"There’s one thing that’s stealing when you are a teenager and you want the adrenaline rush. And part of it is about testing the rules..."

"... and getting away with something. But what I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification. Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I? And Jeff Bezos has too much money — he’s a billionaire — so why should I have to pay for organic avocados? My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?"

Says NYT writer Nadja Spiegelman on an episode of the NYT "Opinions" podcast, "'The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?'Why petty theft might be the new political protest."

Those other 2 characters are New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, a political commentator I blogged about a year ago when he was being touted as the potential "Joe Rogan of the left."

Tolentino says: "I think it’s great that the valence of property is on the table as something to be toyed with, in terms of direct action. We’ve forgotten that there is a long and storied history of sabotage and engagement with property destruction, even, which is abhorrent to people...."

Piker: "In the Marxist tradition, adventurism is the action that is oftentimes decentralized. Oftentimes, anarchists will say, 'This is the propaganda of the deed.'

I heard Dana Bash say it at 1:15 a.m. on CNN: “We’re all living in the manosphere now.”

I can't find anyone else quoting that — I quoted it here, in real time. And I want it preserved.

And let's see who else was talking about the election in terms of the "manosphere." 1. November 5, 6:15 AM, in The Washington Post: "Into the nervy climax of the 2024 elections/Our columnists are trying to keep calm as this year’s immensely consequential vote wraps up." The columnist James Hohmann speaks of the "manosphere"... disparagingly:

The party’s coalitions are changing. We’re going through this realignment that Trump has hastened. And Republicans are now much more dependent than they really ever have been in our lifetimes on low-propensity voters. They’re counting on the "Manosphere," the Joe Rogan listener, the crypto bro, “the guy who vapes.” And these are not high-propensity voters.

2. November 5, 8:09 AM: "Joe Rogan Reminded of His Own Brutal Words After Trump Endorsement/Joe Rogan just endorsed Donald Trump. Here’s what he once had to say about the former president":

The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed... Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump....

3. November 1, at NPR: "America's Next Top Scapegoat; plus, Inside the Black Manosphere":

Then, Brittany is joined by Code Switch's Gene Demby to explore the roots of a corner of the conservative internet that may have surprising effects on the election: The Black Manosphere.

ADDED: There's also, from September in Atlantic: "How Joe Rogan Remade Austin/The podcaster and comedian has turned the city into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other 'free thinkers' who happen to all think alike" (previously blogged here).

And, to go back to August 2016, something from The New Yorker — previously blogged here — there's "WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST," a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino, who quoted "An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" by Kristin Dombek:

"'If you are an especially giving person, warns the Internet, you are a prime target for narcissists,' Dombek writes. The narcisphere has a gendered inverse, which some call the manosphere and which is dedicated to teaching men how to dominate women by feigning self-confidence. This is the realm of pickup artistry. It is much worse than the narcisphere...."

And here's something I blogged in November 2018:

"What I was surprised to find was the extent to which [the 'manosphere' is] using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity," said Donna Zuckerberg, interviewed in "Donna Zuckerberg: ‘Social media has elevated misogyny to new levels of violence’/When the academic, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, began exploring online antifeminism, she discovered far-right men’s groups were using classical antiquity to support their views" (The Guardian).

"Climate therapy, I had come to think, could help people find this place of acceptance, shifting them into engagement or allowing them to remain there without losing their marbles."

"But the practice seems rooted in a faith that the world and the future will be best served by us maintaining our sanity—a sensible enough creed, though I don’t always share it."

Writes Jia Tolentino in "What to Do with Climate Emotions/If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?" (The New Yorker).

"[Jia] Tolentino, a millennial essayist and New Yorker staff writer, said that she had not read Ms. Didion until her 20s, but immediately realized..."

