New music Friday, or Thursday if you’re on the West Coast, has become a beloved, emotionally-charged tradition for well over a decade now. Like staying up late for Santa, my teen and young adult years are peppered with memories of 9 PM PST new music listens, lying supine, eyes closed and headphones in, or huddled around a speaker with my sisters. I remember when folklore dropped in July 2020, my sisters and I, sprawled across my bed, collectively gasping during the bridge of “august.” And I remember at age 18, returning home after the sun had gone down, burnt out by school, work, and dance class, the promise of listening to thank u, next that night being the only thing that got me through the day.

As I’ve expressed in past essays, I haven’t been a particularly devoted Olivia Rodrigo fan, but have rather admired her talents from afar, viewing her as more of a gifted niece or twice-removed cousin than a peer or voice of my generation, per se. I’ve written that her ripped fishnets and stomping Doc Martens have long felt a little juvenile for me. I had enjoyed the singles off her third album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, but again, I felt like I’d aged out of her listenership. Not that you have to be a certain age to listen to certain artists’ music, but Rodrigo’s past lyrical musings about physical insecurities and disappointing men felt a little unrelatable. Not that I’ve grown out of feeling physically insecure or being disappointed by men, but those feelings have been baked into me for so long that I’d assumed I’d picked apart their nuance ad nauseam. My early teenage realizations feel like a lifetime ago.

When Instagram notified me that Rodrigo’s third studio album had been released last Thursday, I had completely forgotten about it. My teeth were brushed, my water bottle was filled, and I was about to head off to an early night of sleep. But then I remembered how increasingly difficult it is to give albums a fair assessment these days, with how quickly reviews and trending audios are spun up following a release. Why not give an album the fairest assessment you can, listening to it top to bottom right at its release before the peanut gallery can color your opinion? A wave of What the hell, sure rolled over me as I plugged in my headphones, lay on the couch, and pressed play.

So far, my favorite albums of the last year include Audrey Hobert’s Who’s the clown?, Kacey Musgraves’ Middle of Nowhere, and I suppose, Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend. I admire Hobert’s crisp, tight songwriting, and Musgraves’ sweet, easy listening quality. Carpenter is always a ludicrous mood booster, an aux crowd pleaser. But it had been a while since I listened to something that took me for a ride in the way this Rodrigo album did. That lofted me to sublime peaks, and dragged me through forlorn valleys. That really put a pit in my stomach that I woke up with the next day.

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Exciting announcement: I will be hosting a free newsletter-writing workshop in East Hollywood on June 30th, in partnership with Microsoft Surface!!!

I’ve had so many conversations with people who are eager to start newsletters, but struggle to find time and energy to put pen to paper. Many aspiring writers I speak to feel that their perspectives aren’t unique enough or that they aren’t skilled enough to begin self-publishing. To them I say, there’s no time when you’ll feel completely ready, and nobody who will give you permission, so you may as well give it a try now.

If you’re an avid newsletter reader who wants to begin writing yourself, this workshop is specifically for you. We’ll build out practical writing schedules, talk through newsletter niches, brainstorm essay ideas, and hang out. Even if you’re in a good groove writing your newsletter, please come through. I’d love to meet you and hear about your writing process. There will also be Cafe Hysteria and Microsoft goodies for everyone.

Microsoft just released new Surface devices, and I’m excited to use the Surface Pro as I continue to build out this workshop, especially for writing, drawing, and typing. I’ve been itching to host an in-person event for a while now, and am grateful to be supported by a brand that’s letting me hold the creative reins. I’m so excited to meet some of you in person.

• Date: Tuesday, June 30

• Time: 4-6 PM

• Location: Cafe Nido, Los Angeles

RSVP here, space is limited! See you then.

To like the right things is to signal cosmopolitanism, intelligence, and an elevated sense of discernment. I, on the other hand, do not have a refined palette, and never have. I can recall nodding along in conversation as a teen, pretending that I had listened to an indie album a cute boy or popular girl was telling me about, asserting that I forgot the names of the songs when asked which one was my favorite. My music library is well-represented by trending sounds on TikTok. I am just now getting around to reading classic literature. I lack extensive knowledge about much predating this century. If I were to have a dinner party with anyone, dead or alive, I’d likely want Taylor Swift present. I’ve always been a harbinger of mainstream, bubble gum, cookie-cutter, suburban American “bad” taste. And for a long time, I tried to hide it. But today, through this newsletter in particular, I’m often apt to defend it.

I’m endlessly fascinated by what makes up popular opinion, what charms and revolts the hiveminds of mainstream hand-to-mouth-algorithm-fed consumers. I largely credit this to the fact that I came of age right as social media platforms were beginning to take shape. As a tween, I came upon slews of chronological feeds, where I was free to tumble down rabbit holes at my own will, no algorithm labeling and slotting me into a category. To have freewheeling access to such a breadth of material at such a formative age was profound.

But today, I’m curious whether teens are having the same experience. The internet of decades past involved much more hunting and gathering, cutting-and-pasting images into collages, and divulging embarrassing prose on Tumblr. Today’s is an infinite, lightspeed feed of information perfectly tailored for your specific flavor of passive consumption. Though my memory is tinged with rose-colored nostalgia, what once felt like a mom-and-pop business is now an increasingly corporatized franchise.

In such a landscape, exhibiting “bad” taste, or taste that deviates from your algorithm, is a near-radical act. Discovering art on the internet that’s off the beaten path is a means of exercising agency in a world that’s limping closer to sameness, and frankly, flatness in speech, dress, mannerism, and artistic preference.

I got a chance to speak with Ione Gamble, the founding editor-in-chief of Polyester Zine, about how the internet informed her own sensibilities and the impact of algorithms on cultural palettes ahead of the release of The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste. The book is an ode to all things bad taste, featuring original essays by Tavi Gevinson, Rene Matic, Cat Cohen, Seth Bogart, Zarina Muhammad, Gina Tonic, Yomi Adegoke, Angela Hui, Sabrina Brier, Kieran Yates, Annie Lord, Lauren O’Neill, Nicola Dinan, and Ramisha Sattar.

It was a pleasure to chat with Ione about the internet’s past, present, and future, given what a crucial role Polyester has played in informing the tastes of so many young girls and women online. The book is a joyous, insightful, and relatable read and will be out June 18th. You can preorder it here.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MH: What struck me in the introduction of the book was your writing about how taste relates to identity development. Can you speak to how the internet helped develop your early sense of taste?

IG: I hit tweenhood just as social media as we know it was really coming into the fold. I think what I found so liberating about the internet was that it was basically a portal to discover your taste in a way that wasn’t as easily accessible before. In the book, I talk about sneaking downstairs to watch music video channels on the family computer. But MySpace, and even more so Tumblr, a few years later, really opened up so many more portals to different things.

What was so interesting about the internet was that it seemed like all of these endless possibilities. It was just kind of like these endless tangents and rabbit holes, which I think is so fruitful as a teenager, when you’re trying different identities on and finding things that are important to you. Having access to a library of unlimited resources was so beneficial to me and a lot of people my age.

MH: That’s something I definitely relate to. Can you speak to some of those groups that you were drawn to online? Because for me, it was One Direction, Taylor Swift, kind of the kingpin fandoms of Tumblr at the time.

IG: I’ll preface by saying that I was very much like a voyer in these places. But I think what I gravitated towards was the fashion community on Tumblr, and the people who then went on to write for and create Rookie. So obviously, Tavi Gevinson, who’s in the book, but also Arabelle Sicardi, who had a blog called “Fashion Pirate,” and Laurence Philomène, who is a photographer.

My interests were very centered on queer art and the world that we consider very “Petra Collins.” The Virgin Suicides screenshots, Ghost World. I was less interested in organized fandom and more into general interests, moods, and vibes, I guess.

MH: It must be so exciting to have Tavi in the book after reading her and having Rookie be such a formative part of your identity. What was it like asking her to be involved?

