Writes Emily Stewart (at Vox), voxsplaining the fuss over Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.
Radio personality Howard Stern said he’s “dumbfounded” at all the hullabaloo, wondering on air, with regard to Kid Rock and [Travis] Tritt, “Why do you care so much?” ...
Anheuser-Busch, which is getting a ton of earned media out of this, appears to largely be riding the wave....
The backlash comes from people who say they suffer from an obscure and perplexing condition called “trypophobia” — a fear of clusters of small holes like those found in shoe treads, honeycombs and lotus seed pods.... The phobia isn’t recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... But self-described sufferers and some researchers claim the images can evoke a strong emotional response and induce itching, goose bumps, and even nausea and vomiting....
Ah, yes. Of course. I've written about trypophobia twice already on this blog. In 2013, I told you about the subreddit devoted to the peculiarity, r/trypophobia. And I see that they're expressing themselves about the new phone:
And here's my 2017 post, on the occasion of an "American Horror Story" poster that triggered trypophobes.
Back to WaPo and the new iPhone:
In 2016, Kendall Jenner raised the condition’s profile when she wrote a blog post saying the images give her “the worst anxiety.” “Things that could set me off are pancakes, honeycomb, or lotus heads (the worst!)," she wrote. “It sounds ridiculous but so many people actually have it!”
Pancakes! I know what she's referring to — the look of the batter when it's time to flip.
Flip the pancake. But for some people, apparently, flip their lid.
Back to WaPo:
Researcher Arnold Wilkins, a professor emeritus at the University of Essex, theorizes the mathematical principals hidden in the patterns require the brain to use more oxygen and energy, which can be distressing.... “We know the images are difficult to process computationally by the neurons of the brain, they use more brain energy.”
Photos of honeycombs and strawberries — common sources of the creeps, or worse, for people with trypophobia — also share those mathematical qualities with more sinister sights like mold and skin lesions. Other research suggests the discomfort might come from an innate drive to avoid infectious diseases and contaminated food. Some have also hypothesized the fear could stem from an evolutionary response to dangerous animals like poisonous frogs and insects, which often display patterns similar to those seen trypophobic photos.
Camera lenses are a special problem, I think, because they're sort of eyes. When we look at eyes, we have the feeling that it's a living thing, and if it's not 2 eyes, the living thing feels alien — heartless or cruel:
What can you do if you want to wretch every time you see the new iPhone?
Is it "wretch" or "retch"? It's retch. Fortunately, wretched editing doesn't make me want to throw up. "Wretch" isn't even a verb. You wretch.
ADDED: If "wretch" isn't a verb, why does the word "wretched" exist? "Wretch," the verb, is obsolete. The OED has it as a transitive verb meaning "To render miserable" and as an intransitive, Scottish verb meaning "To be or to become... parsimonious." From 1633: "As the wretch wretcheth, the more he is enriched."
So WaPo's spelling is fine if these iPhones are making you parsimonious (in Scotland in the 17th century).
MORE: To be wretchedly precise, the OED does not say that the adjective "wretched" comes from the obsolete verb "to wretch." It says the etymology happened "Irregularly" by adding the "-ed" suffix to the adjective "wretch." "Wretch" was once an adjective that meant "poor, miserable, deeply afflicted" (that is, having the qualities of a wretch). Thus, in the 1400s, one might write: "Allas! I, woful creature,..I, wreche woman."
By the way, originally, the noun "wretch" referred to a banished person, an exile: "Goo naked vngry and bare foot.., as wrecch in werlde þou wende." As you wend your way through the world, you wretch, go naked, hungry, barefoot, and phoneless.
"I think people who show up on the screen are glorious.... So this series was created to fulfill my childhood wish, which was to become an icon by standing with the stars," she said. So we see her with Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. And she also puts herself on the scene with intellectuals — Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Did you think Simone de Beauvoir would shoot a gun... like that?
IN THE COMMENTS:
Example: Alex said:
Kirby Jenner, the "Fraternal Twin of Kendall Jenner" is a brilliant parody Instagram account where he pastes himself into photos of Kendall. I couldn't care less about the Kardashians but I am fascinated by the fashion and Photoshop skills on display.
Ha ha. Great! So much more fun than Celine Liu. I enjoyed them all — here — but let me pick out one.
