elon musk is literally like a parody. like he cant genuinely fucking be like this like bro is on some satirical depiction of a spoiled rich kid type shit. like hes a cartoon evil rich guy. throwing tantrums bc someone criticized him or said they didnt like him. spending billions of dollars to buy an app and then changing the app every time someone uses a feature of the app to insult him or hurt his feefees. dude straight up does the cartoon steam blowing out of ears train whistle shit irl every time someone says anything mean to him or is transgender but whats terrifying is he has enough money to do anything he wants and millions of chuds who would gladly no homo suck his cock every night before he goes to bed. like. how has someone come to be like this. why has this been allowed to happen why was he created
i think most rich guys are actually more like elon than they aren’t, they all have simpering fanclubs online but enough haters to keep them up at night. i’ve seen a good half-dozen “richest man in X country” instagram accounts litigating their personal beef with some obscure shitposter who won’t stop trolling them. they run the world but everyone doesn’t love them so they’re not happy
this is the richest guy in africa and his mortal enemy, a bored brazilian man
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:
There is a trend towards women self-infantilizing through what I’ll call viral micro-content. This means tweets, tiktoks, instagram posts, etc about a variety of things: “bimbo” culture, “girl dinner,” and the subsequent “girl–x” content (girl money?) which basically paint a picture of a cultural trend towards self-effacement, degradation, women as incapable anti-intellectual babies, etc.
Bridge point: You have to have consciousness raising to have feminism of any kind. Sharing information is vital to a feminist project. People who grew up on the 2010s internet, which despite its flaws was chock-full of early feminist websites, blogs, etc, experienced a mini explosion of consciousness raising. The content wasn’t always good, but it existed.
Back to assumptions: many people who were around for above period of time see this self-infantilizing viral micro-content. They draw a connection between it and our current culture war, where feminist thought is having a difficult time making inroads or organizing in a genuine way even in “leftist” spaces.
Here’s the move I don’t like: People make this connection and the conclusion they often draw is that individual women do not have an interest in feminism and empowerment anymore, that this content exhibits a mass-cultural turn away from consciousness raising and towards women degrading themselves or discounting their abilities.
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.
fuck “girl lunch” fuck “girl math” a woman is a hairy animal who sweats and grunts and excretes and hungers and gets wrinkly and dies eventually. you have to love that.
My son is working very hard to learn to read and write, and I’ve found that if I correct his spelling he gets discouraged and stops trying. As long as he keeps reading and writing, he’ll figure it all out eventually, so making sure he doesn’t get discouraged is very important. That said, sometimes…
Him, turning to me after typing a sign in Minecraft: Theme Park!
My bf studied japanese in high school and often says “gambate!” (not sure of spelling) to be like. encouraging. I think it means roughly “let’s get this bread.” However, as someone who took spanish in high school, it always sounds like a command to me. And as near as I can tell, in spanish it would mean “go shrimp yourself.”
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I’m definitely not a fluent speaker, so I could be wrong, but here’s how I got there:
In Spanish, some (informal, I think?) commands are formed by dropping the “r” from the end of an infinitive verb. (Every infinitive verb in Spanish ends in r.) For example, “to run” is “correr.” If you want to tell someone to run, it’s “corre.” If you want to tell someone to do something to something/someone, you append a little pronoun thing to the end. From “besar” (to kiss) we get “bésame” (kiss me). From “cocinar” (to cook) we get “cocínalo” (cook it). From “callar” (to silence) we get “cállate” (silence yourself/shut up).
So, “gambate” immediately reminds me of “cállate,” which is a rude command. It would be formed from the verb “gambar” and the second person object “te” for “you/yourself.” But “gambar” isn’t a word in Spanish. However, “gamba” is a word. It means “shrimp.” So while it isn’t technically grammatically correct, in the same way we “verb” nouns in English, the noun “gamba” is being used in the place of a verb here. “Gambate” (or more properly “gámbate” to maintain the correct stress for both the Spanish and Japanese). “Go shrimp yourself.”
Native spanish speaker. You’re quite right about your linguistics here, and spanish speakers love to make up new words by conjugating existing words (at the very least, my parents do)
My confusion stemmed from never having heard the word gamba before. To my knowledge the word for shrimp is camarón
So i looked it up and apparently gamba actually means prawn. So it’s actually go prawn yourself
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