"... that 'through the words of others, I had been reading her my entire life.' At a memorial where so many of the eulogies came from writers who have been paid a lot to complete sentences, it came as little surprise that the guests spent much time debating about who’d given the best one. But the funniest, many people said, belonged to [Susannah] Moore, who vividly recalled some of Ms. Didion’s one-liners, among them, 'Whatever you do, you’ll regret both,' and 'evil is the absence of seriousness.' That one arrived following a dinner Ms. Didion hosted. Among the guests, Ms. Moore said, was Bianca Jagger, who ignited scorn from Ms. Didion by proceeding to pick the magazines up off the coffee table and read them one after the other. The editor Joan Juliet Buck described a conversation she had with Ms. Didion, who had told her how to deal with a stalker: 'Move into the Carlyle.' Annabelle Dunne, Ms. Didion’s niece, reported that her aunt had advised: 'Don’t forget to have a baby. It’s easy to forget.' [David] Remnick started his speech with his misgivings about giving it: 'How do you speak about someone who was in her time the foremost enemy of canned cliché and falsehood?' he asked, before going on to praise her 'authority of tone' and the way she led by example."

From "A Star-Studded Goodbye to All That/Among the well-wishers at Joan Didion’s memorial service in New York" (NYT).

"Spears is still in a profoundly difficult position, despite, and perhaps because of, her new control of her life."

"If Spears acts in any way that could be construed as irresponsible, it could be taken, in legal battles to come, as proof that she can’t handle her own life. In August, police records show, she placed three calls to police that she subsequently cancelled, and police were also dispatched to her home after she was accused of damaging a housekeeper’s phone. (The matter was referred to the district attorney’s office, which did not pursue charges.) In mid-October, Spears wrote on Instagram, 'I’ll just be honest and say I’ve waited so long to be free from the situation I’m in . . . and now that it’s here I’m scared to do anything because I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake !!!' She had just regained the freedom to drive, for the first time in thirteen years, and the paparazzi were chasing her, 'like they want me to do something crazy.'"

"How Britney Spears Got Free, and What Comes Next/Spears fought for years to end the conservatorship she was under, and finally won. But the legal battles aren’t over" by Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino.

"There’s this concept of the dignity of risk. Most of us have a very wide range of bad choices we can make that society is O.K. with, but, in a conservatorship..."

"... you’re subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in."

Said  Zoë Brennan-Krohn, an ACLU lawyer, quoted in "Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare/How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life—and have held on to it for thirteen years" by By Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker).

As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. “In practice,” Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “this is absolutely not the case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, ‘What else have you tried? Why isn’t anything else working?’ And, if the conservator hasn’t shown that they’ve tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I’ve never heard of a judge asking that in any situation.”

"Tweaking out in Florida, she becomes fixated on abolishing the death penalty; she tweezes out all her leg hairs individually; she spends days online tracking the status of Mir, the Russian space station."

"In the clarity of recovery, she announces, 'I think I am ten times prettier than I actually am.' She wonders if maybe all the mess she’s made will be worth it—maybe she’ll have produced a work of genius. 'Trouble is, you never know,' she writes. 'You never know until it’s all done.'.... I was always terrified of the way she spoke about death, as if it were a joke she’d been telling to the devil for years.... 'I have always made choices without considering the consequences, because I know all I get is now,' she wrote, at the close of her essay for New York, seven years ago. 'Maybe I get later, too, but I will deal with that later. I choose pleasure over what is practical. I may be the only person who ever went to law school on a lark. And I wonder what I was thinking about with all those other larks, my beautiful larks, larks flying away.'"

From "The Chaotic, Beautiful Larks of Elizabeth Wurtzel" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker).

"My favorite genre of mom merch broadcasts desire and dependence: 'Mamacita Needs a Margarita,' for instance."

"There’s an entire subcategory that specifies what 'mama runs on': caffeine, chaos, and cuss words, or Jesus and Chick-fil-A, or Starbucks and pixie dust. Lately, as best I can tell, the most common set of helpmeets are the slant-rhyming trio of coffee, wine, and Amazon Prime.... Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, [with] the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure....  The 'Unicorn Moms' Instagram page... declares that the Unicorn Mom is 'not perfect, enjoys alcohol, has a sense of humor & couldn’t care less what you think. Also, Beautiful; Boss Bitch & Zero F#&Ks Given.' Many of the memes on the Unicorn Mom page are joking complaints about husbands, children, housework, and conventional expectations.... This mother 'may not be perfect, but she has tried very, very hard to be—and is making peace with her "limitations."' Perfection, in other words, still provides the vocabulary and sets the tone. What’s missing from this dialogue... 'is the larger context, this system in which there’s no way to win, not for any of us.'"