IG: I’ve known Tavi for ten years now. I started Polyester in 2014, and I think for issue four, she was our cover girl. There was a crossover between Polyester and Rookie in terms of contributors. One of the photographers that we worked with had texted me saying Tavi was going to be in town in 2016. So we did this shoot, very last minute, and we’ve stayed in touch on and off throughout the last ten years.

I think she informed so many of our tastes and gave young girls a road map to feel liberated by their likes and dislikes. Her piece is so interesting, her essay is amazing in the book.

MH: Getting into “bad taste,” which is at the core of the book, an argument I found really compelling in the introduction was that algorithms are predetermining our sense of taste. As such, having a “bad” sense of taste that diverges from mainstream sensibilities can feel liberating.

I do wonder, though, with how many internet subcultures there are, how much free will you think we have in the taste we develop today? Do you think we have any kind of free will in the media and aesthetic niches we gravitate towards, or is it entirely predetermined by algorithms?

IG: Not entirely predetermined. I think that the book is really cynical about the internet of today. But I also think that there is still hope. I think there is still a lot of good to be had online, but I think it’s becoming more oppressive.

When I was a teenager on the internet, algorithms barely existed. It just felt like the Wild West, you found what you found, and it wasn’t predetermined at all, whereas now we’re grouped by interest. And the groupings are all towards an outcome of purchasing something.

It’s not as if we’re being spoonfed stuff all the time without an option to opt in or opt out, but opting out is becoming increasingly difficult. It takes a lot more willpower and brainpower to try to forge your own mindset.

MH: Definitely. In addition to that, it’s so hard to find something new. I think people kind of get pigeonholed and stay fixed on what they like until a hot new thing comes up.

Not only are we being inundated with ads, but we can also make ourselves into ads and products to be sold. And I wonder if that’s kind of related to my next question, which is: why do you think people online are so fixated on communicating their sense of good taste to the world? How is the internet amplifying this desire to convey good taste?

IG: There’s a certain amount of it that’s human nature; you naturally want to share the things that you like. In the past, that would have occurred in fixed communities, like in school or in your neighborhood. But the internet is a much bigger platform. You can reach so many more people.

Since the rise of TikTok, we’ve also become obsessed with this idea of “experts.” People can take ownership of micro-identities, which can be a path to monetization and success.

MH: The ownership aspect of it almost feels like we all have Monopoly pieces and are staking claim to certain identities. In middle school, I had a friend who was a huge fan of The 1975 and told me I couldn’t listen to them because they were “her band.” Assuming ownership over her sense of taste was like assuming ownership over her sense of self.

On the flip side, you argue that embracing bad taste allows us to live more authentically. How do you think the internet would look in a world where we weren’t overly concerned with conveying good taste?

IG: I think that it would look more like the old internet, where people really revel in their own taste, and points of difference are seen as something to be celebrated.

If people feel like they can be themselves, it makes for a much richer cultural environment because we have a plethora of ways of being, whereas at the moment it feels restrictive. I think it’s definitely possible for us to kind of break out of the confines of good taste, but I think that they will always be there because it’s just the dominant cultural mode.

MH: Do you think that there have been any positive developments that have come out of internet communities over the past five years? How does the internet look better today than it did when we were like teenagers?

IG: That’s really difficult. I think the good parts of the internet are the people or the spirit of things that have persevered. Girls on the internet are still forging through with their own projects. I’ll always credit the internet for giving groups of people access to things that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I think that’s all still completely possible. But I do think it’s become more difficult, which maybe makes the people who manage to do it now even more impressive.

Apart from that, people are always trying to get back to the internet we grew up with because it felt more interesting and enjoyable. Whereas people who love the internet today wouldn’t say it’s a net positive experience. Does that make sense?

MH: Definitely. It feels like you need to take a break from it now. It’s kind of hard to parse out whether that’s because I’m an adult now and have more responsibilities, whereas as a teenager I could literally just waste my days on the internet without repercussions. It’s hard to tell how much of it is a result of platforms changing and how much of it is a result of just me changing.

IG: I had to think about that while writing the book as well because obviously, I’m not in that stage of life anymore where I’m looking for all of these new experiences all the time. My hope is that teenage girls and girls in their early twenties are still using the internet like we did, but I haven’t seen evidence of it happening at scale.

MH: It does seem like there’s a bit more passive consumption, as opposed to searching and creation.

My last question: What are you hoping people take away from your book?

IG: I think something I found unexpected in all the contributors’ essays was the difference in tone across them. Some people took it a lot more lightly and humorously, and some people were analytical and serious. I loved the mixture of both. “Taste” can feel narrow and prescriptive, but it really is so broad.

I was touched by the contributors writing about the real joy of taste, which is recommending things that you love to someone you care about, and how taste is actually a way to foster connection rather than hierarchy. I feel like there was a cord of hope among all of the writers. I hope people feel a bit better about it all when they walk away from it.

At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, or even ambitious, I will admit that I do, in fact, monitor my Substack dashboard. And for the latter half of last year, I was confronted with a mighty New Subscriber plateau and some of the lowest engagement since I started self-publishing nearly four years ago, but who’s counting? Of course, I kept on writing and self-publishing anyway, either because I simply do this for the love of the game or because I don’t know how to take hints, or both.

Since I’m a basic, unabashed lover of all things mainstream, the things I’m interested in writing about and the things people click on often overlap. I don’t chase the algorithm per se, but rather the algorithm is the water I swim in. And on occasion, I’ll publish a fresh perspective on a buzzy topic, right as it’s hitting its stride in the news cycle, right as that mysterious algorithm decides to shine a little extra sun on me, and I’ll receive an influx of new readers. And if I’m being completely honest with you, when that happens, the gratification is intoxicating. It’s the kind of validation that you try hard to disregard out of fear that it won’t happen again. The kind of pridefulness that God would smite.

But for every few comments that express excitement in discovering my publication, or offer a compelling critique of my work, there will be at least one hateful, garbled one that I will earnestly try and fail to understand. A comment that indicates that the reader didn’t read the whole piece, or only chose to fixate on one line from it. Or a comment indicating that the reader straight up doesn’t like my writing at all.

I’ll try to leave a composed response, and sometimes we come to an understanding, even if we disagree. But more often than not, the commenter will double down on their opinion, having read my reply or not. Or they’ll refrain from following up at all, passing on like a coyote in the night. A flash of their teeth, then, poof, vapor. This is the challenge, of course, of self-publishing on the internet, one of the most public spheres we have. You can’t guarantee meaningful engagement, and you certainly can’t win them all over.

When I lived in New York, I used to complain that people walking on the sidewalks needed to have more spatial awareness. New York pedestrians need to check their blind spots on the pavement and pull off to the side when looking up directions on their phones. This is a public space, and they need to share the road, I would say. My boyfriend would retort that since these are public streets, I’m the one who actually needs to be more patient. What does the “public” owe me, exactly?

What does the public owe me? It’s a question I consider as I think about my writing career. It also reminds me of the criticism pop stars receive after requesting privacy and general “understanding” from the public. Not that I think I’m a pop star, or anything.

Aren’t we owed the ability to say whatever we want about pop stars online, whether we’ve thoughtfully engaged with their work or not, given they’re flush with fortune and attention? Aren’t we owed certain access to them since we stream their music and spend hundreds of dollars on concert tickets? And, on the flip side, aren’t the artists owed a certain amount of grace and privacy as public figures who already share so much of themselves for their jobs?

Over the past couple of years, Chappell Roan has been the poster celebrity for setting boundaries with fans, positioning her relationship with her supporters as starkly non-parasocial. Her critics posit that she asked for this life, that her being a public figure necessitates people having constant access to her, especially when she’s in public spaces. The question isn’t exactly what the public owes her, but what she owes the public as a result of choosing a highly visible career. And the answer, to many, is that she owes everyone everything, since we’re the ones monetarily and symbolically propping up her success. We’re stockholders in the publicly held company that is Chappell Roan.

