In this wild, wild year, “self-preservation” gains new meaning every day. To help you swallow today’s reminder to keep on going, a spoonful of sugar in the form of zany synths goes a long way. The wiggles on this Yellow Days single nearly overpower the sandy vocals repeating the stay-alive mantra, which is either a result of youthful folly (the artist is 21) or a metaphor for life’s distractions. Maybe both! Listen here.
We’ve all read Emily Ratajkowski’s essay in The Cut by now, yes? It’s a showstopper to be sure, detailing the fruitless tribulations she’s gone through as a model trying to claim a stake in her own image. Imagine seeing books and gallery shows spring from a photoshoot during which you were assaulted, having no control over who sees the pictures. What if you had to buy an expensive painting that replicated a shot from your own instagram, just so it wouldn’t creepily hang in someone else’s house? Ratajkowski’s accounts are truly harrowing, and media people have been drooling over them the way everyone else drools over the images in question. But at long last, we have a critique, and it sounds awfully familiar.
In short (and her piece is long), the writer Haley Nahman argued that the essay does more to enhance Ratajkowski’s personal brand than it does to dismantle oppression; if she understands her complicity in reinforcing the male gaze, why does Emrata do nothing to undermine it? And— here’s a big one— why do we as readers not demand more? As Nahman explains, we onlookers love a critique that comes from inside a harmful system, and to reward the critic’s self-awareness, we absolve them of their participation.* “What if, instead of fighting for all bodies to be exploited for likes on Instagram, we simply redefined the contours of aspiration?” Nahman asks. Do we really need a symbol of success within an oppressive machine when we could instead take that machine apart?
Word, but also let’s not place too much responsibility at any one woman’s feet. Coming out as a person who thinks about stuff doesn’t necessarily conscript Ratajkowski to being our feminist savior; ideally, her essay serves as an informational foundation for the women coming up in her wake.
*As we have done for Jia Tolentino, noted hot-girl intellectual who can articulate the problems of her position in society whilst fully participating in and benefitting from them.
The “renounce-and-reproduce” strategy is course lifted from a classic brand playbook outside the world of feminism. See: Oprah selling processed snacks for weight loss; Apple touting an app to limit screen time. The irony never ends, and now, HBO Max is rolling out a meditation TV show. Television, you’ll recall, is the ultimate way to dissociate, and streaming offers us such an effective exit from ourselves that it keeps us up at night. Lest you internalize that idea and go away (the Netflix CEO recently admitted that Netflix would fail if everyone traded TV for meditation), Big Streaming is offering you a way to feel as if you’re doing the good thing whilst doing the bad. “A World of Calm,” HBO’s visual adaptation of the popular meditation app, explores the interconnectedness of one specific, tactile thing per episode (chocolate, wood) through sumptuous visuals and narrations by Keanu Reeves, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Idris Elba, Zoe Kravitz, and other celebrity embodiments of ASMR (its trailer is basically very wholesome porn). The Hollywood Reporter calls it “a distracting analgesic for contemporary agita,” which sounds pretty great, but is still probably just that: a distraction.
So is anyone actually working to change from within? Retail seems to be dipping its toes into the righting of wrongs with a circular shopping platform called Trove, which is helping REI, Levi’s, Patagonia, and other brands take back used goods to sell again. At REI, which just announced the program, you get a gift card in exchange for your used gear, which means 1. you get credit for reducing waste; and 2. the store gets to sell the same item twice. And look at that: they didn’t even undermine their own business model.
