaking Hungarian!” maybe if Corbet had cast someone who actually spoke hungarian this wouldn’t be a problem. If The Vampire Diaries can have multiple actors who spoke Hungarian, so can a movie that was trying to be nominated for an Oscar! I think the bare minimum for an actor should be for them to be able to nail an accent and language. I think it’s the bare minimum of a director and casting director to hire an actor that you don’t have to use AI on. I am not going to sit here and say that Adrien Brody is a bad actor, because he is objectively not. But there is in no way that he was the correct choice for this movie. I think much like Corbet, he probably saw this as an opportunity to court the academy, which I guess I can’t hate on someone wanting to be acknowledged for their work. But I can hate on the use of AI in a film and the casting of a well known actor over a more culturally conscious casting choice.

Corbet, like Brody, had no connection to his Jewish heritage and doesn’t speak Hebrew or yiddish which is very apparent in this movie. To make a movie about things that you do not know about, especially when this movie is on such a deep and historical topic, feels very selfish. From my perspective, I have relatives that were killed in the holocaust. I have seen their pictures, I know what they look like. But no one could convince me to direct and write a movie about Austrian survivors of the holocaust. This is because even though I identify with that part of my heritage I am in no way a poster child for that experience, I don’t even speak Hebrew! That’s why I feel so comfortable saying that Adrien Brody shouldn’t have accepted this role and Brady Corbet shouldn’t have made this movie; I am them and they are me. From what I’ve read about them, if anything I have more of a connection to my heritage but even then that strengthens my resolve that I would not have made this movie and that they shouldn’t have made this movie. What really confirms this belief is found within this film, specifically what the most important building in this film is based off of. The Community Center, the building we’d spent most of the movie with, is inspired by nazi death camps. If you haven’t seen The Brutalist, the building is inspired by the two concentration camps that László and Erzsébet were held in. Like it is literally inspired by the crematoriums in the concentration camps. Maybe I’m cynical or too close to the subject, but I don’t think anyone held in these spaces would ever find solace in recreating the places that very well could have caused their deaths. Why would you make a gigantic monument that essentially memorializes your suffering? I understand that suffering can be used to inspire art, ironically a la The Pianist, but to remake the facility of your oppression is mind boggling. What’s even more mind boggling is a man with Jewish heritage who is claiming to try and honor said heritage is the one who wrote that into the script! Like I have been saying, it gives the impression that Corbet was out of his depth in creating this movie both historically speaking and with art history. Because of how this movie was marketed, people think this is a movie about Jewish people surviving the holocaust and thriving through adversity; but this movie is in no way about Jewish people or the holocaust. This movie uses the holocaust as a catalyst to the continued suffering of László and there is only one scene that actually depicts Judaism. The most this film does to discuss judaism is to frame itself as a pro-zionist mouth piece by repeatedly discussing Israel and how its essentially like a Jewish safehaven and ignores the history and the continued genocide of the Palestinian people that accompanies that. This movie isn’t about how the holocaust affected people, this is a movie about suffering and trying to win an oscar.

My opinion on this movie is not based on the fact that I didn’t like it, because to be honest I didn’t absolutely hate it. It could have been an amazing movie but instead it was this aggrandizing, made-up story. My opinion on this movie is based on the fact that it was made in bad faith. It tries to frame itself as a period piece but has wild historical inaccuracies and the main character is a brain child of a director who couldn’t find someone with a tragic enough background for the movie he wanted to make. This wasn’t a movie made because he genuinely liked the history of brutalism, he made this movie because there was a story he wanted to tell no matter how inaccurate the story came to be. It would be one thing to portray all of this suffering and hardship if they were following the memoirs or life of a real person, but to come up with a story of someone going through so many terrible things feels like there was no want for anything other than to get off on how sad something is. There are so many routes Brady Corbet could have taken if he genuinely wanted to tell the story of a Hungarian immigrant, there are even Jewish-Hungarian architects that he could’ve shared their life story, but he didn’t choose them because they didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell. This decision very much gives the impression that Corbet cared more about making a dramatic, tragic story than creating an accurate story. On top of this, because Corbet didn’t care to invest in culturally conscious casting he then had to use AI in this movie which immediately mars it in my eyes. I think Corbet is in the wrong for what he did with this movie and I think Brody should’ve never signed on to something that he couldn’t do without the assistance of AI. These two people are trying to pay homage to something they don’t know about and something I don’t really think they care about. This movie doesn’t care about holocaust survivors, this movie cares about making as big an impact as possible. I could honestly go on and on about my problems with this movie but I’ll close with this; putting a shipping container in 3 years before they were invented and saying it was an intentional choice is lame and proves that this movie was trying to do nothing but tell its own story under the guise of being an accurate period piece.

When it comes to dating at my age I believe in one thing; every person worth dating is either gay, dead, or married and dating apps are truly a testament to that belief. Until recently I have never particularly been a relationship person, I have never even been in a serious relationship. While a good part of that was probably due to being a very tall, chubby, and socially anxious person in middle and high school; relationships were not something I wanted. I think I only ever pursued crushes or thought about relationships because I felt I was supposed to; that it’s what was normal for a teen girl and something I should do even though I wasn’t interested in it. The people I had crushes on were always avoidant or emotionally unavailable, like I was trying to make it not likely for them to like me back. While in some ways it was painful to never have had someone have a crush on me or to pursue me, it meant I had a very peaceful adolescence. Throughout my adult years I was so caught up in academics and moving frequently that relationships were the last thing on my mind. But, throughout all of this and despite not particularly wanting a relationship, I was on dating apps. Bumble, tinder, hinge; you name it I was on it. I kept them all in the games folder on my phone to really signify how important they were to me. Now, I’m 25 and actually want a relationship and the apps have somehow gotten even worse than they were when I was 18. It feels as if men have regressed even more than I thought possible. Maybe it’s because I’ve been binging Sex and the City but the urge to write about my dating escapades, especially the failures, has gotten too strong to fight. Through this relay of my dating troubles, I intend to cover dating as a woman in the 21st century, the male loneliness epidemic, and the plague of being the permanently single friend.

My first foray into online dating happened when I was 16, when tinder for some reason let people under the age of 18 sign up to meet other teenagers. Tinder didn’t keep that feature for long and it quickly died out, but not before I had my first real date. As you can imagine, it was not good! I’m not going to lie, I forget this man’s name. This is probably due to the fact that he was incredibly boring and did not ask me a single question the entire date and the only things he talked about were cars and fish but only when prompted. After an incredibly dull lunch we went to a movie, Now You See Me 2, where he uncomfortably had his arm around me with a stiff hand on my left boob for the entire movie whilst breathing heavily in my ear. I told him I only wanted to be friends after that but never texted him ever again. Years later he did text me trying to be friends but I told him I had enough friends. This experience didn’t exactly have me chomping at the concept of dating, which excluding two very intense periods of limerence I didn’t date again until my senior year of college. Berkeley isn’t exactly known for its rich dating scene and I felt that deeply. My main desire of being on dating apps was to “stick it to” one of said periods of limerence so it’s not like I was putting a lot of effort in. I went on a singular date and it was with a woman so it was perfectly okay, nothing came of it but it wasn’t an egregious offense by any means. In all actuality, most of the dates I have been on from dating apps have been with women, yet most of my experiences and particularly the bad ones have been from men. When I think about dating apps and my experience on them it’s almost entirely male centered. Whilst living in Oxford I was a bit of a demon and was going on dates pretty frequently but they were all so inconsequential that they have mostly left my memory. There is one date I went on that stays in my mind, I went out with a man also named Sam. He had the personality of cardboard but his body felt like it was carved from marble. He was a demolition expert for the British military and did rowing in his free time. I know we’re supposed to value personality or whatever but everyone deserves a hot person every once and a while. Our first date ended up being in a coffeeshop next to a cemetery and he argued with me that American voltage was too weak to run an electric water kettle and that’s why we didn’t use them even thought the electric water kettle was invented in Chicago, but he was so hot I did not care! Unfortunately the whole affair was finished very quickly, mainly because he finished very quickly. He was finished very quickly whilst the live action Scooby Doo was playing in the background. The next day he texted me and told me that it was a one time thing and he wished me luck on my studies. I asked him if he was saying this because he finished very quickly and he replied yes, it had never happened to him before and he was very embarrassed. I blocked him after that. Despite my vastly unfortunate history with dating apps, I can’t help myself but stay on them. Even though the vast majority of the conversations I have will never transfer over to being in person. I have come close a couple of times recently but both failed for different reasons. The first was a couple of months ago when I matched with a seemingly very lovely man, he looked like a more attractive Jesse Eisenberg. We were chatting and agreed that dating apps were horrid places where relationships never happen. We were getting along well and I told him I’d love to get coffee but I had a very important question; who did you vote for in the 2024 election? He immediately unmatched me. The next was about a month ago and on paper he was perfect. He was 27, a PhD candidate in public health sciences, and had gone to a good school for his masters program. He was checking so many boxes I didn’t even care that he was 2 inches shorter than me. He wasn’t a republican, he had the same political beliefs as me and was generally interesting to text with. When I’m online dating I try to keep texting to a minimum and plan a date ASAP, but I was about to get my wisdom teeth pulled so that wasn’t feasible. He said he understood and that maybe we should facetime instead. I was a little iffy on that so I said thanks but no. We were still texting and he said again that we should facetime. I told him firmly that I didn’t want to do that, we haven’t even met each other and I didn’t want to spend my few pain free hours left facetiming with some rando. He replied “you have no faith in us, jk”. I blocked him after that. The worst thing is, after all of this I am still on dating apps! I’m like an addict who can’t quit, except dating apps are a much less respectable addiction. But as I get older and see my friends in relationships, how can I not do anything other than try to find that same happiness.