On the other hand, Taylor Swift is an artist who leverages parasocaility for her own gain, who can now turn whole media narratives in her favor, seemingly making everyone understand her, even if it’s just her own cacophony of followers. Swift and the Swifties possess a kind of mutual debt to one another, quietly and loudly delivering and demanding more from the other, whether it’s the purchase of more vinyl variants, the disclosure of more personal lore in songs, or a kind of unflinching loyalty, resulting in collectively back-turning on people Swift is feuding with, whether she asks them to or not.

Blind idolship and blind condemnation are both detrimental to meaningful engagement. In the case of Taylor Swift, and increasingly, Chappell Roan, one crop of people has grown inordinately fond of her, while the other has grown inordinately hateful, which has led to our inability to say anything wholly significant on either side of the fence.

Online conversations are perhaps more nuanced than tabloid stories or Pop Base tweets, but they will never be as nuanced as face-to-face interactions, where either interlocutor has a greater chance of understanding the other. Online, responses are sent and received with delays, allowing conversations to lose real-time dynamism and momentum. Positions get misconstrued, trolls commit willful ignorance, and users often approach other users presuming negative intent. Of course, these things happen in real life too, but there’s a greater chance that the person you’re speaking to is fully hearing what you’re saying.

A fear of misunderstanding, or worse, fear of dissent, and eagerness to grow, motivates writers to frontload their material with paragraphs of toothless disclaimers, warning that their point of view may not apply to every single situation or every single reader at every single time of day, instead of an actually compelling argument. This outsized fear and appetite lead to inoffensive, voiceless girls-be-like, internet-be-like, and celebrities-be-like writing. It leads to writing that many are probably mistaking for AI, when it’s really just flattened human input and output, published with a shaky hand.

What does the public owe you, as someone putting work into the world, be it a blogger or a pop star? Are you owed the presumption of positive intent or attentive readership? Many believe they are, whether they’re Substackers bemoaning their lack of growth on Notes feeds, churning out recycled thesis statements, or artists publicly scorning Pitchfork, growing misty-eyed at an Album of the Year loss.

And what are you owed as a reader or listener? Is either party really owed nuanced, meaningful engagement before opinions are drawn up? I guess not, I guess none of that is explicitly promised anywhere. But, as a writer seeking meaningful engagement with readers, I often wish I knew whether my readers were fully engaging with my work before I respond to their damning comments. And, conversely, as a reader, I often feel entitled to the opinions I have, even when I merely skim the work’s surface.

Publishing online is sometimes akin to an English teacher standing at the front of their classroom, posing a thoughtful question to a room of bored, restless high schoolers; the symbolic score is rarely settled. Neither debt is fully paid by the artist or the consumer. Nobody’s itch is fully scratched. Neither side ends up fully happy, expecting something that the other can’t adequately provide due to a near-perpetual lapse in understanding.

As true as it ever was, the great challenge in creating and consuming anything is being totally understood and totally understanding. And the fact that it doesn’t always happen is fuel enough to keep trying to make it so.

A few months ago, Eliza McLamb broke a story on her Substack about Chaotic Good, a digital music marketing company that helps artists grow, in part, by manufacturing fake fan accounts and influencing public opinion in social media comments. McLamb writes about how surprising it was to learn that Geese, a rock band that positions themselves as “raw” and “counter-cultural,” uses this type of service. But as a musician herself, she acknowledges how tempting it would be to leverage a career-boosting service like Chaotic Good to bypass the slow drudgery of bootstrapped self-promotion. A service like this would manufacture meaningful engagement and mass understanding.

I similarly imagine that many writers on Substack would wave a magic wand, if they could, to materialize writerly success and tailor online reception in their favor, not unlike how Swift can flick her wrist and mobilize her attentive army, or how Andrew Tate can import one million loyal email addresses upon launching his own Substack publication.

But truly fruitful creative careers and meaningful engagement are forged through years of friction, disagreement, and misinterpretation, through convincing the public that you have something important to say and them trusting your convictions, often over time. We all risk misperception and disdain when we make our work public. We aren’t owed an accurate or favorable interpretation, and we will never achieve it in full. But it’s fun to try to get close, and with enough elbow grease, we can certainly approximate it.

I share a bedroom wall with this couple, who are the muse that keeps on giving. I wish, desperately, that I didn’t know so much about their personal lives. I wish that they weren’t providing as much inspiration for my writing as they are. But when I wake up after a night of tossing and turning, earplugs in, trying to drown out their screaming, fighting, and furniture-throwing with ad-free rain sounds on YouTube, they are understandably all that’s on my mind.

I wrote about them a while back, penning that living in an apartment means dissolving the boundaries of your space and letting the outside encroach. I hear teenage sons yelling at their video games and fathers banging on their doors, demanding them to be quiet. I’ve heard parties being thrown, people having sex. And I’ve heard couples fight nasty fights, oblivious, or perhaps indifferent, to the fact that the walls are practically paper.

Looking back at my first essay about the couple who live next door, I wrote that anger is one of the more challenging emotions for me to sympathize with, mainly because it’s not one I express myself very often, at least not in a conventional way. Every emotion I feel at full volume inevitably manifests as tears; happiness, sadness, rage, stress, loneliness, all of it. I haven’t felt an impulse to throw chairs or slam doors since I was maybe a toddler. That’s not to say that I think I’m better than this couple, necessarily, but that I truly do not understand them.

In my first essay, I wrote about wanting boundaries to remain intact between the members of the couple and between the couple and me. But these so-called boundaries have only become more threadbare as the months have dragged on. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fist fully punches through my drywall one day. When I wake to the sound of high-pitched screams and IKEA chairs being thrown at IKEA bedframes, my comforter feels like cement. Without the option to fight or flee, freezing is all you’re left with.

Let me tell you what happened last night.

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My mom always told me there would be a day when I returned home and noticed she looked significantly older than she did when I was a kid. This hasn’t really happened. There hasn’t been a moment in which the passage of time has dawned on me all at once like that. I’m not any more aware of my mom’s aging than I am of my own aging. I usually need some kind of reference point to understand it. It’s only when I look at a photo of myself from middle school, high school, or college, and then look in the mirror, that I understand that I’ve gotten older. I can see the way the skin has settled, the way the collagen and fat have moved, the way my expression has grown weathered, even at twenty-five. The same goes for my parents.

But what’s certainly made me attuned to the passage of time is the fashion and technology that surrounds my mom. She is the person that I’ve known the longest and, in many ways, most intimately. She is the most fixed structure in my life, the center of my axis, around which the world turns and changes.

My mom has wished me Happy New Year every year I’ve been alive, and each year, she’s donned a different ensemble that reflects the times. I’ve seen her rock a Rachel haircut and an Ann Taylor blouse, with a Blackberry in hand. I’ve seen her wear clogs and combat boots, purchase Maroon 5 albums on iTunes, and stream Kacey Musgraves on Apple Music. I’ve seen her leaf through issues of Us Weekly and tune in to Real Housewives reunions. And most recently, I see her in my mind’s eye in J. Crew or Lululemon, holding her comically large smartphone, larger than the one she had ten years ago, with two hands.

I don’t write this to shame my mom. Lord knows she’s stared at me staring at my phone for plenty of years on end. All that’s to say that, soon, adult children will not know a life without the image of their parents staring down at their iPhones. Soon, kids won’t know a world in which their parents don’t swipe Candy Crush or YouTube Shorts, or trade stocks, or watch a wedding, a concert, or their child’s own birth through a screen. It won’t be bizarre that the person who taught them to read, write, and ride a bike experiences much of life mediated through a screen because it’s just the way the world works. I do remember the time before, though, and I might be the last generation to.