From "The Quiet Protests of Sassy Mom Merch" by Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker).

ADDED: The "larger context" of social justice may be "missing from this dialogue," but what's missing from Tolentino's think piece is the larger historical context of women's humor. She may want to feel like she's talking about something trendy and new, but it's actually quite old fashioned. And I'm saying this as someone who worked for 2 years in the mid 1970s on a market research report on magazines that required me to read all the women's magazines every month. The stuff Tolentino is talking about is of a piece with completely mainstream humor from 40 or 50 years ago. I'll just say one name: Erma Bombeck.

"On Twitter, people appear to identify objects and phenomena with 'cursed energy' every hour of every day."

"It’s not just creepy images: the word has acquired new valences, has come to signify increasingly generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. 'The way I use "cursed" has a connotation of being trapped, i.e. a sort of Greek Mythology Ironic Eternal Punishment vibe,' Alex Pareene, a writer for The New Republic, told me....  The cursedness that has come to be incessantly invoked online... may be connected to a sense that the very relationship between direct cause and effect has grown weaker. Americans are regularly dying in mass shootings but Congress won’t pass basic gun legislation; the President has been racking up impeachable offenses since the Inauguration but momentum for impeachment is only building now, as we approach the end of 2019 (and, really, who knows for sure). At the same time, our sense of indirect, complex cause and effect may be tightening. We see Caribbean islands destroyed by hurricanes and look guiltily at our air-conditioning units; the Supreme Court ruled one way in Bush v. Gore and now Ivanka Trump is acting as a diplomat in North Korea’s demilitarized zone. I have never been able to interest myself too much in the idea that we are living in a simulation, and yet the idea of cursed energy does evoke a feeling that the simulation is breaking, and that something terrible is emerging from the breach...."

From a Jia Tolentino essay (in The New Yorker) about the social-media concept "cursed."

She doesn't mention Reddit, but I've been following the subreddit r/cursedimages. Tolentino goes so political in her essay. The subreddit  r/cursedimages isn't at all political. That's why I subscribe to it. I've got my Reddit setup to give me endless interesting material that's nearly 100% devoid of politics. That's the way I like it!

Here's the r/cursedimage elaborate explanation of what is and is not "cursed" for the purposes of that subreddit. They're looking for images that produce "confusion, eerieness, or dread." And they quite emphatically do not want "random gross/weird food... [a]ny illustrated/animated character, especially Minions and Spongebob... [y]ou or your friend doing random poses in the dark...  r/mildlypenis or mildly sexual things... Hitler/Nazi/KKK/ Antifa Posts," etc. etc.

By the way, I also follow r/mildlypenis. It's the kind of relaxing entertainment I look to Reddit for.

Here are a few examples from r/cursedimages (which actually I don't recommend looking at a lot of them in a row):

"Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean."

Said Jia Tolentino on "Fresh Air" yesterday. Here's the context:

We will have a mass shooting in America and people will get online and express their very true anguish, and people express their anger and their righteousness, and this formidable undeniable moral narratives [sic] about how children should not be dying in the U.S. like this — and then nothing happens.

And so the gun control debate is just a continual reminder to me: An opinion doesn't necessarily translate to action. Moral clarity, these days, it means a lot less than I would like it to mean. ... 

But there's nothing formidable about the "moral narratives" that "children should not be dying in the U.S. like this." It's "undeniable," but that's because everyone already agrees with the obvious truth that mass murder is bad. It's obtuse to speak of "moral clarity" about something that's isn't the slightest bit susceptible to unclarity.

What Tolentino is unclear about is the distinction between problems and solutions. Indeed, she is expressing this unclarity with anger and righteousness. It's a dangerous bait and switch. There is clarity and energy about the problem — mass murder is evil — and Tolentino (and others) attempt to appropriate that feeling and transfer it into action to adopt a particular solution. But there is still unclarity about the solution, and you can't dispel unclarity by mixing it with clarity. You can only trick people into thinking what was unclear became clear.