In my opinion, the most painful aspect of dating apps is how people can truly say whatever they want without any repercussions. For the longest time I have kept a folder of things men have said to me on dating apps, as you can see it’s terrible! Maybe it’s just because of the fetishization of fat women, but the way men interact with me on dating apps is abhorrent. They treat me as if I should be thankful for any attention and I should greet any scraps of attention they throw my way with gratitude. On top of that, even when men don’t say nasty things to me they put in no effort. They’re boring. They ask no questions. They’ll message back once or twice and then ghost you. They’ll ask for your snapchat and not your phone number. They are both somehow perversely juvenile and 29. It’s the trenches and really confirms that dating apps are the clearance racks of the romantic world. I know I am not the only woman having problems on dating apps. Everyone knows it’s the trenches and that finding a relationship on a dating app is next to impossible but what else are we supposed to do? In this day and age, there appears to be no feasible other way to meet people. I go through phases where someone says some vile thing to me and it pushes me over the edge and I delete all of the apps and I have a few months of peace, but I always go back because what other option is there? I know so many people who have had successful romances and current relationships that started on dating apps and even those people can acknowledge that dating apps have morphed into this hapless space that they would not be successful on now. While writing this essay, I matched and had full conversations with two people only for them to ghost me for no reason and this isn’t even including the dozens who matched with me only to never message or never replied in the past month. It’s ridiculous. Not to theorize, but the entire dating world feels as if men now feel as if they are the ones that should be wooed and not women. That us lowly women should be on our knees begging for attention from these high-value men. In the real world this behavior is also present. In bars men are standing on tables and on the back of benches just standing there watching. They’re asking women to buy them drinks. Men don’t want to approach women, they want to be approached. I am not one to stick to gender norms or believe in them, but women should always be the ones to be wooed. Men are literally one of the biggest threats to women’s safety, why should women sacrifice their own safety just because they want a relationship? All of this leads to a never ending cycle of hope, disappointment, and annoyance that leads me to question if it’s possible to get into a relationship via online dating or even in real life.

I know that if I really wanted to, I could be in a relationship. If I was more pliable, more malleable with a taste for suffering I could get in a relationship tomorrow. The problem is I’m not. I value my own sanity and I’ve tried the whole process of molding yourself to someone else’s wants and needs and it’s exhausting. For both of my limerances I did exactly that. I made myself pliable and accessible to try and catch their attention and it achieved nothing but my own suffering and ire. I look back at those times and think about how pathetic I was and have realized how easily I can lose myself. Call me optimistic, but in a relationship I think both parties should be able to maintain their own personalities. But I look at the women around me and on social media and I do not see that. I see women with objectively shitty partners who make their life worse and I don’t want that. I love my life, why would I bring anyone into it that doesn’t bring something valuable to it? Part of me wishes I lived in the 90s, where people would introduce their single friends to each other and set up blind dates or single people would sanely approach you in a bar, but unfortunately these aren’t things that happen anymore and I know this because I’ve asked my friends to set me up with their single friends and frequent bars. I recently watched When Harry Met Sally and a scene stuck out to me. After Sally has broken up with her boyfriend, her bestie Marie pulls out a literal rolodex and starts riffling through it pulling out names and numbers of men that she can set Sally up with. There wasn’t even a request on Sally’s behalf, Marie immediately jumps to finding a partner for her best friend. Unfortunately, this is not the norm anymore. My requests to be set up are often met with my friends saying they don’t know any single people or that we know the same people. That’s why I’m stuck in the tarpit of online dating.

My time on dating apps has made me feel like a social degradation is happening for men. Men and women feel as if they’re growing and evolving in different directions but only women are the ones being blamed for it, not the men who treat women like their own personal fantasy machines. Being a chubby teenager was impactful, because I was never anyone’s crush. No one ever asked me out. It was much to my shock when I got on dating apps and was suddenly bombarded with men’s fantasies and harassment. It was jarring to go from unwanted to people suddenly being overly forward. What I realized though is that while to some degree these men were fetishizing me, they would act this way to anyone who gave them a drop of attention. The things they were saying to me were not because they specifically wanted me, they just wanted someone who was pliable and ready to become the canvas of their desires. These men don’t want dimensional women, they want breathing sex toys. This has only been exacerbated by red-pill alpha male content that tells men that they need to make women submit and then they as men need to be in control. This content directly dehumanizes women and the lingo and practices of these weirdos has made it into mainstream culture with most people not even realizing it. This has had a domino effect, where men are freak weirdos on dating apps and in real life leading to women rightfully being uninterested in that aggression and not interacting with these men. Yet, it is women who are being blamed for the isolation of men.

Men are steadily becoming more anti-social weirdos. A growing percent of men don’t have real friendships, they spend their free time locked in their rooms talking to disembodied voices playing video games with animated women and watching porn. Because of this anti-social behavior, in 2023 the US Surgeon General coined the term “The male loneliness epidemic” in an advisory on an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The creation of this term gave men the perfect ammunition for blaming women for something they themselves caused. Women didn’t make men have no friends, lose their social skills, and become hermits who don’t know how to hold a conversation. While I understand that the pandemic held a significant role in the prevalence of loneliness, women have bounced back socially. When I teach art classes they are entirely women, and when there is a man in my classes 9 times out of 10 they are there because their girlfriend brought them. Men don’t invest in themselves, their friendships, or their relationships because for their entire lives the women around them have done it for them. Whether it be mothers, grandmother, wives, girlfriends, or sisters; men have had their social lives handed to them on a platter and anything else that they have had to do themselves becomes superficial. Men typically don’t know a lot about their own friends, let alone their girlfriends or mothers. While I know that historically men have always been freak weirdos, I feel like we as women have to experience it more now because it can reach us anywhere. We don’t just experience weird men in bars anymore, it’s while we’re cooking dinner or reading a book or lying in bed because we are now constantly accessible via our phones. I think that’s why so many people from older generations have the “not all men” mentality, because they maybe had to interact with 5 men on a weekly basis. As modern people we come across hundreds, maybe even thousands on a weekly basis. This combination of self-inflicted isolation and unwillingness to evolve and become unreliant on women has led to men to become obsolete in a way. Women don’t need men to have fulfilling lives and social circles and I’m not sure I can say that about men. I believe I can say that the vast majority of men in the world benefit from having a girlfriend and women no longer benefit from relationships as they did in the past. In a lot of ways, it feels like I’m yearning for something that doesn’t exist anymore; that finding a good relationship is like striking gold now due to men regressing.

Dating apps suck. They empirically suck. I have been told horrible things on them, I constantly have my hopes dashed by random people, and they feel like a time sink. Despite this, they feel like the only way to get into a relationship thus locking me into the continuous terrible cycle of matching and ghosting. I am not the only person who feels like this, I think it’s the general consensus that dating apps are bad but there are no other options. Friends don’t set their single friends up on dates anymore, men don’t approach women in bars anymore, and over all men don’t put in effort like they used to. With the invention of the term “the male loneliness epidemic” men have been given a hall pass to blame women for their lack of relationships when in reality it’s men and their unwillingness to improve anything in their life on their own without the help of a woman. This isn’t taking into account the disgusting manner that men often treat women and this growing trend of men wanting to be the party that’s wooed. The overlap in misogyny and dating has allowed for this perpetuation in dating being terrible and women feeling hopeless about their love lifes. I’m still trying and my friends are still trying but we all go through cycles of deleting and redownloading dating apps in the hopes to find someone who adds something to their life but at a certain point it just feels like a never ending game where no one wins. How long can you rely on hope when the dating pool now feels like I’m waiting on a countdown for my 30s so all of the people who got married in their 20s get divorced and the dating world widens up again. Dating apps are a cesspool and I cannot wait for the day that I can get off of them forever.