I’ve often chatted with friends about how uncanny it is to see our parents and grandparents absorbed by their phones. While many have expressed dismay about “phone-based childhoods,” millennials and elder Gen Z are witnessing their parents and grandparents slip into what Charlie Warzel dubs “phone-based retirement.” Whereas retirements of decades past may have been characterized by volunteering, travel, and time spent exploring hobbies, many are worried that those over 60 are spending their third act consumed by their screens.

In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people over 60 spend over half their daily leisure time in front of a screen, which is about four hours and 16 minutes. Dr. Ipsit Vahia tells The Atlantic that many older adults began spending even more time online during COVID, wherein Zoom family reunions, Telehealth appointments, and church livestreams acted as gateways to social media and online entertainment platforms. Much of this time seems to be spent on YouTube. Last year, Nielsen reported that adults 65 and up watch YouTube on their TVs nearly twice as much as they did three years ago.

Older adults are more sedentary and usually possess more leisure time than younger and middle-aged adults, which may compel them to engage more with screens of all kinds. For instance, outside of social media and YouTube, one study found that older American adults typically watch TV for more hours a day than younger and middle-aged Americans. However, the same study also found that older people enjoy TV less than other leisure activities. Since many older adults are less mobile and involuntarily sedentary, TV and phone time are likely some of the most accessible sources of leisure available.

The issue of older adults and screens is becoming more of a ubiquitous, watercooler conversation, but it’s still only ever discussed with a joking, fleeting tone. People go home for the holidays, watch their parents scroll Reels by the Christmas tree, joke about it in their sibling group chats, and then resume their lives, often, frankly, just as addicted to their devices as their parents.

We’re all too aware of the problem that screen-addicted children pose. It’s easy to grow concerned about a future world run by adults who are less than literate and lack executive functioning without leaning on AI. These are our future doctors, scientists, and politicians. These are the people we’re counting on to cure terminal illnesses and pass legislation that slows Earth’s warming. We want them to have mental acuity and focus.

On the other hand, in the United States, a country that prioritizes productivity and output above personal well-being, elderly people are rendered disposable. Weak social security benefits, stringent Medicaid eligibility requirements, and high out-of-pocket costs for nursing homes and assisted living make that abundantly clear at the governmental level. Many Western families wouldn’t fathom taking in an elderly relative, especially one dealing with a health issue. And this isn’t necessarily because they don’t want to or because it’s not the cultural norm. Long hours, low wages, and high costs of living make it feel impossible, especially if there are also children to raise. When there’s already so little time and money to go around, the most expedient solution can be putting grandma in a home, out of sight and away from one’s conscience.

It’s also easy to dub elderly relatives disposable when they hold extreme, contradictory political views, making the cost and effort of putting them in assisted living a lesser pill to swallow.

Still, regardless of how many AI videos of Charlie Kirk reincarnated as Jesus they’ve shared, these conditions make a lonely, complicated time in one’s life even lonelier and more complicated. Much like teenagers, older people retreat into their phones, shrouding the ache of isolation and fear with hyper-stimulation, which only leads to a greater come-down the second it’s time to look up. This isolation is often what makes alt-right political communities online beckon like a communal Garden of Eden.

Often, when I speak with people whose parents were born outside America, the irreverence most Americans have for their elderly relatives and neighbors becomes even clearer, and it’s quite depressing. I’ve seen friends and loved ones gracefully carry the burden and responsibility of caring for elderly relatives who possess vastly different political ideologies from them, under the guise that family comes first, no matter what. I completely understand why people part from family members who hold hateful political beliefs. And I’m also inspired by those who maintain a kind of boundaried love in the face of misunderstanding, and even hate. Both decisions take immense bravery.

In general, Americans are quite comfortable classifying people as expendable or beyond repair when they behave outside the legal or cultural status quo. This is especially true with our criminal justice system, which relies on punitive action, rather than transformational or even restorative justice. We’re more apt to conceal the “problem people” from our view than to help rehabilitate them, or worse, change our social systems to prevent people from relying on precarious vices. Old people and their smartphones are no different.

We’re quick to cast judgment on the internet illiterate, falling for spam calls and sending Bitcoin to unknown contacts, but I shudder to think about what a completely internet-literate elderly population will look like. Do all people develop a kind of softness as they reach their final quarter, instinctively knitting sweaters and baking chocolate chip cookies for their grandchildren? Will those instincts kick in for a generation of zillennials with an iron grip on their caustic funny bone?

I believe that time softens our hard, sarcastic edges. I want to believe that we all end as puddles of mush. But by the time we age into earnestness, it can sometimes be too late to extend it to our elderly relatives. We should speed up the process of becoming more sincere, as the internet will continue working hard to curb it, making us feel stark and indifferent to even those who raised us.

Look up from your phone and ask your parents, grandparents, and/or neighbors questions, even if it’s awkward. They, in turn, will look up from their phones to answer, and over time, it might feel less embarrassing. There might be something to learn from even the people we disagree with or don’t understand. It might feel less uncomfortable and scary to look down the barrel of life, to confront the issues we often conceal dead in the eye. Life might even feel less like sleepwalking and more like walking upright.

There’s this blonde couple that you probably remember popping up quite a bit on your feed during COVID. The pair looks like they’re siblings or from Utah, or both. The man is what a 2020 internet would dub “a golden retriever”: perpetually smiley, upbeat, slightly aloof, and noisily feminist. His name is Hunter, and his wife is named Maya, together they’re @mayaandhunter.

The account blew up during lockdown when Hunter would post “Day in My Life as a Stay-At-Home Husband” content, in which he would engage in domestic tasks while making sincere quips about “dismantling the patriarchy.” Their comments section was and is replete with women crying, “Why aren’t all men like this??” and “May this love find me.” The couple makes many jokes about Maya being the breadwinner and Hunter being utterly comfortable with being the homemaker. In one video, he’s asked to “shake his moneymaker,” and in response, he grabs Maya and jokingly shakes her around.

Similar to any other domestic content creator, like Nara Smith and Hannah Neelman, Hunter doesn’t completely lack an income, despite what his online presentation might suggest. While he doesn’t lead with it in any of his videos, he had been enrolled in law school and studying for the bar for the first half of the 2020s. Unlike Maya, who had been working a full-time job at her family’s manufacturing business, at least at one point, Hunter may have had a more flexible schedule, allowing him to engage in more of the domestic labor. But they certainly don’t lead with any of this knowledge, flirting with rage bait to earn views and playfully interrogating haters in millennial-optimistic tones.

I hadn’t thought about this couple for a while, until I attempted to watch the most recent season of Beef. The latest addition to A24’s catalog of exposition-dense, eating-the-rich media centers a power-hungry middle manager at a SoCal country club and his British, aspiring interior designer wife. A conflict sparks when two young employees at the country club, who are in deep puppy love, catch the manager and his wife aggressively fighting, witnessing the husband threaten to hit his wife with a golf club. The young couple, played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny, get a video of this fight, and muster up the courage to use it as blackmail to get a higher salary and health insurance.

I couldn’t tell you what happens next, as the writing was too trite for me to continue watching. But what did keep me hooked for at least the first two episodes was the relationship between Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny’s characters. While the characters are 29 and 28 years old respectively, they possess sweetly juvenile notions about life and love, at one point lamenting that they only need each other and the beach. They’re deeply sensitive, working through relational conflict with airport self-help book platitudes and pop psychology terms far from their original context. Very “I hear what you’re saying, babe, I’m validating your emotions,” and unwavering confidence in each other’s ability to achieve medium-sized professional goals.

Melton expertly brings this type of soft boy, Girlfriend Guy, to life. It’s the type of serial monogamist guy I’m assuming many of us knew in middle and high school. Vaguely Mormon-feeling somehow, gentlemanly to the detriment of his swag, rigidly assuming the role of Prince Charming since the day he took his first date to a sixth-grade dance. Some might describe this type of man as “whipped,” but in my eyes, that carries a different, more negative connotation of coercion. A “whipped” partner doesn’t make any moves without his wife’s okay, remaining firmly at her hip like a Labrador.

