This is my garbage site. It's supposed to be garbage, which I'm told is
liberating. You aren't supposed to like it, or me.
I created this site because I wanted a site where I could talk about
personal shit, particularly gender politics, regular politics, and my
assorted gender issues. Goal is to write more freely/stream
of consciousness instead of trying to edit myself and play it safe. There will
be some questionable punctuation and design decisions.
"If I have peed farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants."
: Portrait of a shitty childhood
This short documentary Christmas, Every Day
is genuinely one of the most painful things I have seen recently. It’s about a
family in Alabama that is raising their pre-teen girls to be social media influencers
who post makeup tutorials and dance videos on TikTok to farm engagement and sponsorship dollars.
Perhaps the most disturbing part is the scene where Dad explains the motivation for this parenting
choice as setting his girls up with “passive income” so they can “be their own boss”
instead of working a normal job—misappropriating the logic of “girlboss” to rationalize a childhood environment
that will, without qualification, give them confidence and body image issues
for the rest of their life.
Another irony of the video is that the family lives in the midst of absolutely
stunning, jaw-dropping natural beauty, a horizon full of trails and forest and waterways.
But the “career” that the parents have predetermined for their kids requires the girls to cultivate an endless clean-girl aesthetic
that separates them from the rawness of nature.