I’m an anthropologist. I love the subject. When I was 12 I told my mother that I was going to study anthropology at UC Berkeley and that is exactly what I did. One of my defining moments with the discipline was in one of the first anthropology classes, biological anthropology. My professor was discussing racism, more importantly how it’s completely illogical and a concept made up by old white men to try and make themselves feel superior and support colonialism and slavery. A student, a white man, raised his hand to disagree with her. He felt that saying white people created racism out of nothing was a generalization, that there were inherent biological differences between white people and other races. I will never forget my white, Danish professor absolutely destroying that racist in front of the entire class. To say I was enthused by this would be an understatement, I think I even clapped. This was the first time I had seen a white person confront another white person on racism and it was a very influential experience. In recent times I have really been trying to consider my own privileges and a thought I keep having is how I have had the privilege of not only being a white person, but that I’m a white person from a non-racist household. Because for a lot of families and in a lot of places that is not the case. In this time, white people have been (or at least should be) confronting the privileges they have as white people. But there is one privilege that I think should be talked about more, especially amongst white leftists and democrats, which is that being raised in a non-racist household is a privilege a lot of white people do not have. I know that a white woman writing about racism is scary, rightfully so, but this argument is targeted towards my fellow white people. Additionally, I believe that a lot of these anti-racist white people are not actually doing anything to combat racism and are still benefitting from the emotional and physical labour done by people of color. Despite this, many anti-racist people claim to hate the South for doing the exact thing they’re doing, not fighting racism. This combination of the hatred of the South and refusal to acknowledge their privilege of being a non-racist white person has led to the continual reliance on people of color to shoulder the weight of educating racists. This is by no means a defence of racists, it’s a call out for white democrats who do nothing in combating racism other than saying they’re not racist.

I think a lot about how people interact with each other, how all of the social puzzle pieces fit together to form someone’s beliefs and opinions. I was raised by vegetarian hippies and I think about how that has formed my beliefs and opinions. For example, I think the concept of eating meat is gross and I think women should run everything because my family is a matriarchy. I try to look through this lens of how everyone has these integrated values to understand how other people operate. Like if someone keeps interrupting what I’m saying in an effort to contribute to the conversation, I assume that in their family that’s the norm for conversations and it’s something that’s not intended to be rude. In anthropological terms these habits would be considered cultural transmission or socialization. These are beliefs or behaviors that are passed down from one generation to the next. Humans are an inherently social species so having a ubiquitous social language is comfortable and logical. But I ask you to take part in a mental exercise with me. Think about your family and about the beliefs you were imbued with since infancy. Think about the sense of cohesion you have with your family. Now, consider if you did a complete 180 and stopped having the same social lexicon. For my family, a 180 would be becoming a racist republican. If I suddenly had these views my family would stop talking with me, rightfully so in my opinion. But now imagine the inverse. Imagine that you’re a part of a traditional Southern family. A family whose great-great grandpa fought in the civil war as a confederate and you went to a high school named after some confederate general where almost the entire student body was white. Maybe your family isn’t overtly racist, but it’s definitely not anti-racist because that isn’t how anyone was raised. Would you be able to break away from your family’s beliefs if that was all you ever knew? I’m sure some of you reading this have split from your family for some reason, but not everyone has the strength or support network for that. I’m not asking you to look at racists with any sympathy, I am asking you to consider the fact that socialization greatly affects what you believe and that if you are a white person who comes from a family that doesn’t support racist ideals that you are privileged. If you have been raised with this privilege, it is your obligation to at least attempt to bridge this gap and give these people a chance to grow.

One argument I do not agree with is that the South is inherently bad and that every white person in the South should just be tossed out, that they’re stupid, or some other statement along those lines. I think this line of thinking helps nobody and ignores a lot of issues. For one, these sweeping statements almost never include the fact that in Southern states the population is not just white people, with over 40% being people of color. On top of this, statements like these typically ignore the historic efforts by representatives and governments in the South to try and make education as inaccessible as possible. If you look at any state ranking in education Southern states take up essentially all of the bottom spots, but this is intentional. Southern states spend less per pupil than other states for public education, like thousands of dollars less than other states. I don’t like when people say that Southerners are stupid because it’s not like they had any say in the education they can receive; the people representing them want them to be uneducated. The people in charge want them to barely graduate high school because it’s easier to govern a mass that doesn’t know that they should question authority and hasn’t been taught anything other than the bare minimum. On top of this education gap, the South is one of the most gerrymandered regions in America. Gerrymandering, the intentional redrawing of congressional maps to break the voting power of the oppositional party, is rampant in the South. Some of the most gerrymandered states are all in the South. This means that even if there are the numbers to flip a red seat it is more than likely that this will not happen, which perpetuates all of the problems associated with the South. Many of the Southern states that we think of as Republican would not be red if they weren’t gerrymandered. This whole concept was inspired by multiple conversations I have had with friends, white Democrats, who have said things along the lines of they hate the South and I just can’t agree with that. The cards are stacked against Southern people. I am not trying to say that the racist history of The South should be swept away because people have shitty high schools, I’m saying that completely disregarding a group of people because their representatives are evil without even attempting to change anything is wild.

I understand that not being a racist might not be considered a privilege to a lot of people, but it is. People who receive higher education are less likely to be racist (depending on what subject you studied). This also typically means that you are more likely to come from a more affluent background or will have a more affluent life, meaning that having beliefs that go against the broader social norms is more acceptable. By social norm I mean within the norms within the Western world, specifically the United States, because racism is the norm and necessary for the country to function. America is and was built on racism. From its founding with its genocide of indigenious communities to slavery in the 17th-19th centuries up until modern times with the continued violence of these communities and the reliance on modern slavery in the prision systems and labor exploitation in innumerable markets (textiles, technology, mining, agriculture, etc.). This country is inherently racist and needs the subjugation of people of color to survive, so being able to push against this social norm is a form of privilege, and the more you are able to separate yourself from these systems of oppression the more privileged you are. If you are able to not buy clothes made in sweatshops you are privileged. If you are able to buy produce that you know is not grown with exploitation you are privileged. In this day and age where white people have been publicly acknowledging their white privilege, why are white people so unwilling to acknowledge the fact that being raised in a way that allows for them to push back against the racist bones of society is a privilege? Privileged white people are so willing to brush away people in the South yet unwilling to acknowledge the factors and circumstances that surround that politically loaded area and that itself is a privilege. To know that you can do nothing other than vote and still have your political beliefs carried out by your representatives is a privilege. If you come from a blue state, you will never know what it feels like to not have your beliefs represented. The closest you will get to that feeling is the electoral college. What is ironic is that these non-racist white people are actively taking advantage of the labour of people of color. Efforts to educate the South and fight against gerrymandering have predominantly been done by people of color.

White people have an obligation to try and have conversations with racist people. This labour is not something that should fall to communities of color. For one thing, white people have nothing to lose with these conversations. I have had plenty of conversations in bars trying to convince white men that colonialism is bad and have lost nothing but time. Having these uncomfortable conversations is quite literally the bare minimum someone who is anti-racist person can do. By conversations I don’t mean the typical Democrat reaction of haha dummy, I mean genuinely try and converse with these people. I believe, maybe naively, that racists fall into 2 camps: the genuinely crazy racists and the people who simply haven’t been educated or had the environment to not be racist. Because no one is born racist. As someone who works with kids, kids do not care what race someone is. It is something that is inherently socialized and taught, meaning that if someone is given a chance they can unlearn. I think that looking at anyone as a complete lost cause helps nobody, this mind set will not allow for us as a society to move forward. I understand that not everyone’s mind can be changed, but I believe that as white people it is our responsibility to have these conversations and make that attempt. As a white woman it’s not my place to forgive racists, which I’m not, but it is my place to try and educate people and take away some of the burdens that people of color have to deal with.

White people’s relationship to racism is interesting. They both want to separate themselves from racists yet do nothing to actually help people of color. I know a white person critiquing other white people is ironic, but you need to write what you know. White people refuse to acknowledge the privilege of being raised in a household where the norm is not being racist. This is a privilege because being able to push against the systems that your country has built itself on is a privilege, especially when you are able to remove yourself even further from the industries that still use exploitative practices because financially that will always be more costly. Whilst non-racist white people are privileged, they often refuse to use that privilege to alleviate labour from people of color by completely refusing to even try to educate people who have not had the same opportunities as them. Non-racists Democrats often completely disregard white people from the South, even though they have not had the same opportunities and chances at education that they have. White people should be taking on this burden to try and educate these people but oftentimes they still use the emotional labour of people of color for their own benefit. It’s not an earth shattering statement to say white people aren’t doing enough to combat racism, but I believe the easiest thing white people can do outside of being not racist is to acknowledge their privilege in that and use that to at least try an educate people who haven’t had the same opportunities or privileges as them. Use your privilege and do some good, and stop saying you hate Southerners! Like hate their governments but not the people that suffer under them.