The Girlfriend Guy, or more commonly the “Wife Guy,” does not lack a sense of self. Rather, being a husband is one of the more major facets of his identity. He brings his wife up any chance he can to innocently brag about her, or purely because she’s the person he likes to talk to and about most. I’ve encountered this type of man in corporate social settings. He’s typically a decade or two my senior, and I usually find him pretty charming. I find it endearing to see a man’s face light up at the mention of his wife, as it still occurs only occasionally. It’s still not uncommon to hear men grumble about their wives, or drop the sporadic “My Wife” joke, especially when they’ve had a few drinks at a Thursday night happy hour.

However, the Wife Guy influencers are of a different breed, heavily playing up their attachment to their significant other for the camera. And they’re usually just one half of the package, as Wife Guys are most successful online when audiences can see them spoiling their wives in real time.

While Maya and Hunter are the anti-partriarchy influencer couple, Matt and Abby Howard are the we’re-not-regular-parents-we’re-cool-parents couple. They have a kind of rabid, Disney Adult hyperactivity; the aforementioned millennial optimism on crack. The millennial identity is characterized as a child with the responsibilities and bank account of an adult, and that certainly colors how Matt and Abby discuss marriage. Their videos are flush with anti-adulting quips about marriage, in the vein of “You mean we get to have a sleepover every night?” and “Wait, can you believe we get to grow old together!!!”

Noah and Lori, on the other hand, play antagonists, acting out the role of an aunt and uncle who are constantly, half-jokingly nipping at one another. The juvenility persists, with the pair posting videos captioned “Normalize tickling your husband for 15 seconds when he makes you mad” and “Loving you is so fun,” wherein Lori hangs on Noah like a koala bear. These types of couples are also known to act out “skits” of sorts, typically involving one of them speaking to the camera about the other partner, while the partner stands behind them and laughs or tries to interject.

Mushy, infantile millennial couple content sharply contrasts Gen Z’s more nihilistic #ihatemybf content, which also leans partially sarcastic. Many Gen Z girls are fond of talking down on their boyfriends online, posting videos captioned “When he’s talking down on himself but I highkey agree so idk what to say.” This attitude mirrors the stereotype of Gen Z being more fluent in snark and more rife with realists than ever-sparkly millennials. Though millennial women pioneered the girl boss generation, Gen Z women have taken “I hate men” sentiments much further and more literally.

There is nothing immediately wrong with Wife Guy content creators and corny millennial couples, beyond their sickly sweetness making me nearly faint from second-hand embarrassment. But there is something rather icky about the way everything, and I mean, everything, they do is made into content. It’s well enough established that oversharing online is taboo and that highly parasocial influencers give us the heebie jeebies. Perhaps my prudish attitude towards PDA is tinting my view, but I do think some aspects of romantic relationships should be purely between you and your partner. The kooky, absurd aspects of romance that only happen behind closed doors are part of what makes relationships sacred, even beyond the more out-of-body, stars-in-your-eyes aspects of love. I don’t, for example, need or want to know the stupid names you call each other, or the fact that you maintain conversation when one of you is taking a shit. Keep those ridiculous, stupid things secret, so they remain sacred.

I’m also often very suspicious of men who need to make a big show out of doing an act of kindness for their girlfriend or wife, as it often reads as though they’re asking for a pat on the back. Maya and Hunter have an ongoing series in which Hunter cooks food for Maya to help her recover from her ED. He explains each component of the meal to the camera, before setting the plate before her and offering a quick peck on top of her head. This is once again a kind of act of kindness that feels most precious to me when it’s exchanged between two people, and not broadcast to the public.

But then again, I guess I have to remember that social media is now a big part of how young people figure out how to treat their partners, how they learn just about anything. Maya and Hunter are to budding millennial and Gen Z couples what Barbie (2023) was to much of the United States; explicitly spelled-out manuals for how to broadly prioritize gender equality, manuals that still likely won’t be clear enough. Influencers perform, and romance and chivalry are virtues that we’ve long enjoyed having acted out for us. I shouldn’t be so surprised that it’s being eaten up so readily.

There’s a sense of defensiveness that rears its head when you begin sharing creative work with people. I’ve certainly found this to be true with non-fiction writing, and in most cases, it strengthens the work. When I’m putting forth a particular perspective, I think through all the different angles and edge cases that might alter that perspective. Any Achilles heels within my argument, any instances in which someone might misread my point of view. I’m sure some people are approaching my work assuming positive intent, but to make my argument airtight, I usually presume most will be approaching it with pessimism and illiteracy. I assume that everyone reading it has elementary-level reading comprehension, or is, at the very least, only scanning the piece.

I find that sharp defensiveness causes artists to operate in one of two modes: they either reject a sturdy perspective in favor of vague, widely pleasing non-viewpoints, or harden their point of view and assume expertise to a rigid degree. In other words, highly defensive artists melt their arguments down to bathwater or fortify them into stone. I enjoy art that dabbles in either of these approaches: vibes-based, prosey writing, and hard, highly argumentative articles, for instance.

In pop music, I find that this toughened, expert-assumed approach manifests in artists writing as though they have it all figured out, offering listeners the keys to the universe. This sense of definitiveness, of having unlocked life’s immovable truths and almost being beyond self-improvement, is a feeling I experienced immediately post-grad in my early twenties, when I got settled into my first job. Having hit an early stroke of good fortune, I naively assumed the role of master of the universe, and often pontificated on my newsletter as such. Conversations with friends were all heavy nods and easy exchanges of surface-level advice. Just breathe, just drink water, just get off your phone, it was all that easy.

My younger self, with her daily meditation and journaling practice, made some good points. But I’ve found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that the meaning of life can be distilled down to something as simple and final-seeming as “breathe” or “it’s all about the little things.” It is, and it isn’t all that.

Lorde and Kacey Musgraves are interesting case studies in this shift in perspective, in claiming to have it all figured out, only to reject that sense of fully knowing almost immediately.

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I can’t pinpoint the moment precisely, but at some point in my childhood, I came to believe that rock bands were going to be a much more important part of my adulthood than they’ve ended up being. Perhaps it was the many portrayals of garage bands I ingested via films like Freaky Friday (2003), Jennifer’s Body (2009), and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules (2011), or The Killers and Green Day soundtracking various suburban-set, coming-of-age films and CW originals throughout the 2000s. My family car rides were accompanied by a wide range of bands from Guns N’ Roses to No Doubt, along with anecdotes from my parents about the concerts they attended in the 80s. Born and raised in Seattle, I learned very early on that grunge band culture was baked into the fabric of my city. Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell were among my mom’s top celebrity crushes.

When I was in middle school, harder rock gave way to indie, with bands like The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys being among the trendiest groups to stream. Millennials, who were then the older siblings and babysitters of my close friends, favored Passion Pit, Cage the Elephant, and Kings of Leon. I, lamely, stanned 5 Seconds of Summer, and attempted to get into bands they cited as inspiration, like Blink-182 and Good Charlotte, which is very brave of me to admit, everybody clap.

Young adulthood, according to the movies, was a montage of catching a friend’s band play at a local bar and bumping into your soulmate in the crowd, or being the dreamy girl in the front row, swaying with her eyes closed, adrift in the music. On and off screen, the more obscure-sounding your favorite band was, the more culturally attuned you were. Those who revered pop stars were ditzy, shallow, and artistically underbaked. Those who listened to bands that played real, loud music, with real, weighted instruments were emotionally in-touch cerebral tastemakers. This was at least the world as I saw it, as a girl who felt a natural draw to melodramatic pop stars, but ventured deep into the annals of indie bands’ discographies in an attempt to convey good taste and high intellect.

Today, however, rock bands, and bands in general, have dissipated in mainstream culture. They’re undoubtedly still around, and I’m sure many of you listen to them. But they don’t play as big a role in monoculture as they did decades ago.