AND: Well, you can probably tell I picked that one because of my longstanding "men in shorts" theme. So let me give you this one too, because it has another one of my themes:
“I was ashamed of my acne because of the shame people would place on it,” [said Hailey Wait, an 18-year-old student]. Her acne affected her self-esteem, prompting her to raid the Walgreens makeup aisle for cover-ups, even if they did little but aggravate her skin condition.
Seven months ago, she had had enough, and instead of hiding behind cheap foundation or highly edited selfies, she did the opposite: She revealed her blemishes to her 15,000 followers on Instagram for the first time.
Here is the lovely, acne-proud Hailey Wait, in what I'm thinking of calling the best social-media influencing I have every seen — best and most beneficial:
So much of Instagram is women using way too much makeup. I love this leaning so far in the other direction.
And now, in the latest wrinkle, celebrities have joined the skin-positivity cause, with Justin Bieber (who recently posted on his Instagram Story that “pimples are in”), Kendall Jenner, Lili Reinhart, Lucy Hale and SZA openly embracing their acne.
It gets real and then it gets really funny. A sweet teenager does something cool and she's real and then the fake people jump on board. I'm real too!
It's entirely possible that Caitlyn Jenner wrote a book trashing the Kardashians with the collusion, acceptance, and encouragement of the rest of the family in the pursuit of the shared goal of setting up reality-show scenes like the one I'm quoting above.
It does make a pretty great scene:
That's acting to some extent, but who can tell? I have no base line to know what these people would be like in a completely unscripted setting.
Can you imagine having your most gripping emotional moment in lighting that fabulous, with your makeup done that flawlessly?
Said Caroline Issa, "the fashion director and chief executive of Tank magazine and a street-style star-turned-occasional Influencer," quoted by NYT fashion & style columnist Vanessa Friedman in "The Rise and (Maybe) Fall of Influencers." Friedman continues:
Since being what used to be called a “tastemaker” became a job, and word-of-mouth tips became known as “influencer marketing,” attention has been focused largely on the risks to brands in linking up with individuals.... But while it’s easy to be distracted by the siren call of Influencer culture — Money for just being you! Free trips to sit front row at fashion shows! Global branding laying out the red carpet for your delicately pointed feet! — what the cases of Kendall et al. make clear is that there are also risks to individuals.
Kendall — Kendall Jenner — has gotten into one problem after another, taking gobs of money people want to give her. It's hard to imagine caring about her problems.
What's interesting here to me is how people who can hardly do anything get to be "influencers." What kind of a job is that? It's not easy to rack up 80+ million followers on Instagram, but once you have that, it's not surprising the marketers want to hand you money to be seen with their product. It probably makes more sense than buying ad spots on TV shows that might have something like 10 million viewers.
Speaking of influencers, Freidman claims to cringe at the word but seems to accept it because it's in the Cambridge English Dictionary. Is that an influencer dictionary? My dictionary is the Oxford English Dictionary — screw Cambridge — and it has "influencer" — meaning, duh, "One who or that which influences" — going back to 1664:
1664 H. More Modest Enq. Myst. Iniquity 473 The head and influencer of the whole Church.
Those were weightier times. The things pretty youths like Jenner are influencing us about really don't matter. We're lucky to be free to divert ourselves with the utterly inconsequential quandry, Coke or Pepsi?
Pepsi has apologized for a controversial advertisement that borrowed imagery from the Black Lives Matter movement, after a day of intense criticism from people who said it trivialized the widespread protests against the killings of black people by the police....
The ad looks very beautiful and expensive, and it seems to be part of a recent trend in ads (for example during the Super Bowl) that associate the product with a deep-but-shallow angsty-but-feel-good political message. And it reminds me of the old I'd-like-to-buy-the-world-a-Coke prettiness:
Coke told us "It's the real thing," so maybe Pepsi's the fake thing, and in that light, I suspect Pepsi made a beautiful and intentionally flawed commercial that would stir up social media and get everyone to watch the commercial and talk about it. Pepsi would apologize, but it wouldn't really be sorry. It made you look.
And I'm saying that because if that wasn't the idea, Pepsi is just so dumb. That commercial took a lot of work and a lot of money to make. So many people were involved. They had to know some segment of social media would trash them for appropriating the seriousness and pain of others. Unless they are flat-out idiots with too much money to throw around, perhaps enough to buy the world a Coke.
