mood

I have a take on the recent spate of "women are innocent little dumb babies who shouldn't have to work" viral posts/tweets/general sentiment that's been all over the internet lately but IDK if people are gonna like it LOL

Ok ok...not to get all McLuhan or whatever but I really do think people are ignoring how the medium of this content itself is shaping what's said, and as a result are attempting to paint broad-strokes pictures about the state of feminist thought, which I think is not really the best mode of analysis and avoids addressing the actual issue at hand. Let me break down the most common chain of assumptions I've seen:

This, to me, is a fundamental misunderstanding of viral micro-content as a medium–of what these pieces of content say about culture and how ideas are deployed. I’m not saying that this content doesn’t present issues for feminism. But not because of the content itself: I think it’s more accurate to say that the medium of viral micro-content itself is completely at odds with the goals of consciousness raising, because it hinges on relatability rather than the dissemination of ideas. “Bimbotok” is a vague sentiment that is masquerading as a philosophy around womanhood. To treat it as a concrete philosophy and address it as a problem in a feminist discourse is only addressing part of the problem, because doing so risks naturalizing viral micro-content as a plausible medium of consciousness raising to begin with. The undertone of what I hear is that if only these women cared, didn't hate themselves, and wanted to be good feminists, then this content wouldn't exist.

This is what I disagree with. Viral micro-content of any kind necessarily meets us at our most casual, our most exposed; people who like it say it meets us at our most “real” or “human;” detractors say it meets us at our most vulnerable. The path this content takes is one user sharing their experiences, in the hopes that other users will “relate” to it and replicate the content themselves.

You know what’s relatable? Feeling bad. Feeling stupid. It’s not that all of us think of ourselves as stupid all the time, but when we feel bad, we want affirmation that it is normal to feel that way, that we’re not alone. I think even the most empowered feminist occasionally feels this way; what’s different is that prior to the onset of viral micro-content platforms, expressing these ideas probably wouldn’t go more viral than a forum comment or a conversation between friends could go viral. You cannot write a viral 1,500-word blog post on the concept of “girl dinner.” It’s just not a 1,5000-word idea. Even if you wrote 1,500 words on it, by doing so, you’d be saying enough that many people would be alienated by something you said–the experience becomes less universal the more it’s articulated. Case in point: there are plenty of tweet threads that articulate longer ideas (good and bad) about feminism, and they get torn apart for not being relatable enough. Even if they gain an audience, they rarely start a trend. But a 10-second video that gestures to a concept, or even a series of 10-second videos deployed over time and favored by an algorithm? Those are sentiments, and those sentiments can become trends because they are universal enough to be replicated. Sentiments that comfort, affirm our worst thoughts, or fail to challenge us are the most easily replicated. THAT is the niche that viral micro-content fills: it’s a pseudo-social medium, it creates the illusion of community discourse or solidarity, when in fact all it’s deploying is relatability.

So my argument is that this content is not an example of one discourse of feminism being replaced by another. To me the arc here is instead one form of consciousness raising (2010s blogs, websites, etc) which led to a discourse of feminism (2010s pop feminism, or actual feminism if you were smart enough to use those blogs as a starting point) being replaced by…nothing at all. It’s simply gone away, and that’s the issue. I think it's sort of playing right into the viral micro-content machine to treat these pieces of content as the whole essence of the women making them–not because your average bimbotoker deserves to be coddled, but because the "bimbotoker" in question isn't someone you are addressing directly. They're making content. You are seeing the content, not them. The content is designed to make you feel like you know them, see them, but you're not. In order to be oppositional to the content, you have to remember this about it. And I think it’s generally a mistake to dismiss the women themselves first, in these great “we’re never getting out of here, feminism is over, there’s no hope” type posts–instead of the content itself in form, function, structure, method.

A quick add-on for the folks in the notes: I see some people addressing the various reactionary “trad” movements that have spawned content on TikTok, twitter, and elsewhere. I’d like to say a few things about this to clarify my original post.

What I hoped to achieve above is to address the content of various self-effacing/degrading pieces of content around women as such—rather than, as I have seen around feminist circles online, as a sign of the end times so to speak, a sign that even the slightly quirky left-leaning women who might in a different time have gravitated towards feminism have now thrown in the towel and decided to celebrate hating themselves. For the reasons I outlined above, I find this move to be ineffective and largely wrong-footed. Restated, I think trying to take the temperature of how ripe the ground is for feminism based on viral micro-content is a fool’s errand. Instead it is a better use of time to admit that you cannot viral micro-content your way into feminism, and to proceed from there.

This does not deny the possibility that reactionary movements gain traction on social media. They absolutely do. But I’m not saying they don’t in the above. In fact, what I am saying is that some mediums for content are inherently tailored to spread via emotions, relatability, surface-level ideas: things that console us at our worst, affirm that what we are doing, what we like, is okay. This is a terrible way for feminist principles to be disseminated, because they are designed to make people uncomfortable, challenge status quo, and, if done right, get people to care about groups who are completely different from them. And if we are back to a period of necessary consciousness raising (we are) these things have to be said at length. It is hard, if not impossible, to do this effectively on social media via viral micro-content. Those who do often end up falling into the trap of mico-celebrity, where even if what they’re saying is right, people follow them as a personality. The current state of leftist microcelebrity culture proves why this is terrible for a movement.

It is, on the flip side, a great way for reactionary, trad-fash nonsense to circulate. I think there’s a tendency in online circles to assume that the internet is a sort of public marketplace of ideas, and that other than hostile content moderation practices and censorship, there is not a way to favor one set of ideas over another. I think this is so deeply wrong. The medium we are posting in can itself be balanced in favor of one thing over another. The way we say something impacts how we say it. The insidious thing with a lot of this content is that it actually is, truly, unserious. A lot of those women are genuinely engaging in parody, clout chasing, goofiness. To say that they are doing organized anti-feminism would not be accurate; they’re not doing organized anything. The reactionary tradfash movements do at least a measure of organizing in order to keep hold of people after viral content hooks them in. At the top of the QAnon funnel is a tweet; at the bottom is an endless swell of 10-hour-video essays, news, communities.

Anyways, that’s a tangent. And I’m not exactly trying to solve the problems of feminism with this post—I’m just saying that renouncing all these women, many of whom are Gen Z or younger and absolutely need feminism, as lost causes, because of their TikToks, is prooooobably a bad idea. Something can be stupid and pervasive because its medium fundamentally favors pervasive stupidity without actually being a sign of anything but the fact that a medium favors pervasive stupidity. That’s all.