A couple of years back, the podcast The Rest is Entertainment pointed out that in the first half of the 1980s, there were 146 weeks in which a band held a number one chart position. In the first half of the 1990s, there were 141 weeks when bands held a number one spot. But in the first half of the 2020s, there were only three weeks in which a band reached the top chart position.

For The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey ponders the many reasons why bands have fallen off. While the pop genre has always been dominant, it seems to encompass even more mainstream listenership than it did in decades past, nudging rock and even hip hop closer to the periphery. There are several reasons for this. For one, the barrier to entry for making bedroom pop on your computer is far lower than garage rock; no instruments or rehearsal space required.

Lynskey also writes that selling multiple personalities to audiences is much trickier than launching a single one. It takes much more skill to convey the idiosyncrasies and dynamics of a group, and perhaps a longer form of media and a sturdier attention span. He writes that the MTV era of televised music programs made formalized band introductions more straightforward. Today, most people are finding new music through Spotify and TikTok algorithms, both of which remove artists from their particular contexts, compiling them into a kind of monotonous sludge of clips and soundbites on a feed. Lynskey points out that even the portrait orientation of an iPhone video for a TikTok is more tailored to a solo artist than a group, as you can’t fit everyone in the frame.

The punchiest voice always wins online, and the voice of a group is naturally a bit more muffled. Unless, of course, the group is a pop boyband or girl group, in which every member is engineered to be highly singular, each person fulfilling a different, but equally potent archetype. In a rock band, the separate players, while impressive on their own, are their most extraordinary when put together.

Interestingly, just because there’s less mainstream noise surrounding bands doesn’t mean there isn’t a curiosity about them. The cross-generational enthusiasm surrounding Geese makes this abundantly clear. As does the internet’s tendency to romanticize Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 “Silver Springs” performance, in which Stevie Nicks sings the bridge directly to Lindsey Buckingham, which was later replicated in the YA novel turned Amazon Prime series Daisy Jones and the Six. There’s clearly a mild interest in the relational drama that can unfold within band dynamics.

But modern curiosity about bands still feels deeply rooted in nostalgia, which will undoubtedly hinder bands from developing contemporary identities. boygenius’ 2023 Rolling Stones cover was a direct reference to Nirvana’s 1994 cover. And whenever Geese is brought up by an esteemed outlet like The New Yorker, they are simultaneously praised for “reviving” a certain style of rock n’ roll, as well as pioneering a new style of music.

Whatever the future of “rock” is will certainly differ from whatever it looked like in the past, not only because more synthetic instruments are intervening, but because the post-TikTok generations are apprehensive about holding sincere eye contact, Gen Z Stare notwithstanding. Rock bands are classically confrontational and sweaty, their eyes and vocals piercing an audience that returns energy back at them. You can feel the crackle of electricity flickering between the crowd and the performers. In contrast, I’ve seen far more people in my generation try to become DJs than try to start bands. And today’s layman DJs occupy a more reticent, stereotypically Zoomer role than bands at functions: head down, eyes and hands busy with their computer, the audience members gyrating in their own bubbles.

Having grown up completely on the internet, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are also far more aware that everything is a performance, leading them to double down on their virtues of irony and disaffection, staring blankly rather than with their eyes and mouths agape. They know that even a performance of authenticity is still a performance, especially when it’s mediated through a screen or acted out on a stage. This perhaps draws them closer to artists who more openly and deliberately curate themselves, most of whom play in the pop space. Rockers, on the other hand, are typically conceived as far more genuine, evoking the image of misfits spontaneously finding each other, jamming in their parents’ garage. To younger generations, “authenticity” in music may be less about having a stripped-back facade and more about being honest about what that facade is intending to convey.

Charli xcx is a pop artist who has succeeded in feeding Gen Z sincere sentiments coated in a healthy gloss of irony. In a recent profile, British Vogue revealed a line from a song off Charli’s forthcoming album and standalone follow-up to Brat: “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making rock music.” British Vogue ran with this, misleadingly sub-titling the piece “Charli XCX Lets Vogue In On Her Rock Reinvention,” priming audiences for the pop star to make a complete pivot into rock.

A few weeks later, Charli released the song containing the lyrics in question, fittingly titled “Rock Music.” While the track contains a chorus of highly distorted guitars and cymbals, it’s unmistakably a pop song, reading as a playful poke at rock’s, at times, melodramatic conception of “authenticity.” The lyrics seem to suggest that “repackaging” is necessary for pop stars, like herself, to be received seriously and with sincerity, in the way rock stars often automatically are. “Wow, I’m really banging my head / I’m really hurting my neck,” Charli drawls in the second verse, deadpan. In the music video, she trashes a hotel room and smokes a handful of cigarettes in a moto leather jacket, ashing them on piles of even more cigarettes.

In response to the song’s mixed reception, Charli has refused explanation, writing in an Instagram post: “i’m not gonna explain where i was coming from with ‘rock music’, but all i know is that things can be funny, earnest, sincere, and joyful all at the same time and that’s what i feel about a lot of the things i make.”

I can envision rock bands making a mainstream return, though the music may sound different than the rock of decades past. And I can only foresee it happening if fans can get onboard with the fact that the rock image and sound is part-manufactured, that deciding to present “authentically” is as much a sartorial choice as pop stars’ latex and glitter. In a recent Substack article, Eliza McLamb wrote about her surprise in finding out that Geese was a client of Chaotic Good, a music marketing firm that helps artists rapidly ascend in popularity, in part, by making hundreds of fake fan accounts to influence public opinion, propagating what many refer to as “industry plants.”

But McLamb, a musician herself, ponders what artist wouldn’t game algorithms if it guaranteed them success? What musician doesn’t want to play music aloud to an audience of thousands? Even Kurt Cobain, who appeared as authentic and “real” as musicians come, was hungry for a large stage. There is, in fact, a cunning side to even the rawest-seeming rock stars, and a soft belly on every product of the pop machine.

Where have the bands gone? They’re still here, assuming new and old forms. But it may be a minute until we see them reach their former chart standings, so long as they continue presenting so earnestly, and the young brain-rotted public, of which I belong, remains so barbed.

Several weeks ago, 59-year-old Simone Cromer, otherwise known as Club Chalamet, announced that she would be shuttering the doors of her Timothée Chalamet fan account, or at least shifting its focus. Known for her flair for online dramatics, including clapping back at her critics in Twitter replies and pontificating on Chalamet’s awards odds in long-form captions, Cromer shared that she would be shifting to a more publicist-esque digital presence. Moving forward, Club Chalamet will post in support of Chalamet’s forthcoming Dune: Part Three release, but will cease to share the more fiery, emotion-laden content she’s become known for over the past few years, citing a change in the fandom as the impetus.

“So much has changed from what we all initially signed up for that it doesn’t resemble what lured us here in the first place,” reads Cromer’s public statement on the Club Chalamet Instagram. She writes that a notable shift began in the Club Chalamet fandom approximately one year ago, and since then, the clock has been ticking.

I’d argue that the clock began ticking long before that, though, starting around April 2023, when Timothée Chalamet began dating Kylie Jenner. This is when his identity as the internet’s lead soft boy, the longest-reigning White Boy of the Month, began to crack.

Chalamet ascended to fame on the crest of mass girl adoration and has always seemed to be at his most publicly favorable when he’s in the girls’ good graces. His roles in Call Me By Your Name (2017), Ladybird (2017), and Little Women (2019) each offered a distinct, realistically idealized boy archetype. Feminized, bilingual yearner, apathetic burnout, boy-next-door yanking on your hair, each practically engineered for Jeff Buckley TikTok edits. Offscreen, he was clumsily charming and bashful in interviews, with a huge, toothy grin, tripping over his words, clearly nervous about saying the right thing. This only further endeared him to the masses, transferring his onscreen boyfriendness onto his actual person. A former theater nerd and Kid Cudi stan weighing less than 150 pounds; surely, this seemed like a boy any of us could have a chance with.