My relationship with autism used to be fraught. I only ended up getting diagnosed because I was being stalked, and this happened when I was already an adult. I had to change my entire perception of myself and had to come to grapple with the fact that the world was going to treat me very differently. I was trying to navigate how to interact with the world and how the world might view me, and one of the most obvious tactics to see how the world views autism is how autistic characters are portrayed in media. To put it frankly, 99% of autistic characters are annoying. They’re brash, overbearing, and something to point and laugh at; I didn’t see myself in any of the characters that I was seeing in TV or movies. The real cherry on top of being diagnosed with autism later in life was that it happened during the pandemic, a time when mental illness or disorder gave you a sort of clout online. Where you could scroll through comments and with some regularity see comments along the line of “uwu autism”. It was the era of self-diagnosis and heart shaped blush. Taking all of this in whilst coming to terms with who I was did not make me identify with any media I was seeing. It felt isolating to feel like no one had my “kind” of autism. My relationship with autism has grown, but the beginning was hard. This isn’t a hit piece against people who identify with the portrayal of autistic people in mainstream media or who have self-diagnosed themselves, but instead a broader survey of my history with autism.

When I was 20 years old, I started being stalked by someone who I had vaguely known throughout school. To put it plainly, he was weird and regularly harassed women. He has autism, in my opinion that should never excuse harassment but in the end that is what allowed him to get away with this behavior for so long. An example of the harassment he perpetrated would be how at school he would go up to girls, never boys, and ask if they would rather get 20 immunizations in 1 second or show a stranger their belly button. If someone replied to the belly button option he would respond “Okay, then show me your belly button”. He wasn’t doing this just for laughs, this genuinely got him going. There were always the rumors of the reactions he had if someone actually did show him their belly button, which I will not get into, but it was for nothing other than his own gratification. For the longest time, this was the only interaction I had ever had with him and I was glad. One time I ran into him in a store and he asked if I was Samantha and I replied “No, who is that? I’m Rachel.” and had to promptly explain to my friend why that had happened. There was also an instance of him happening to harass my cousin’s wife but if I went into all of the details of his creepiness and perversions but this would be thousands of words more than it should be. One day he started texting me how he was worried about a fellow past classmate. How he was worried that she was in an abusive relationship and that she was depressed. I was in no way friends with this classmate and was immediately suspicious of his intentions, because to my understanding he never cared about women as anything other than a tool to act out his fetishes. I promptly told him to lose my number or I was going to call the cops on him. I blocked him and immediately reached out to the girl he was talking about. I won’t get fully into the following chaos, mainly for the sake of the woman he stalked, but after posting about this on instagram I found out that he had stalked or harassed dozens of women including one of my best friends. This whole situation culminated in him coming to my house and me having to file a police report. Throughout this whole process, like I think most people would, I started googling. I started googling the relationship between autism and stalking, the process of legally pursuing an autistic person for stalking, and promptly learning that getting an autistic person prosecuted for stalking is next to impossible. I then had to learn that the police were incredibly useless, an example is an actual police officer asking if my mom could talk to his mom even though we were both 20 by this point. After all of that I felt disheartened and vulnerable. I called an emergency meeting with my therapist and explained the whole situation and my spiral of research. We started talking about how he had autism and all of the background information and then she suddenly says, “You know, I think you have autism too.” I was shocked, not only because this felt like incredibly inappropriate timing to bring this up, but because I did not believe her. I knew I was a little quirky, but I thought I, if anything, thought I would have ADHD. I brought up things I thought were specific to ADHD and she shot them all down by saying how that was something that was also found in autism, or saying that I was fully wrong and that was not a part of ADHD at all. I was in awe. My idea of myself was suddenly becoming much clearer yet also more confusing. I always thought I was annoying and felt like a chip was missing in my head that made me constantly not understand what people meant. At first I had a hard time believing it. I constantly told myself “you don’t have autism, you’re just annoying”, as if I knew more than a licensed professional. Getting told that all of the weird things you do have an actual explanation did make life make more sense, but created this dichotomy in how not only I viewed myself, but also how other people interacted with me.

The process of “coming out” as autistic as a 20 year old woman was interesting. Because I not only had to tell my friends, but I specifically had to tell people that had known me for years and decades that I had this new piece of information about myself. It was not as tumultuous as I expected, no one freaked out or cried except my mom and I consider that a win. While the thing I was most worried about ended up being incredibly calm, what was unexpected was the confessions I was unwittingly I was about to receive. I often joke that I’m like what boygenius is for bisexuals but to autistic people, an awakening experience if you will. And while it’s a joke, there is some truth in it. Since my diagnosis, there are three phenomenons I have become very familiar with. The first is people telling me I just need to watch Love on the Spectrum. The second is people saying “well I think everyone is a little autistic” which is like, okay. Sure. That’s an opinion to have. I don’t agree with it but okay. The third phenomenon happens in both one-on-one and group situations. I’ll be talking with someone and autism will come up as a topic and then someone will lean in and almost in a whisper say “You know, I think I might be a little autistic. I feel really socially awkward” The best metaphor I can give for what this feels like is being gay in the 90s. Why does it feel like someone is confiding in me some deep dark secret? Like I’m “out” and they’re too afraid to come out. Why are we speaking about this in hushed tones? At times it feels like people expect me to have the autism version of a “gaydar”. Like I didn’t even know I have autism, you expect me to be the judge for other people? I thought my inability to touch paper without feeling like dying was normal, why would you expect me to tell you if your social anxiety is really autism? I am in no way angry or upset with anyone who has done this to me, your autism confessionals are safe with me and will not be judged, I just find it so interesting how this has become something that has become such a common occurrence. I understand why people do it. As someone who felt so isolated in the beginning of my diagnosis and looking for camaraderie, I understand trying to find someone who understands you. I have become quite fond of these interactions because they mean that not only do people think that I am a model autistic, but that they trust me enough to have this conversation. Not to sound like a stereotype, but finding a community who can relate to what you’re going through is important, and these confessions kind of create that. I will never blame someone for trying to figure out how they’re feeling. Finding community or representation is hard, especially when the representation and public perception of your disorder isn’t the best.

Autism is an often misunderstood or misconstrued disorder. In the media there are rarely accurate portrayals, often with characters like Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory or that one autistic doctor from The Good Doctor. These portrayals are caricatures, they’re not accurate, they infantilize people with autism, and oftentimes are written by people who are not autistic. A particularly good example is in the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. This story follows a 15 year old boy autistic boy, Christopher, trying to solve the murder of his neighbor’s dog Wellington. I initially picked this book up at a book swap and was excited to read it. As I worked my way through this book I started to feel very icky, for lack of a better word. Christopher was beyond a caricature, a completely unrealistic depiction of what autism looks like for the vast majority of people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). I had an eerie feeling that he was written by a non-autistic person and it turned out I was correct. Haddon not only didn’t research autism at all prior to researching this book, but he’s not even an autistic person himself. He touts the fact he did no research proudly, claiming that his experience working at an adult training center and having friends who have been diagnosed with Aspergers, a now outdated term, as enough credentials to accurately write an autistic character. While claiming to have a connection with the autistic community, he wrote multiple scenes where Christopher is yelled at and threatened with violence because he found it “amusing” ^1. This is because Haddon wasn’t writing this book to raise awareness or do anything beneficial related to autism, he wrote it for entertainment. He wrote it knowing that people would enjoy laughing at an autistic person who couldn’t understand social context and felt that we would probably relate to the people yelling at him. The point of characters like Christopher or Sheldon Cooper, a character that is still maintained to not actually be autistic by the Big Bang Theory showrunners, is not to normalize autistic characters but instead have you point and laugh at them. To have you relate and cheer on the other characters who yell at them. I think characters like these are why there is a large disconnect with autistic people, especially women. As a child I obviously didn’t relate to any character that was supposed to be autistic, I mean I didn’t even think I was autistic, but as an adult there were no characters that I related to or found any of myself in either. If anything I found them really annoying. Like with other nuanced topics, mainstream media rarely portrays autistic characters with any variety and in an extremely exaggerated fashion. Recently, there have been better portrayals of autistic characters on shows like The Pitt and Heartbreak High, but I have also felt represented by actors who have been diagnosed with autism in recent years such as Holly Maddison of The Girls Next Door fame. Representation has gotten so much better and the stigma is getting less severe, but social media is still at it with the normal shenanigans. Like with most communities, people hunt for representation when it’s not present but people often lose the plot. For example, on the show Peacemaker there is a character named Adrian Chase aka Vigilante. He is a diagnosed sociopath who enjoys killing anyone and everyone he views as criminals, including jaywalkers and graffiti artists. The showrunner, James Gunn, has explicitly said he is a sociopath. I understand wanting representation, but trying to parse it out of a serial killer is maybe not the best place to find it. I think a lot of this comes from the pseudo diagnosers online, who think that self diagnosis makes them qualified to diagnose anyone or any character with anything they see fit. There is inherently nothing wrong with self-diagnosis, especially when living in a country where tens of millions of people don’t have health insurance, but sometimes people take it too far.