But if they were indeed idiots, it gives me hope. Hope that advertisers will henceforth eschew politics in ads for commercial products. Maintain the separation of commerce and politics.
AND: Much of the social-media trashing uses images from recent protests, such as the lovely black woman in a long dress who stood elegantly in front of riot-geared police. They're aghast at the idea that a woman giving a Pepsi to a cop would solve the problems that the protests are about. But maybe the commercial was made by old fools who remember the idea of protesting the Vietnam war by sticking flowers into the barrels of the rifles of guardsmen — as seen in the famous photograph "Flower Power" (by Bernie Boston):
BUT: Only a desire for virality can explain why, when Kendall Jenner rips off her blonde wig (at 1:48), she hands it to a black woman. Here, hold my wig. I gotta protest. I mean, it's one thing to say stop being blonde if you're going to join a protest, but it's aggravating to fling that thing at the nearest black woman.
But let's talk about the gender question — why does Jenner take off her wig and, also, wipe off her lipstick? That seems to say women who fix up their hair and put on makeup are somehow unfit for the political uprising — even an uprising consisting of not much more than a search for love and a display of graceful loveliness. That rejects a lot of women.
And what about the association with that other Jenner, Caitlyn? There's quite a bit of wiggage and makeup on that one.
ADDED: Now, I'm getting interested in the question of how much makeup to wear to a protest. I found this at reddit:
I'm going to DC for the Women's March on Washington on January 21 (the day after the inauguration) and I'm thinking about how I want to do my makeup for the day. Factors I'm considering:
for everyday makeup I just do my brows, cream blush, and whatever lipstick I'm in the mood for at the moment
it's gonna be cold and I'll be sleep deprived and tired from travel, so I want to go with something that won't require touch-up
do I want to go for something sharp/severe and angry, or go for something overtly feminine [i have a thing about how society praises women when we act more masculine/ aggressive, and that femininity and softness are seen as signals of weakness rather than a certain kind of strength)
ALSO: Meade sends me this video...
... and I'm all: "Is that the music? I was trying to figure out who it was. I thought it might be Sting." I see it's Skip Marley — Bob Marley's grandson — and I feel sorry for him. Such a nice song and now it's getting dragged down by this controversy. Or is it getting a boost through this virality? We're all listening to it, noticing him.
In the comments, Meade, signing on to the virality theory, writes:
The entire thing is very Trump-y. Skip Marley, Jenner, Pepsi... even Trump will win from this.
AND: Rewatching the commercial, I'm struck by the complete lack of any racial message in the protest. The signs say "Join the conversation" or "Love" or show peace signs. Why are people saying Pepsi is using Black Lives Matter rather than a completely nonspecific anodyne generic protest? Is it just that there are many black people (along with a lot of other people) in the commercial?! Isn't it racist to look at black individuals and understand them as an embodiment of their race.
I didn't fix on the lyrics to the song, other than to notice the word "generation," long associated with Pepsi. You can read the lyrics here, along this response from Skip Marley to the question whether it's about the Trump election:
It didn’t stem from [the election], but it just happened to fall around that time. The song can be used in that way. It can [be used like that] because it’s up to people and their interpretation of a song. You can say it, but it’s not really a political song. I don’t want it to be viewed as a political song because it’s not really that kind of song. But I’m happy that people take it as strength in these times. It’s for the people in the United States to reassure that there’s a feeling inside that we're lions.
PLUS: I don't know if Skip Marley is, like his grandfather, a Rastafarian, but the lion is an important symbol in that religion. And the song does warn about losing religious freedom ("Yeah, if ya took all my rights away/Yeah, if ya tellin' me how to pray/Yeah, if ya won't let us demonstrate/Yeah, you're wrong...").
IN THE COMMENTS: Sean Gleeson said...
I didn't see a protest in the ad. More of a parade. The signs were wordless peace, love, and smiley face symbols. Everyone is smiling ear to ear. Even the police, who are not bothering anyone or barking orders, just standing by, like they are on a parade route. It's got kind of a flash-mob street party vibe.
Thanks for making me see the lineage back to "I'm a Pepper"!
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