The Week Emma Sulkowicz Carried a Mattress and Coolio Wrote About Pornhub
Emma Sulkowicz started carrying her dorm mattress around Columbia University’s campus in September 2014 and didn’t stop. To class, across the quad, everywhere she went—the same mattress on which she said she had been raped by a fellow student the university declined to expel. The piece was called Carry That Weight, and within days it was in every feed, which meant within days everyone had a firm opinion about it who had not been present for any of it. That’s not a criticism. Visibility was the point. The weight was literal and legible in a way that institutional failures rarely allow themselves to be.
Somewhere in the same week’s scroll, a few links down: Geoff Mackley rappelling into the mouth of an active volcano with a GoPro. The footage looks like a compositing error—heat shimmer distorting the frame, the walls of the caldera impossibly close, the whole thing registering as something the camera shouldn’t be able to survive. Below that: a man who had dressed his dog in a spider costume and sent it into an elevator full of strangers, to predictable effect. The internet of 2014 had no tonal buffer. The protest and the spider dog arrived in the same feed with no mediation between them, and somehow both registered as equally real and equally urgent.
Anita Sarkeesian had released another episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, this one focused on the use of women as background decoration in mainstream titles. The response was the same as every episode: coordinated harassment, death threats serious enough to involve law enforcement, the persistent argument that a YouTube essay series about representation constituted an attack on gaming culture. The episode itself was calm, carefully made, and correct. The people threatening to kill her for making it seemed not to notice they were proving her point in real time.
And then there was Coolio, who had written and released a song about masturbating to Pornhub. I don’t have much to add. It happened. The internet needed ballast that week, and Coolio provided it.