Here, quick, drink this glass of pond water. I just ran some tap water into it.

And you wonder why people don't act. I think they don't act because they've got the experience and presence of mind to see where the clarity is and where it isn't.

"The [20-pound] blanket enacts a fantasy of immobilization that is especially seductive in a world of ever-expanding obligations—to work, to monetize, to take action, to perform."

"Last weekend, a friend came over and tried out the blanket. 'That’s really good,' he said, eyes closed, unmoving. '“I kind of want more. I kind of want to not be able to move at all.'"

From "The Seductive Confinement of a Weighted Blanket in an Anxious Time" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker).

Had you ever heard of weighted blankets? Here's an example of one on Amazon: "Weighted Blanket by YnM for Adults, Fall Asleep Faster and Sleep Better, Great for Anxiety, ADHD, Autism, OCD, and Sensory Processing Disorder." The weight is "sand pellets."

I've never thought about weighting myself down as a way to fall asleep, but I have noticed that if I'm reading my iPad and get drowsy, putting the iPad in the center of my chest seems to help me go right to sleep. Something about the weight?

"Sulkowicz wants to change behavior, too, but thinks that punishment is more efficacious than tweaks to campus life."

"When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his 'remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.' But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. 'He’s been scared shitless,' they said.*... 'It’s about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human.'"

From "Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus?/A team of researchers at Columbia believes that small changes to college life could make campuses safer" by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

I'm interested in the enthusiasm for harsh punishment and for deterring bad behavior by scaring people shitless. That's the common stereotype of a right-wing mindset. Most of that New Yorker article is about understanding the behavior of college students and tracking them away from bad sex, that is, looking for root causes, which is the classic mindset of the liberal. Torentino asked Sulkowicz about that approach (which led to a program at Columbia called "SHIFT"):

Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: “My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program, here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try,’” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that’s conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing—expelling people who sexually assault other students.”

 That's an attitude I've always heard called right-wing.**
_________________

* I was confused at "they said," even though I'd read, earlier in the article (and had not forgotten) that Sulkowicz "identifies as non-binary, and uses the gender-neutral pronouns 'they' and 'them,'" and I had already struggled with confusion when I read "in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop" and "carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mattress around campus... was a performance project: they would stop carrying it, they said, when the student who had raped them was expelled."

** The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing.

"There’s a certain kind of personal essay that, for a long time, everybody seemed to hate. These essays were mostly written by women."

"They came off as unseemly, the writer’s judgment as flawed. They were too personal: the topics seemed insignificant, or else too important to be aired for an audience of strangers. The essays that drew the most attention tended to fall within certain categories. There were the one-off body-horror pieces, such as 'My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina,' published by xoJane, or a notorious lost-tampon chronicle published by Jezebel. There were essays that incited outrage for the life styles they described, like the one about pretending to live in the Victorian era, or Cat Marnell’s oeuvre. There were those that incited outrage by giving voice to horrible, uncharitable thoughts, like 'My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing' (xoJane again) and 'I’m Not Going to Pretend I’m Poor to Be Accepted by You' (Thought Catalog). Finally, there were those essays that directed outrage at society by describing incidents of sexism, abuse, or rape."

So begins "The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over," by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker). Tolentino discusses the rise and fall of these overly personal essays. One element of the story — of every story, really — is Trump. It's not that gynecologists are finding Trump's hair in vaginas, but the topics of "relationships, self-image, intimate struggle" seemed noticeably lacking in "broader social relevance." As the editor of the Awl and the Hairpin put it: "I want to encourage people to talk about mostly anything other than themselves."

Put simply, the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was. Many profiles of Trump voters positioned personal stories as explanations for a terrible collective act; meanwhile, Clinton’s purported reliance on identity politics has been heavily criticized. Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.... Writers seem less interested in mustering their own centrality than they were, and readers seem less excited at the prospect of being irritated by individual civilian personalities....

No more lost-tampon essays, in other words, in the age of Donald Trump....

So now Trump is to blame for inhibiting the personal expression of women. That awful man!