Because of this lack of accurate representation in mainstream media, it makes sense that autistic people, especially women, have started turning to social media to find some sense of comradery but even this has created a weird vacuum. Most of the examples of autism in media I can think of are about men, which makes sense. Until recent years the criteria for diagnosing autism were based on cis-het white boys, meaning that women and POC were much more likely to not get diagnosed at all or not as early as a white man would be. I am walking proof of this because when I was 12 I took part in an autism study as part of the control group! I often think about that study and wonder if I should let them know that there was an error, but if the 12 year old who tested with an IQ score of a 16 year old wasn’t a hint that something was wrong that’s on them. This explains, to a degree, the lack of female autistic representation in mainstream media. Because of this lack of female representation, women might go to other sources of media to find community. Like most people, I was glued to my phone during quarantine. I was on tiktok more than I would like to admit, and what I would even like to admit less is the side of tiktok that I was on. I was very much on the e-girl, alt side of tiktok. After I got diagnosed I noticed a trend on that side of tiktok. In a way, autism was used as an accessory. Cutesy e-girl content would be made about autism, like kawaii heart-shaped blush content in relation to autism. They would talk about how they had forest fairy autism and other cutesy, whimsical phrases. Most of these posts manic-pixie-dream girled autism, making it seem like a fun way to describe yourself as opposed to something that can be traumatic for a lot of people. It trivialized autism in a way that made it hard to look away, like a car crash of clout chasing where I couldn’t look away. To top it off, most of these girls were saying how they were self-diagnosed, how professional diagnosis is flawed and inherently bad. People on social media were pushing inaccurate and often dangerous misinformation about autism for no other reason than to gain followers. According to Drexel University’s A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, under #autism 32% of information was generalized and 41% was completely inaccurate ². Meaning that the vast majority of autism content is inaccurate. I have my own belief and it’s very mean. I think that these creators don’t actually have autism, that they are simply just annoying. While I don’t think self-diagnosis should be completely swept aside, I do think the people jumping on social media to talk about autism in a fake anime voice aren’t actually autistic. I understand not fully trusting mental health professionals, America doesn’t exactly have the best history of treating people with mental disorders kindly, but to jump on social media and say that self diagnosis is the only valid way to find out you have autism whilst lip syncing to a Five Nights at Freddy’s audio is one of the most annoying things you can do. Recently on my FYP there has been an uptick in memes highlighting how absolutely ridiculous these people were acting. Watching the anime voices, cartoonish makeup, and Tiktok hand movements felt like opening up a time capsule, it’s what inspired me to write about how annoying some of the #autism people on social media can be. While some people on tiktok or instagram genuinely share their experience and raise awareness, the vast majority are just annoying clout chasers trying to capitalize on peoples vulnerabilities.

My journey with autism has been different. While most women get diagnosed later in life, I’m going to assume that most people don’t get diagnosed because they were getting stalked by an autistic person. Finding out I was autistic at 20 years old was a big adjustment but in the end I have been better for it. It gave me an explanation for how I felt and acted and has allowed me to be a better person and friend. Even though sometimes people treat me differently or say an odd thing here or there, I don’t regret finding out I was autistic. My diagnosis has given me a different lens to view media that is supposed to depict autistic people. Unfortunately the majority of portrayals are inaccurate and poke fun at people who have this disorder, but luckily the tides are turning towards more accurate representation. That being said, people online are doing way too much and I legitimately think they are bringing the perception of autistic people down. While self-diagnosis can be valid, a lot of the people doing it online probably have something else wrong with them. They use their self-diagnosed autism for clout and to spread misinformation that can be harmful, and they’re just straight up annoying. Being diagnosed with autism and navigating the social world can be complex, but minimizing what people with autism go through is dismissive and helps no one. We already had to go through being associated with Sheldon Cooper, we don’t need anymore hate. And no, I have not watched Love on the Spectrum.

1. https://theconversation.com/mark-haddon-did-no-research-into-autism-for-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time-thats-just-one-reason-its-controversial-237022

2. https://drexel.edu/news/archive/2023/October/Can-We-Trust-Autism-Information-on-TikTok

I love women. Almost all of my meaningful relationships in my life have been with women. I never feel as much as myself as when I am surrounded by women. But I have also never been as traumatized by anyone else as I have been in my female friendships when I was a teenager. I look back at my friendships from the ages of 12-17 and immediately have a wave of dread wash over me. The intricate nature of what it's like to exist around other girls when you're going through puberty felt like a game of chess that I was constantly losing. Much like how Charli XCX felt about Lorde, I didn’t know if anyone actually liked me, it felt like someone was always hating me, and I always hated someone to some degree. While “Girl, so confusing” is about Charli XCX’s and Lorde’s confusing friendship, I feel as if it's applicable to every woman at one point in their life. But why are girls so confusing? Why do we actively approach each other with deep seated anxiety and hatred when we’ve barely breached puberty? I’m not going to speak for the entirety of women, but the friendships I had as a child have genuinely affected how I interact with other people; what I jokingly call my friendship ptsd or friendship trauma. Through this essay I plan to walk down memory lane and postulate why adolescent girls treat each other as adversaries.

When I think of my friend trauma I think of multiple periods of my life. I think about 6th grade, 9th grade, and my senior year of high school. Luckily by my Freshman year of college I had enough self respect and backbone to finally understand when to axe a friendship, but it was definitely a reflex and not an active decision. While the concept of jumping on substack and calling out all of the girls who wronged me is very tempting, I don’t think I would gain anything from that. Also a lot of people have access to this and I am not trying to argue with my adolescent opps in the comments of this post. I do think that examples are important so I will be giving instances that evoke that certain “Girl, so confusing” je ne sais quoi. I am not the first person to discuss the traumatic nature of female friendships, not to harp on Girls again, but Lena Dunham captures that essence of truly not knowing if one of your friends hates you or not. Hannah and Jessa’s friendship is built off of a tumultuous friendship in college. On one occasion Jessa told Hannah she would be at a free Palestine party but was actually at the Israeli fraternity. On multiple occasions Jessa does things that no one would do to someone they consider a friend, yet she time and time again states that she considers Hannah a friend. While this is a fictionalized story, I think every woman can identify with seeing a woman treat someone they call a friend horribly.

The beginning of my traumatic friendships started in the 6th grade. Like most 12 year old girls, I was incredibly unsure of myself. While this is probably in some way exacerbated by my undiagnosed autism, I think this is also just par for the course of going through puberty and having the world start to treat you differently. You’re both a child and a teenager with hormones so crazy you almost can’t see reality anymore. None of this was helped by the fact that I felt like the butt of every joke, both in my friendships and in sports. No one directly made jokes about me to my face, but I saw the whispers and giggles when they thought I wasn’t looking. I would ask them what they were joking about and I would always be rebutted with an “oh it's nothing”. One example that particular stands out happened during cheer practice. We were doing some final stretches at the end of practice and I was hearing girls behind me laugh. I tried to shake it off and think nothing of it, but after practice I went to the bathroom and saw that I had gotten my period and majorly bled through. They were laughing at me instead of telling me something was wrong. How can you not feel like the butt of the joke after that happens. Feeling as though I was the stereotypical weird fat kid didn’t help this inkling that no one really liked me, that they were only keeping me around to point at and laugh. I’m sure this feeling was also intensified by the teen dramas at the time, it felt like they gave me the ammunition to react even more dramatically to these feelings. These teen shows felt like they were being mimicked constantly, with one time a boy even threatening to jump out of a tree if a girl didn’t agree to date him (we were literally in elementary school). Another example that sticks out to me is that I got the same phone as another girl and she was so offended she convinced all of our friends to not talk to me because she felt like I was copying her, it was the cheapest phone in AT&T and mine was pink hers was green (give me a break). This period of time was filled with so much anxiety and uncertainty on who was actually my friend. Fast forwarding to 9th grade, the battlefield changed but that core problem remained the same. If anything the uncertainty was even deeper. The cattiness was palpable in pretty much every friendship that I had. Even the girl that I considered my best friend started planning things purposefully without me because she felt I was too “clingy”. But it wasn’t just my friendships that were complicated. From an outside perspective things were complicated for most girls. Now that dating was in the equation, the boy politics added another level of complexity to every social interaction. Girl A would be mad at Girl B because she dated the boy she liked for 2 weeks 6 months ago. Every interaction felt like navigating landmines. A girl would suddenly hate you because you mentioned you had a crush on a boy without knowing she had one too. I’m not discussing this from a holier than tho perspective, I did it too, but it is still crazy to think about how mean we were to each other over literally nothing of importance. The final period of time, and the time that traumatized me the most, was my senior year of high school. In that one year I had 2 friend group fallouts, one of which I will take some accountability for. The one I feel partially responsible for happened between me and three other girls that I had science class with. I had known these girls since elementary school but this was our first time being friends as teens. From the start of this group I remember feeling taken advantage of. I was the one always driving us, to the point where it felt like they only invited me places when they needed a ride. They would go to parties without me and tell me about it later; it really worsened my sense of them not particularly liking me or viewing me as a friend. It came to a boiling point, as did my crazy, when I found out that one of the girls was going to prom with a boy that she knew I liked and she didn’t tell me about it. I found out about the “prom-posal” through one of my friends. I’m not going to sugar coat it, I lost my head. I posted on my finsta, as most 17 year olds would, a cryptic post about someone lying to me and saying I had pictures of them doing “illegal things” and the admissions email to the college they got into. Was it insane of me to do that? Of course. Was I over how they were treating me and I used this as a way to get my frustrations out? Yes. The friendship breakup continued when one of them called me a bad friend who never asked any of them how their days were, as if they ever asked me anything about myself. As a 24 year old I can obviously see how I had overreacted, but 17 year old Samantha was crushed. This crushed feeling was then exacerbated by another friend group implosion immediately after. This group of girls I considered much closer friends. We had lunch together everyday, regularly hung out outside of school, and even went prom dress shopping together. But I randomly started feeling like I was on the outside of the friend group, even though I was the one who brought us all together. I would catch them talking about plans and when prompted what they were talking about they would say something random in return. I started to feel like I was being cut out in a matter of days. When I brought this up in our group chat I was told that I was correct, they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. They felt I was too loud, too competitive, and overall too much. To say I was heartbroken would be an underestimate. I couldn’t understand how so many people hated me, people who I thought I was close with. This feeling of exclusion and secret hatred has stuck with me to this day. I constantly feel like all of my friends are on the brink of deciding that they hate me. When my friends don’t respond to my texts it feels like the shoe I’ve been waiting to drop finally has and they’ve decided they don’t want to talk to me anymore. I know that this is ridiculous, but these adolescent friendships traumatized me and have permanently altered how I interact with other people. But why are girls so mean to each other, why are young girls constantly trying to knock each other down?