By 2023, on the precipice of signing his multi-year Warner Brothers deal, Chalamet had achieved 90s DiCaprio, pop star-level status. Wonka (2023) kept him on the girls’ good side, offering an opportunity for all of us to giggle at his PG-rated singing and dancing over Christmas break. But after that, his press strategy started to shift, perhaps realizing that teen idols make money, but don’t necessarily win Oscars.

Chalamet’s trolling antics began with the press tour for A Complete Unknown (2024). He wore Bob Dylan drag to the premieres, rode a Lime bike onto the red carpet, and adopted Gen Z slang in interviews with the press. He did all this with Kylie Jenner firmly at his side, confident enough in his masculinity and relationship to act foolishly without fear of losing his perfect girlfriend or mass appeal. In his acceptance speech for his first Screen Actors Guild Award win, he said that he aspires to be one of the greats, citing the names of renowned actors and athletes that inspire him. “I’m really in the pursuit of greatness,” he posited. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.”

This boisterous shift in behavior was unlike what we’ve come to expect from Chalamet and other esteemed artists in his field. The DiCaprios and Day-Lewises of the world are known for their reticence, their quiet confidence, only ever really emoting when the camera is rolling, and otherwise articulating themselves with careful poise and eloquence. Taking a page from the generation succeeding him, Chalamet was beginning to toe the line between sincerity and irony. But his immense talent and strident ambition kept him in the running as “one of the greats.” We loved him all the more for letting us see his sweat, if even for a moment.

But the press tour for Marty Supreme is when irony gave way to bafoonery. Chalamet’s press swag became increasingly hypebeast; baggy hoodies and windbreakers, Chrome Hearts ping pong paddle holder on his hip, bright orange suit matching Jenner’s orange leather gown, hand on her ass on the red carpet. A latent blaccent began rearing its head. He hopped on a verse of an EsDeekid song, evoking high school SoundCloud rap group sensibilities.

Looking back, these antics read as a deliberate shift in strategy, a means of becoming more of a teenage boy hero than a teenage girl heartthrob. All of this came to a head when he sat down with guy’s guy hero Matthew McConaughey at a Variety x CNN Town Hall in front of students at the University of Texas. This is when Chalamet uttered his fatal line about being glad he doesn’t work in ballet or opera, industries “no one cares about anymore,” a moment I’ve avoided writing about out of fear of discoursing it to death.

With the way people online were reacting to this offhand comment, you would have thought Chalamet had walked into an opera house with a live bomb. As a former ballet dancer myself, I didn’t take much personal offense to it. I get what he was trying to say, as I often talk about low ballet attendance and fine arts illiteracy with my dance friends. He immediately tried to cover up what he said, apologizing quickly and acknowledging that he took unnecessary shots. But it was too late, the moment had already been captured, and Chalamet had long been teetering on the brink of intolerability.

I’d venture to guess that many of the people who got upset about this comment hadn’t been to the ballet or opera in years. Rather, I think the public, as well as Chalamet’s predominantly young women fanbase, had become peeved with his newfound bro swagger and used his comment as grounds for cancellation.

There is a certain flavor of offensiveness attached to the teenage boy aesthetic, a kind of implied snark that can make even an adult woman squirm, breezing by a group of teen boys at the mall. That edge is, of course, part of what makes teenage boys cool. Early Chalamet was the opposite of edgy: all wide eyes, graciousness, and approachability. Since then, he’s leaned cockier and more sarcastic, aligning himself with objects of adolescent boy affection: hip hop, basketball, and a girlfriend with an uncannily perfected female form. His softness has firmed up, and the teen girls have understandably lost interest as a result. This is no longer a product meant to serve them.

This reminds me of Drake’s similar transformation from 2016 feminist poser to 2025 teenage boy sympathizer. In the 2010s, Drake was revered by women for his sensitivity, sympathizing with strippers, and outputting pseudo-girl power anthems like “Make Me Proud” and “Nice For What,” the latter of which featured cameos of successful, creative women like Issa Rae and Misty Copeland in the music video. These tracks arrived slightly ahead of Chalamet’s come-up, when Obama-era optimism gave way to mainstream feminism, making the act of male allyship en vogue.

Since then, however, Drake has shed his Hotline Bling-pink facade and aligned completely with the boys. In 2018, he was outed as an alleged absentee father, and in 2022, he claimed Megan Thee Stallion lied about getting shot by Tory Lanez. Over the past few months, he’s been cozying up with Twitch streamers, embarking on what GQ dubs a “misguided over-embrace of youth culture.” He is noisy about his sports gambling wins and losses, losing $1,000,000 on the most recent Super Bowl. His carelessness with women and money only emphasizes his security in his masculinity and wealth. There’s nothing manlier than a guy brazenly putting his foot in his mouth, only to somehow keep landing on top.

The most recent episode of Nymphet Alumni suggested that we’re in an “Age of the Boy.” Deluges of deep-fried brain rot, 6-7-adjacent memes, and a Supreme and middle school boy swag resurgence may be correcting the behemoth “Year of the Girl,” which brought us Barbie (2023), The Eras Tour, The Renaissance Tour, and the “Girl, so confusing” remix with Charli xcx and Lorde.

Every few years, we seem to remember that teenage girls are a profitable demographic; one of the biggest takeaways at the end of 2023 was the economic impact of girls buying concert tickets, merch, and pink clothes for Barbie screenings. I always find this hilarious, given the fact that the Western teenage girl identity is heavily reliant on consumption: makeup, clothing, hair doo-dads, pink razors, and pink pencil cases. The teenage boy's identity, on the other hand, is marked by a lack of consumption; denying excessive adornment to one’s body, face, and bedroom, rejecting soap and clean socks. A girl stick figure is simply a boy stick figure with a bow, skirt, and purse.

Beyond its economic impact, fandom, in particular, showcases the power of teenage girls as cultural tastemakers. Throughout history, the biggest pop acts in the world have stood on the shoulders of girls and queer people performing free labor to promote their work, be it organizing fan clubs, running stan accounts, selling homemade merch, or crafting fan edits. I was recently reminded of “Rainbow Direction,” a One Direction fan-coordinated event, in which different sections of stadiums were assigned specific colors to light up on their phones, creating a rainbow effect during the song “Little Things” to show support for LGBTQ+ fans at concerts.

It’s accepted, and even expected, that teenage girls outwardly express their reverence for artists they love in enthusiastic ways, sobbing at the barricades and publishing hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction for free. This is the same level of unabashed earnestness that motivates a figure like Club Chalamet to view her fan account as a site of real, emotionally driven promotional work. Which is exactly what it is. Girl-conditioned enthusiasm is what drives culture forward.

For this reason, I think that male artists who are unafraid to align themselves with girl fans, to be a surrogate boyfriend, of sorts, or even a genuine ally, will always have the most staying power in pop culture. An artist like Harry Styles has been able to survive queer-baiting and performative allyship allegations by never once rejecting his title of heartthrob, and even doubling down on the validity of teenage girl taste. In his Rolling Stones profile from 2017, he spoke to the power of teenage girl earnestness, saying: “Teenage-girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.”

Teenage boys, of course, are emotional beings, deserving of their own media to ingest and figures to look up to. All that’s to say that girls and women can tell when they’ve been pandered to, and they’ll cease their free promotional efforts just as fast as they commenced them. They aren’t to be taken for fools. In the case of Timothée Chalamet, it’s clear that even aligning yourself with a bros-before-hoes-adjacent aesthetic is enough for the girls to avert their gaze and become less tolerant of public stumblings.

It all gets to a point, as they say. There’s only so much water a dam can hold until it breaks. Only so much pressure a room can contain until the windows shatter. It’s often hard to know when you’ve arrived at that place in your own body or mind, until the collapse actually begins to happen. When you’ve manipulated your own reality for long enough, thought one truth while living another, it all comes crashing down in a completely ordinary, unexpected moment. When your sweater gets caught on a doorknob after a terrible day of bad luck, tugging you back when you’re trying to walk forward, your blood pressure spikes, and all you want to do is tear the sweater to shreds. But your emotion is at no fault of the doorknob, or the sweater, or even physics.

