Stoya, Skin, and the Feminism They Package for You
Stoya. I’ve loved her for longer than I’d admit in polite company, and for reasons that go well beyond the obvious. She writes. She thinks out loud in ways that make most cultural commentary look timid. When Karley Sciortino sat down with her for a piece that circulated a few years back, I read the whole thing twice. The subject was the specific absurdity of dating men who identify as feminist—who have the vocabulary exactly right, who will explain consent theory at a dinner party, who then fail the simplest practical tests. Stoya named it with the precision of someone who has done the research personally.
That piece landed alongside something by Lina Mallon about what actually happens when a woman shows even the suggestion of skin on Instagram—the pile-on, the women leading it, the questions left hanging in the air. Is it envy? A distorted feminism? The plain fear of being outpaced by someone who cares less about the rules? The mechanics of online shame are predictable by now, but the fact that so much of it moves woman to woman is the thing nobody wants to examine honestly.
Julia Korbik was pulling at the same thread from another angle—asking whether consumption can be feminist at all. Fashion labels deploying unshaved underarms as brand identity. Underwear for tomboys. Vibrators positioned as political acts. Her argument is clean and correct: the moment feminism becomes a purchase decision, the movement has already been absorbed and sold back to you. You’re not joining something; you’re buying into it. The difference is everything.
Between all of that, I read a VICE piece about eco-sexuals who have sex with the earth. Literally. There’s a specific flavor of VICE article that finds the most structurally insane concept possible and builds something coherent around it, and you read it the way you watch a controlled demolition—you know exactly what’s happening and you watch anyway.
The piece that stayed was Masha Sedgwick on late-twenties anxiety—the sensation of time outrunning you, of focusing on work meaning missing everything else, of the biological clock and the bus that hits you before it matters. The exhaustion of problems you cannot solve. She names it so precisely that reading it feels like being caught out.
Five pieces. A Sunday. The tea goes cold. You sit there anyway.