I am not the first person to say this, but being a woman is hard. The transition from girl to woman is even harder. It's borderline violent. Everything you know about the world is about to change as much as you are. You notice men start treating you differently even when you’ve barely entered puberty. Your body hurts. Your hormones are off the charts. But one of the worst things puberty does is it pits girls against each other, and it does this both socially and emotionally. Socially, girls are being fed media and information that forms a competition amongst other girls. Who is prettier? Who has had a boyfriend? Who has bigger boobs? We are fed teen dramas that frame it as normal for girls to compete with each other and be mean and jealous of each other. This transition does nothing but set girls up to view other girls as competitions as opposed to solaces. In a way this feels intentional, because no one benefits from women hating other women than men and the patriarchy. But emotionally, with hormones out of control, how can you not be self-conscious? Comparing yourself to your peers comes naturally when your own body is making you second guess everything. Through my adult eyes I can see how puberty creates this boiling pot putting girls under pressure, but that didn’t make going through it any easier. I can forgive the girls of my youth for how they made me feel and I can forgive myself for how I acted, but I apparently cannot forget how these adolescent friendships made me feel.

I love women, I really do. I don’t mean to sound like those terrifying men who make being feminists their whole personalities, but I do really love women. Yes, they have traumatized me but they have also supported me in ways I could never have imagined when I was a young girl. Growing up I realized that other women are the only people who will understand what it's like to exist in the patriarchy as a woman. I am lucky that I have had so many amazing women in my life, but the first 17 were filled with me questioning if people actually liked me or not. Looking back at how the girls in my life treated each other made me realize how crazy we all were. I am not going to hate these women for how they treated me as a child because god knows how other girls were treating them. Even if no one was being directly weird to them, society and their biology were still doing damage to them. Like Charli XCX, I have managed to work it out with some of the women who I had adolescent beef with and I am so grateful I have been able to experience growing up with these women and watching them flourish as adults. Hopefully I don’t have any more “Girl, so confusing” moments in my life, especially now that I respect myself and don’t let people confuse me on a regular basis. I think back to baby Samantha and hope she knows that older Samantha finds amazing friends who love her for who she is, or maybe I just became less annoying.

Released in 1994, “Loser” by Beck was inspired by many failed music endeavors, working odd jobs to survive, and of course just feeling like a loser. While I don’t remember the exact first time I heard this song, it was present throughout my childhood. I never understood the point of Loser, why would you willingly call yourself a loser, something that has been an insult since its memorialization in cheesy 80s high school movies. The concept of calling yourself a schoolyard insult didn’t make sense to my little child brain. But, as I’ve gotten older, I get the appeal. With “Loser” in particular I have related to it more and more the further I have gotten into my 20s. It might sound self deprecating to call yourself a loser, but I think embracing your Flop Era is important. Like I said, the concept of being a loser is nothing new, but I would argue being a girl who is a loser has never been more popular. From Party Girl (1995) to Girls (2012-2017), being a loser is in. But why do we love loser media so much? Why do we find comfort in media that is so rooted in uncomfortable conversations and awkwardness? Why have we flipped loser on its head and wear our Flop Eras like a badge of honor? Not to anthropologize too much, but why have our opinions of losers changed? Through this exploration of my own Flop Era and my own history with loser girl media I hope to theorize why we (20 year olds) love watching people flop.

Does it feel a bit self-aggrandizing in some twisted way to call myself a loser? Of course it does. And it's not even that true, but at the moment I am firmly in my Flop Era. I live at home, I’m not doing anything related to education anymore, and I’m not in a relationship; I believe these are all good indicators of a flop. I often think about and compare myself to what my friends are doing and have come to the conclusion that I am the loser friend, which has weirdly become comforting. I joke about how I slayed to hard too early or accomplished too much by the age of 22 so this is the world evening out some karmic debt, but it's a shock going from being in one of the most competitive programs in the world to not being able to get into a Phd program or a get a job in the field that I studied for. Watching my friends be in great relationships, get jobs in the fields they want, and get into Phd programs is rough. Not because I’m not excited for them, I am, but because it makes me feel like our friendship has a timer. That at some point they're going to realize I’m a loser and start to phase me out because I’m not on their level. Like the milk that's hiding in the back of the fridge with its “best by” date that's slowly approaching. What's crazy is that I know I’m being delusional, none of my friends are shallow people, but delusions aren’t grounded in reality. Feeling like you’re falling behind your friends sucks. People have different stages of life, what happens when I’m not on the same stage anymore?Catch-up calls with friends are almost like a humiliation ritual because what do I have to catch them up on anymore? The vase I made? The class I taught? I can’t even tell anymore when people are actually interested in what is going on in my life or if they’re just being polite. Again, I know that I am more than likely just in my own head and that my friends do actually like seeing the cross stitches I make or the ceramics I give them, but I’m worried that my stench of loser is pungent to anyone around me.

While as a child I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to call themselves a loser, but I get it now. Maybe it's some sick method of beating someone to the punch (what adult is calling other adults a loser to their face?) or hanging a warning label on yourself that reads “BEWARE this person will ask you to make plans in the middle of a work day”. Maybe it somehow feels more respectable to acknowledge the fact that I have loser tendencies than to feign ignorance to it. Whenever I think about losers I think a lot about Girls. Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa (I’m a Shosh apologist) are all losers in one way or another and are completely oblivious to it. Hannah thinks she's the voice of her generation, Marnie thinks she's the next hit musician, and Jessa thinks she's too cool for her friends even though she's arguably more lame than all of them. But what kills me is that none of them realize these things about themselves. They have all deluded themselves about how they are perceived throughout the six seasons of the show. The only person who acknowledges their loserness and grows out of it is Shoshana. We end the show having barely seen her for the whole season only to see her at her engagement party, where she has a new group of friends, a better sense of emotional intelligence, and a fiance who sounds well matched to her. While there is some growth seen by all the characters, sans Jessa, Shoshana is the one who has arguably done the best for herself and grown out of her loser ways. I do believe that if we had a time jump we would have seen Hannah and Marnie grow even more into themselves, since we already saw Hannah fully moving on from Adam and realizing she's growing up and Marnie being able to see her flaws. Through this growth we see them finally starting to see and accept their loserness that we had been seeing throughout the show. But the key to them growing is them acknowledging that they're losers, or at the very least that they have loser tendencies. I believe that part of ending your Flop Era is admitting that you're in it. This is also the case for Mary in Party Girl. We start the movie with her literally admitting she's a loser after being bailed out of jail, but the whole movie is her realizing her passion for being a librarian and growing to become the woman she wants to be. Through the movie we see Mary flop and fumble in so many ways, but all the while she is figuring herself out and sets herself on a goal. While we don’t see if she actually pulled herself out of loserville, I believe that her admitting she was a loser was the first step out of there. Not to make Flop Eras sound like it has 12 steps, but the first step of stopping your Flop Era really is acceptance. One loser girl who we have seen not accept her loser habits is Carrie from Sex and the City. I’m not one to shame women, but Carrie is insufferable 90% of the time. From not being able to accept being an adulterer both in her own relationship and others, to begging her friend for money from her divorce because she has terrible spending habits, to just overall chasing a man who has absolutely no interest in her: Carrie is a loser who can’t admit it to herself. Even in the new spin off And Just Like That she hasn’t confronted her loser tendencies and is suffering from the effects. Carrie’s inability to hold herself accountable, even when her friends step in to try and set her straight, gives her no room to grow even when she is completely humiliated. Yes, she does break up with Big on multiple occasions, but emphasis on multiple occasions. It should’ve only been once, instead she is obsessed with a man who is embarrassed of her and she should actually be embarrassed by him as well. Unlike the other characters I have discussed, Carrie cannot admit her flaws to herself in any meaningful way, which is caging her into being a loser. But maybe that's what is so appealing about her.

