Everyone’s Circling

I read a handful of pieces that week that kept bumping into the same wall—everything that’s supposed to be authentic keeps getting sold back to you.

Lina Mallon writing about Instagram and bodies. What happens if you show yourself, if you’re visible. The strange judgment that follows, mostly from other women, hiding behind this idea of feminism that says if you’re exposed, you’re either desperate or you deserved it. She nailed something I’d never quite articulated.

Then VICE with something stupid and brilliant about eco-sexuality—people fucking for the planet, basically. It’s ridiculous, but it’s also just the endpoint of something we’re all doing now. Everything has to mean something. Even sex has to be in service of a cause.

Julia Korbik on feminist consumerism. Bearded women in fashion ads. Hair-removal shampoo marketed to people who don’t want to remove their hair. Dildos for lesbians like they’re a product category now. Feminism as a brand. You could get angry about it, but it’s easier to just watch the machinery work—capitalism figured out how to sell you your own resistance.

Masha Sedgwick on what it’s like to be a woman in her late twenties. All the invisible pressure. The sense that time’s running out, that you’re supposed to want things, that the world has an expiration date built in. I don’t experience that exact panic, but the underlying thing—that you’re aging out, declining in value—that’s pretty universal these days.

And Stoya talking about dating good male feminists, which is funny because even straight sex has gotten politically complicated. Even desire has to come with the right consciousness now. Whether that’s progress or just exhaustion, I honestly don’t know.

They all seem to be about the same thing: trying to live authentically in a system that’s monetizing authenticity. Trying to resist a machine that’s very good at selling resistance. Reading them back to back like that, it felt less like a bunch of independent thoughts and more like everyone circling the same problem from different angles.