felting, sad white women, and injuring myself dancing to taylor swift
scroll to the end for a surprise
Hi! This is a bunch of random shit I’ve been thinking about and googling and watching – hope it inspires some thinking or googling or watching of your own. Thanks for reading!
Google Search of the Week: “Is Harry Styles Balding?”
I threw out my neck this weekend headbanging to “I Did Something Bad” by Taylor Swift at a club in Brooklyn. I don’t think that’s what the Bushwick kids would call “cool,” but I had a great time. Some might say I’d do it over and over and over again if I could.
Come Sunday though I still felt like I’d been hit by a truck, so I sought some professional help in the form of a massage at a place around the corner with good Google reviews and fewer than three dollar signs. I find that getting a massage is both physical and mental exercise for me – being stuck with my own thoughts for an hour is more painful than anything you could do to my physical form. At least with my therapist I can just talk myself in circles for the hour to intellectualize my way out of confronting legitimate issues. (My therapist subscribes to this newsletter so I will pay for that admission later this week.)
Neck pain and mental illness aside, I also came out of that night with some charmingly poorly filmed snippets of my friends singing and dancing, one of which sparked an internet search that I had never anticipated.
“HARRY STYLES IS BALDING,” my friend Kim held up on her phone as a One Direction song blared out of the speakers into my damaged eardrums. She’d typed it out in big letters on her Snapchat app to communicate the urgent message through the pounding bass. When I watched it the morning after scrolling through my photos app, I just had to Google; Is Harry Styles Balding?
The answer is sure, I guess, in the way that most men, and a lot of women too, experience receding hairlines and hair thinning as they age. But the interesting part of the search was coming across a blog titled NiceHair.org that tracked the hair loss and advised the regrowth of said hair of celebrities.
It appears the blog hasn’t published a new post since June of 2021 – why does God take away everything good? – but there is a decent backlog of celebrity hairline analysis from Justin Bieber to David Beckham. How it became the third Google result for this question I truly have no idea.
To be very clear – I am in no way promoting this site (hopefully that was already clear). I haven’t read all of it but, I think it’s pretty creepy, and I am definitely not endorsing the message nor the medical claims it makes about hair regrowth. But part of being a person on the internet is alerting other persons on the internet to weird shit, so, I guess that’s the point.
These diagrams of red triangled foreheads reminded me of another unhinged internet creator with a similarly confusing celebrity dogma: the Don’t Lean In guy.
Miles Klee delved into the green line theory for Mel Magazine last year, and while in meme years that makes this guy ancient history, I still get an occasional nose-exhale-chuckle out of a shitpost with green lines drawn on it. I, too, love being an Alpha Male.
Read of the Week: “Memento Millennial” from Ayesha A. Siddiqi
This is such a good read. Ayesha A. Siddiqi and Charlie Markbreiter discuss millennials, Sally Rooney-ism, and a host of other issues regarding modern and retro internet culture. I especially loved the breakdown of sad-white-woman media – a genre, I, a mentally ill white woman myself, have also consumed a lot of.
As an older Gen Zer, this genre of media also colored my young adulthood quite a bit. I joined Tumblr my freshman year of high school in 2012 – just in time to read all the bad (and sometimes good) poetry about how comforting it is to be sad all the time (it isn’t).
“These women are always unhappy in the same ways, always vying for love in places they are guaranteed not to receive it. The list includes: Hannah Horvath, Fleabag, the protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist of The Worst Person In the World, and a litany of less-acclaimed versions of the same. They’re about as relatable to me as aliens, but it makes me sad how many white women seem to feel seen by them. Which is strange, because these protagonists are all relatively privileged people who could easily avoid the choices that are making their lives miserable, and usually hurting many others in the process. These aren’t stories of women burdened by circumstance.”
This conversation firstly sheds some light on how inaccessible this genre can be to non-white women, which is an important piece of the puzzle if you’re trying to more critically examine the media you consume. Of course, not all media need relate to everyone, and in fact any media that try to relate to everyone is usually too void of meaning to be worth consuming. But staying in (white women) bubbles of sad prose and miscommunication plotlines doesn’t serve much good either.
“The protagonists must first act as badly as possible because this makes them seem ‘relatable.’ Although, as you point out, relatable to whom? Who can afford unhappiness? Collective liberation does not exist in these worlds. For these unhappy white women, ‘freedom’ is just the freedom to act out as much as white men do. And, in a way, they can. Their choices will be ‘humanized’ by the end of the thirty minute TV slot.”
Who can afford unhappiness?
What a question! I feel like we could talk about this forever. With privilege comes a lot of affordability, and a pretty central theme in this sad white female millennial cinematic universe they’re talking about here is the non-acknowledgment of any kind of privilege.
And even further – “Maybe that’s the appeal,” Ayesha says. “It relieves the audience of examining their responsibility to themselves by casting the ways they fail themselves as romantic, glamorous even, or at least according to the culture––appropriately on trend.”
This is such an acute take on these works that have been analyzed into the ground, and it pinpoints something really important: the self-analysis shouldn’t stop at reading the genre, it should only start there. Being a sad white woman reading a book about a sad white woman mostly just reverberates back to us what we already know. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but without other perspectives in the mix, it can become a dangerously self-indulgent echo chamber.
I implore my fellow sad white women who like reading about sad white women to remember to also read books written by and about sad or unlikeable or self-sabotaging women who are not white. (Not a new idea by any means but this read definitely reinforces the importance of it.) I’m no authority on the genre, but I can recommend one of my favorite novels I’ve read this year so far: “Luster” by Raven Leilani is a sharp portrait of a young Black woman that adds so much nuance to the young-woman-in-NYC trope that it practically transcends the trope entirely. I devoured this book and I hope you’ll give it a go, too.
There is so much more to be said about Ayesha’s piece, and it goes in-depth into so many other topics it’s amazing they all fit into one conversation so well. There’s a wonderful section that poignantly dives into the concept of “branding” without even saying the word “branding,” and there’s a cutting analysis of Web 2.0, post-9/11 internet habits, and the end of monoculture (something I’ve personally been pondering a lot). Just read it.
TikTok Account of the Week:
Andrea Love makes me feel things I’ve never felt before (pun very much intended). I am in awe of the level of effort and craftsmanship that goes into these videos – the attention to detail is astounding. Felt? Looking like liquid? Unbelievable. The only downside is that there aren’t more of them.
(TikTok wasn’t embedding correctly so here’s the Youtube version too!)
Tofu of the Week:
Congratulations! By making it to the end of this post, you have unlocked Rare High-On-Catnip Feral Tofu protecting her cactus scratch post kingdom.
I find myself kind of envious of her ability to protract her claws and go absolutely apeshit on a toy mouse. That sounds really freeing. If I could Freaky Friday with anyone, it would be her.
felting, sad white women, and injuring myself dancing to taylor swift
Love it! Also love Luster