This question of why we love watching girls be losers has no definitive answers, but I do have my theories. I think there is a certain comfort in watching characters either go through the same thing you are, or something even more embarrassing. While Carrie is a complete self-centered, immature, mess; that's what makes her likeable. Everyone can see some aspect of themselves in her. I think it's the same for the characters in Girls, they each have something in their loserness that you can relate to no matter what kind of Flop Era you're having. In some sick way it's even nice to watch characters flop harder than you are. Watching Carrie genuinely think that Natasha is apologizing to her despite just being caught cheating with Big makes my inability to get a job in a museum seem a lot less serious. While these are obviously dramatized tv shows, the elements of realism they have within the characters is what makes them appealing and comforting. I also believe that there are lessons to learn from watching fellow losers. What makes these characters not completely painful to watch is that their loserness is not all they are. They find value in non-achievement based activities and margins. They value friendships and nights out over where they're at on the career ladder. While their acceptance of their flaws is sometimes lacking, their own self worth is admirable. Watching these women accept failing at most of the criteria that I judge myself on (relationships, career, education) and still love themselves and love their life is what is the most relatable to me. Because I don’t hate my life, not even in the slightest. I love my friends and my family and everything I do to keep busy. Watching my fellow losers still love their life despite flopping is a great example of how to not let a Flop Era get you down.

Call me controversial, but I think everyone needs to fail in some way. Prior to my Flop Era my ego was too big. I had never been rejected by a school, ever. I got every internship I had wanted. I was going to my dream schools. My head could barely fit through a door and I feel bad for anyone who had to interact with me during that time. Going to Oxford and realizing that I am not that special was necessary, painful but necessary. While discovering I got the lowest grade in my cohort on my first exam put me in such a crying, messy spiral that the only thing that snapped me out of it was watching Cocaine Bear (2023), it was a necessary step in becoming less annoying. My Flop Era has definitely been a humbling experience. It forced me to not put value in my accomplishments and instead value the things that make me happy. Through my own Flop Era I was inspired to consume loser girl media and it was an enlightening experience. It sort of confirmed that to move through a Flop Era you have to accept its happening, but not let being a loser take over your life. Accepting that life isn’t always going to be achievement after achievement is a tough pill to swallow but it's something that needs to be moved on from. I can’t live life comparing myself to what I was doing when I was 21, especially because that was only 3 years ago! While I am a loser right now, I won’t be in a Flop Era for the rest of my life. But you should still listen to “Loser” by Beck.

Throughout my adulthood this trend of skinny people saying how fat they feel has not stopped, and if anything in more recent times, with the resurgence of thinspo and other typical fascist body ideologies, it has risen in occurrence again. Going into a bathroom in a bar is filled with women checking themselves out in a mirror going “god I just feel so fat today” “Don’t I look so huge right now” “I shouldn’t have had those fries today”, the typical drivel that 4 years ago you would’ve heard some random women pipe up and say “noo queen you're so hot.” but this point leads to my first point: fat and ugly are two seperate things. You can be skinny and ugly or fat and hot, these are not mutually exclusive things. Hotness and fatness are both spectrums, and while there might be overlap they are not the same thing!

In high school I had this friend that drove me up the wall. She was beautiful. She was tall. She was skinny. Every boy in our friend group had a crush on her. She looked like she belonged in a cheesy 90s high school movie. And what's worse is she was (generally) nice. She had it all! But at least once a week she would say something along the lines of “oh my god I’m so fat” to my size 18 certifiably plus sized ass. At first I would coo “Noooo girl, you’re so beautiful”. But up to a certain point I came to my 16 year old conclusion that she was just using this to feed her own ego. She was having the fat girl call her pretty! One day she said her normal comments on her body and I snapped back “If you’re fat what am I, fucking jupiter?” I will give her one thing, she didn’t flinch like most people do to my fat antics and replied “ What, no girl you’re so beautiful” and that's when it solidified for me, skinny people don't see the spectrums of hot and fat, they're the same spectrum in their minds. So I’m here to break it to you, you don’t feel fat, you feel ugly. You don’t look fat today, you just look bad.

This isn't intended to be getting on my soapbox telling you “words have meaning” because that argument has been said again and again, and in my opinion is a weak argument. This essay is if anything a reflexive exercise on what it is like to grow up as a fat woman. Being fat is categorically seen as bad. Men, as in most things, have a sense of flexibility that women have never had the privilege of. If a thin woman dates a fat man no one bats an eye, but if a thin man dates a fat woman it's suddenly a crime. Growing up being told that no one will ever be interested in you is traumatizing. It's a point that is reiterated throughout most, if not all, mainstream media. Liking your body as a woman is already a hard enough task, but as a fat woman it adds another layer of difficulty. Having people use an adjective that describes your body to negatively exclaim how they feel they look is demeaning. Change the adjective from fat to any other descriptor and it highlights how stupid that sentiment is. “Ugh I feel so ginger today” “I look so near-sighted right now”. It makes no sense to describe yourself as something you’re not. But again, fat has become synonymous with ugly and it has lost all sense of reason. People often interact with me under the assumption that I do hate my body or that I hate how I look. In conversations about body positivity I always get leading glances, as if skinny people are trying to hand me the proverbial microphone to start my speech on how much I hate my body. People expecting me to hate myself just feels like a way to excuse thinking I’m ugly. Which sure, if you think I’m ugly that's okay, but expecting me to also find myself ugly is insane mental gymnastics. Because I don’t think I’m ugly, and my own self worth isn’t dictated by personal appearances. I have never been a fan of broad generalizations, so having this blanket concept of all fat people are ugly or all fat people should hate themselves is illogical. I am not going to sit here and act like being a fat person is the worst thing in the world, because it's not, but the socialized hatred of fat people has made existing exponentially harder.

The demonization of fatness, and by proxy this phenomena of “feeling fat”, has passed all logical thinking. So many people treat someone being fat as if it's a personal affront to them, that someone's fatness only exists to insult them. While writing this essay I have unfortunately been given a great example of the hatred fat people get for just existing.

For those of you who have been lucky enough to have not seen this online, this is Leanna Perry harassing, berating, and assaulting a woman whose only “crime” was being fat. Through this video the unidentified woman remains passive, not even reacting when Perry spits in her face. Why is Perry reacting like this you might ask? She didn’t want to sit next to a fat person. That's it. It has never made sense to me why fatness is so villainized in modern times. Historically that has not been the case, where plumpness has been sought after and a sign of fertility and virtue. But in modern times the arguments against fatness are nonsensical. People argue they care about people's health or are just voicing their concerns. Call me cynical but I don’t believe the argument of “we care about looking healthy” or any other argument related to health because hardly anyone cares about strangers that much. Also in what world is harassing someone the way to make them be “healthier”? But in the way fatness used to be a way to show wealth and power, the concept of fat is used as a tool of control, oppression, and exploitation. Fat in a lot of ways has become synonymous with bad. This is not anything new, it's been going on since the early 1900s, but we can see the explicit villainization of fat in the 90s. Every form of media was pushing skinny, and not “healthy” skinny, because in no world is heroine chic considered healthy. Tabloid headlines started using fat as synonymous with bad through thinly veiled misogyny, and did it with a fervency that shoved it down women's throats, no matter their age. This was intentional, because the more people they could make hate their bodies the more advertisements they can sell for diet companies and shapewear. In my opinion it's one of the most successful marketing campaigns. They made women all over the world hate themselves, hate food, and think nothing could be worse than gaining 5 pounds. This concept of fat=bad is internalized in a lot of women whether they realize it or not, and this is the case for both fat and skinny women. I have never lived life as a skinny person so I can’t fully understand their thought process but I have heard from multiple women the negative subconscious feeling they have in regards to being fat. I have heard women say they feel guilty whenever they have a crush on someone, because they feel it must be embarrassing to have someone who looks like them be interested in you. Fat women don’t go after romantic relationships because they have been told they are unworthy or embarrassing. Not only has anti-fat rhetoric been the most successful marketing campaign, it has also been one of the most broadly successful psyops. They made fat people think they deserve to be bullied, that they don’t deserve love, and that they deserved to be spit on by someone wearing an Ed Hardy bedazzled baseball hat for just existing.

