The Blogging Pimp of the Miley Cyrus Generation
That’s the title a stranger gave me, and I’m getting it on business cards. Nils Jacobsen—economics journalist, self-described internet expert, Hamburg, studied German literature and media studies, has been covering stock markets and web business for over a decade—wrote a long piece about this journal for Meedia, a German media trade publication. About the dramatic collapse of my side project after barely three and a half months. About the return to the original. About what exactly is going on here and why it apparently matters.
His read: this place traffics in what he calls trashy content with a sexual note, virally processed at high speed—garnished with intimate confessions from eighteen-year-olds.
He’s not wrong. It’s a world, he argues, less about girls themselves and more about girls in the male imagination, which in the social media era has been handed an inexhaustible arsenal. Fast, always-available sex, even when real sex isn’t on the table. YouPorn is always an option.
He wrote about one of the contributors—Daniela, eighteen at the time—who listed among her interests listening to dolphins during intercourse.
He then noted, with barely concealed alarm, that her profile photo suggested the interest might not be strictly limited to marine wildlife. I re-read that sentence several times. Good line, Nils.
This journal’s unofficial motto, which he managed to excavate from somewhere: they’re so hot, they’re allowed to do that. He quoted me directly on the side project: The biggest problem was that I’d forgotten how to write.
Which is true. Three and a half months of pretending to have editorial ambitions I didn’t actually have will do that.
The part I kept coming back to was this: So trashy, calculated, and linguistically limited as it often is, it still captures the zeitgeist of the younger social media generation more accurately than almost anything else—the generation that spends its time on YouPorn and BuzzFeed rather than Playboy or Spiegel Online. The zeitgeist has changed over the past few years: slowly, but radically.
And then: Pornos are ok. Quick sex is ok. Sasha Grey and Miley Cyrus are their protagonists—not the Eurovision Song Contest and Lena. Marcel Winatschek is the blogging pimp of the Miley Cyrus generation, constantly feeding new material to eighteen-year-olds—written by those very same eighteen-year-olds.
He didn’t spell the name of this operation correctly a single time throughout the entire piece. I’ve decided that makes it better.
I don’t know Nils at all, but I feel like we’d get along. There’s a specific kind of person who can call something both trash and the most accurate cultural document of its moment in the same breath, without any apparent contradiction, and I have a lot of time for people like that. The photo at the top is from a truly terrible event I had hoped never to use in any context. It fits perfectly. Now—who wants to be my bottom bitch?