The Man Who Has Seen Everything the Internet Contains
A woman named Marie wrote into Zeit Magazin with a question about her relationship: she and her boyfriend have been together five years and have almost completely stopped having sex. They both still want it. They just can’t make it happen anymore. Sex therapist Angelika Eck answered her in the column Schlafzimmerblick—the bedroom gaze—and the crux of it is something I keep turning over: desire and security are in fundamental tension. You stop pursuing what you already possess. It’s almost structural, the way long intimacy slowly corrodes longing. The question is whether you can manufacture distance inside closeness, which sounds exhausting and is probably necessary.
At Jezebel, Hazel Cills wrote about drag kings—the quieter counterpart to the drag queen moment we’re living through. RuPaul’s Drag Race has made men performing femininity seem not just acceptable but culturally vital. Women doing the reverse—performing masculinity in all its exaggerated, heightened forms—remains a niche, and the asymmetry says something interesting about which gender is considered available for theatrical appropriation.
Maria Bustillos wrote an essay on Medium about Mark Zuckerberg’s smallness—both metaphorical and, apparently, literal. Facebook reportedly goes to some effort to ensure that photos of Zuckerberg don’t exist in contexts that reveal his height relative to other people. The essay is really about the relationship between physical self-consciousness and the specific flavor of grandiosity that wants to become president—which Zuckerberg allegedly does. Power dressed up as inevitability. Small men have run this play before. It never ends quietly.
Kevin Lozano wrote a piece for GQ about the golden age of knockoff sneakers, which is also an essay about the inherent absurdity of sneaker culture itself. The Balenciaga Triple S costs hundreds of dollars and will be irrelevant in a season. The replica market has grown sophisticated enough that the distinction between real and fake has become largely philosophical. Kids are spending real money on the idea of a status symbol. The original commodity’s value exists only as a concept, and everyone downstream is trading in copies of that concept.
And then there’s Brad Kim. Kim founded Know Your Meme ten years ago—the closest thing the internet has to a functioning archive of its own collective unconscious—and gave a 10th anniversary interview to The Verge. He said at some point in the conversation that he can no longer be religious. Not like his mother. The internet took that from him. He’s seen things he can’t unsee, catalogued the full range of what people produce when they think no one is watching—or worse, when they want everyone to watch. Ten years of documenting the internet’s id, and it cost him his faith in humanity. He didn’t say it as a complaint. Just as a fact.