I could sit here and hate on the women who perpetuate this anti-fat culture, that would be easy. That would be expected. While I hate this behavior that is so common, I don’t hate the people who do it. Because the women who do it are victims to the same systems that I am. Weight loss ads have been around since the 50s, stating that harming your body in various ways is worth being appealing. Society wants women small and to not take up space. The patriarchy benefits when women hate themselves and these negative conversations around our bodies are methods of controlling women. Not to sound like a self-help guru, but you should love your body no matter how you look. You are stuck with it for the rest of your life, so you might as well love it. With age I have come to realize that the girl from my highschool maybe wasn’t trying to play some game, that she genuinely hated her body and was repeating what she had been told at some point. I can’t hate her for that. If anything it makes me feel sorry for that she didn’t know how beautiful she was. I don’t hate the women who say that they're fat when they mean ugly because they have been told they’re whole life that they're only worthy if they're skinny. Hating women achieves nothing, we should all hate the systems that make women think their looks are our only value. Except that bitch on the plane. We should all hate her.

If you had asked me what I thought about children about a year ago I would've said I was a staunch hater. I hated hearing babies cry. Children running up and down the aisles of an airplane made me murderous. A toddler screaming with their ipad in a store would ruin my whole shopping trip. Six months ago I would say I hated the parents not the kids, which to some degree I still agree with. But today I don’t know what my feelings on children are. As the youngest person in my family, I was never around kids. My sister is 7 years older than me, my cousins are even older than that. When I was a toddler they were all preteens. I was the annoying little girl who wanted to be included in everything much to everyone else's dismay. This past year has been the first time in my life I have regularly been around children, but with that came even more conflict.

As the daughter of a single mother, I have come to realize that motherhood is built on sacrifice, at least in America. In America, the second you become a mother you lose all sense of personhood, whether intentional or not. You lose hobbies, you lose sleep, you even lose your own body. And this is all expected of you, it's considered the bare minimum. Not only do you lose your personhood, every move you make will now be judged. If you want to go back to work you hate your kid. If you want to be a stay at home mom you’re not a feminist. If you want to co-sleep you don't care about your kids safety, but if you don’t want to co-sleep you're a bad mom. There is quite literally no winning. And most typically this judgement is coming from other mothers. Before my sister even gave birth she was judging other women for how they raised their children.

“I just don’t think you’re a good mom if you don’t want to co-sleep with your baby”

“I don’t understand why some women complain about breastfeeding, I’ve never had a

problem”

“I can't understand women who want to go back to work right away after having a baby”

Her judgment was so baked in that she would judge the mothers at my work who she had never even met, never the father though. Which raises one of my biggest qualms with motherhood: unless you are incredibly lucky, you are still a single mother even if you have a partner. If you’re breastfeeding you have to wake up every two to three hours to either feed the baby or pump because if you don’t your supply will go down. Because you’re the baby's food source you’re attached to each other 24/7. You’re doing the diapers. You’re doing the baths. You’re lucky if your partner makes dinner for you. This is the experience I’ve heard from most women. Sure, you hear the stories of the doting partner who takes the night shift and makes all the meals and doesn’t complain when you want to take a shower, but that is not the lived experience for most mothers. In 1986 Arlene Kaplan Daniels coined the term Invisible Labor, stating that household labor is and forever will be a part of women's role in this world and therefore will never be valued. This undervaluing is not only in women's personal lives, but also their professional. Women are always viewed as the caretaker, but that work is always viewed as less despite men never doing this work. And while the point of academia is never to be “right” Kaplan Daniels is right!

Not to sound like the man hater that I am, but men have been raised and socialized, whether consciously or subconsciously, to let women do all of the work. Men have weaponized incompetence coded into their systems. Either something is too complicated or they're too tired or they just can't get it right or they simply just expect a woman to do it. And if a man is not like that, it is typically because of the labour and time of another woman, whether it be their mother, sister, or an ex-girlfriend. For example, my sister is breastfeeding and pumping and came to an agreement with her husband that he would be incharge of bagging, labeling, and freezing the milk. After she noticed that three days of milk had gone bad she confronted him about it and he said “I refuse to do that labour now”, as if my sister is not the one producing the milk and feeding his son. But yes in that situation bagging and freezing the milk is the hardest thing to do (I’m hoping you sense my sarcasm). Sure, he does the dishes and makes sure their house is not a hovel, but in terms of baby care he does relatively little. And she is not alone in this loneliness in childcare. For men they don't want to be husbands, they want to have a wife. They don’t want to be a father, they want to have children. Men want their white picket fantasy whilst doing absolutely no work for it. That's one of my greatest fears when it comes to children: marrying someone and deciding to have a child only to get stuck doing all of the childrearing.

Not to sound like a fear-monger, but you really don’t know how your partner is going to take parenthood until the baby is there. And I have heard horror stories. My boss's husband begged her to have a child. When she finally agreed she had a traumatic labor that resulted in a C section in which she couldn’t do anything for three months. Her husband did everything for those three months and then promptly dumped her afterwards. A mother at my daycare got pregnant with her boyfriend, who claimed that he was supportive of her continuing her career and putting the baby in daycare. That was until the baby was born and he suddenly demanded that she be a stay at home mom and abandon her career. They are now broken up. And those are the luckier situations where they show their colors early, where they didn’t wait 10 years to cheat on their wife and implode their family. The fact that you could be entering a lifelong connection with someone and they turn into someone with completely different values is terrifying. I know what you’re thinking “well my boyfriend is amazing, he's going to be a great father and a great husband” But I retort, are you sure about that? How does he treat waiters? How does he treat you when you're sick or on your period? How much of the cooking and cleaning does he do? I hate to break this to you, but until you have pulled a week's worth of all nighters, covered in spit up and barely clinging to reality, you do not know how your partner is going to be as a parent.

To get back to the point of this essay; I think being around children has made me both want to be a mother more and less. I think my hardware is missing some elements. I have never gotten baby fever. I don’t feel flutters when a kid hugs me. I like my nephew, but playing with him doesn’t suddenly make me want to give him a future cousin. Even as a kid I never cared about baby dolls or becoming a mom. One aspect of my relationship with motherhood that has changed is that I actually like (some) children now. I know the faults of certain parenting styles and see how children act through non-rose tinted glasses. I know that theoretically I could raise a good person. But emphasis on theoretical. To my point of “you don’t know how your partner is going to act once you have a baby” You won't know how YOU react to having a baby. You won’t know how your baby will react to being a baby. I can already see how my sister has changed as a person, some for the better but some for the worse. Her anxiety has gotten worse. Her body has irreparably changed. Her hypochondriac tendencies have quadrupled for both herself and the baby. Luckily my nephew is a pretty chill baby, but he has to be held by someone constantly and refuses to sleep in a crib, meaning that when my brother-in-law goes out and leaves my sister with the baby that she cannot do anything by herself. I think I could be an okay mom in the best circumstances. But what if I get PPD? What if I have a traumatic labor? What if my baby comes out non-cherubic and is a demon who never sleeps? What if my partner turns into an asshole!!! The world has enough shitty moms, do I really risk adding another to the count? I am comfortable enough with myself to admit my faults and admit that I might not be the best person to be a mother. I heard a woman who consciously decided not to have a child say “I would rather live with regrets of not having a child than to have brought a life into this world and not be able to take it back.” I like being my own person. I like having my own body. I'm not sure I should risk having a child if my conditions for being a good mother are A: having a perfect idyllic birth and B: my baby having absolutely no problems whatsoever. The world is not idyllic and babies are notoriously difficult. I think if I had a baby with colic and I don’t get my daily 9 hours of sleep a night I might implode. And I haven’t even started considering how I would be judged. The idea of a baby being latched onto my tits makes me already feel overwhelmed and I know if I don’t breastfeed I will have to fistfight my sister over some dumb comment she makes and I don't want to put my mom through that. I would want the baby to sleep in a different room because I need my space and every woman in my family has coslept and I can’t fistfight my entire family. I want my body to stay my body and I want people to keep their thoughts in their heads. But who knows, maybe my biological clock will finally tick right and the baby drugs enter my brain and I become a baby wanting zombie with no semblance to my former self.