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There’s a pilates studio in Los Angeles that specializes in syncing workouts with women’s menstrual cycles. I click on the studio’s home page and am confronted with a vagina. A smooth, Barbie-like, leotard-clad bump positioned above a pair of slender white thighs, rear slightly sticking out to create a thigh gap. The black-and-white image evokes Tumblr sensibilities, almost pro-ana, with its graininess and Caucasianness. But I know that isn’t this studio’s intention.

“Follicular. Ovulation. Luteal. Menstrual. Cycle syncing fitness for women” reads the text overlaid on the pelvis. “Strong in every phase,” offers their slogan. The studio offers drop-in pilates, weight lifting, yoga, and ballet classes for women, as well as a schedule of classes tailored to the different phases of the menstrual cycle. Rather than forcing a “one-size-fits-all program,” the classes align movement with the body’s “natural rhythms.”

Power and strength classes are designed for those in their follicular or ovulation phases, periods of high energy, whereas sculpting and lengthening classes are designed for luteal and menstruation phases, when energy dwindles. However, the language of the class descriptions emphasizes choice, affirming that women should feel empowered to choose the intensity that honors how they feel on that particular day. A photo of the Reformer Room shows ribbons of cream-colored tissue on the ceiling, almost flesh-like in appearance. The studio also features an infrared sauna, coined “The Recovery Womb” on the website. All-inclusive memberships start at $300 for eight classes a month.

The web copy isn’t laced with any twinge of irony; the models’ expressions are stern and focused. I can’t find a single smile. The branding suggests that the service being offered is luxurious and informed, distancing “menstruation” from its associations with schoolyard jokes and carefree-woman-in-white-pants Tampax commercials. I’m not trying to snark on this pilates studio, I’m really not. If cycle-syncing is going to get more women working out that otherwise wouldn’t, it’s likely a positive thing. Though the company is relying on language that could easily be weaponized when wielded by the wrong tongue.

Recently, there’s been an influx of chatter on TikTok and Instagram Reels about the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and its effects on physical appearance, appetite, and energy levels. During the luteal phase, which begins around day fifteen of a twenty-eight-day cycle, progesterone levels increase to thicken the walls of one’s uterine lining to prepare for a potential pregnancy. If pregnancy doesn’t occur, hormone levels drop, and menstruation is kicked off, causing the uterine lining to shed. According to Cleveland Clinic, symptoms of the luteal phase include mood changes, tender breasts, bloating, acne, and changes in appetite.

TikTok is nothing if not rife with armchair experts energetically postulating advice that’s rarely backed by facts, but rather supported by the speaker’s aggressive pathos. This advice is often communicated direct-to-camera, eyes wide, hands waving around the face urgently. “You need to be eating cottage cheese on toast.” “You need to get face framing layers.” “You need to wait eight hours to respond to his text if it took him four to respond to yours.”

I will say there’s something quite compelling about these barrages of information, especially when they’re reinforced by an echo chamber of assent in the comments, or framed as a kind of unearthed discovery (“I have this theory that…,” “So I just figured out…,” and so on). From big sisters to group chats to Cosmopolitan magazine, girls have long looked to one another for the keys to the universe in societies that were designed without their agency in mind. There is no hacking our way into becoming mythically perfect women. But any tip that claims to get us even marginally closer is worth a second look, even if it always ends up being snake oil.

“Luteal phase” is the latest buzzword among these advice-savvy young women online. Search the term on TikTok and Reels, and you’ll find dozens of women joking about their differing self-confidence levels at various phases of their cycle. The first half of a video will read “ovulation,” along with photos of women beaming with full faces of makeup. The second half will read “luteal” and feature an unflattering, makeup-free photo of them frowning with a double chin. “How you know you’re in your luteal phase,” another video quips, a girl zooming in on a zit sprouting on her chin with the front-facing camera, grating horror movie music playing in the background.

Other posts are far more sincere. Advice about how to best nourish yourself during your luteal phase. “The ten things every girl should know about her luteal phase,” with a clip of a girl wading in a freshwater stream, face tilted up to the sun. Videos made by licensed dietitians and dermatologists, along with self-proclaimed wellness gurus. Rebecca Leigh, a holistic nutritionist interested in “feminine self-development,” “nervous system[s],” and “energetics,” posts rage-baity content about the predominance of biology and matter over mind. In one interview clip, she suggests that women shouldn’t make any big decisions during their luteal phase, as hormone fluctuation can impair their judgment, exaggerating the severity of situations.

Biological essentialism exists on two ends of a horseshoe. On one end, vocal conservatives delegitimize the existence of trans people, and on the other, suspiciously apolitical, but aesthetically liberal TikTokers with stark white kitchens, meal prep according to their calendars. Typically, little to no science underpins either perspective.

One study found that only one-third of TikTokers advocating for cycle syncing provide credentials, and very few offer any scientific evidence. This makes sense, given there’s little conclusive research on whether syncing diet and exercise to one’s cycle is effective at maximizing energy. Several outlets, like New York-Presbyterian Hospital, provide suggestions for what to eat during different phases of your cycle. But these recommendations are standard healthy-eating suggestions, not especially tailored to menstruation, including lean proteins, complex carbohydrates, leafy green vegetables, and sources of iron, which makes sense given that women are typically more iron-deficient than men. And while exercise can relieve menstrual pain, Harvard School of Public Health shares that further research is required to determine whether cycle-syncing proves especially beneficial.

These vague, inconclusive findings contrast with the rigidity of TikTok recommendations, likely because the research isn’t trying to appease an algorithm. There are no wishy-washy opinions on social media; hard, decisive commentary will always receive the boost. I suppose these creators aren’t doing anything immediately wrong: syncing your diet or exercise to your cycle won’t necessarily harm you physically. But broadcasting pseudo-science surrounding sex and gender to a conservative Western public is a dangerous game, given how false science claims have been historically used to justify race- and gender-based violence, from phrenology to hysteria.

There is no way to adequately discuss the challenges of menstruation using masculine epistemology or hot-and-cold TikTok lingo. Both frameworks emphasize extreme binaries, senses of right and wrong, and best and worst. Achievement hinges on another’s subjugation; there is no version of reality in which all receive what they need. The weaker links are cast out like pills of fuzz picked off a sweater.

I am glad that women are finding outlets to commiserate about the challenges of female biology, which are made even more arduous by misogynistic cultures. But I think these women should be more mindful of how they talk, as misinformed ramblings about the preeminence and defectiveness of female biology have been used to disempower generations of women, stripping them of their rights to bodily and sociopolitical autonomy. If we place excessive weight on fleeting moments of insanity, which afflict all people, systematically tying them to our fixed selves, people in power will use them to justify denying us power. If a woman is unfit to make a consequential decision during her luteal cycle, how could she possibly be fit to lead a country, for instance?

I understand why women search for biological advantages in a culture that makes us feel second-rate because of our bodies. There’s gotta be some upside to all of this pain, hence the domination of “divine feminine” ideology, “women’s intuition,” and even the idea that our cycles are synced with the moon. If we look at our DNA closely enough, maybe we’ll find something that finally proves us superior, or at least worthy of personhood. If we’re born with built-in pain and knowledge that’s inaccessible to men, perhaps we’re indispensable after all. Perhaps we have something inherently valuable to offer the universe, something worth granting us agency.

While women do possess valuable knowledge, they weren’t necessarily endowed with it at birth, at least not any more than men were. The knowledge that’s particular to us develops out of the experience of living in this particular culture in these particular bodies.

In a similar vein to all this, Mikala Jamison recently wrote a great essay against women-only gyms. While acknowledging that women-only gyms can be safe spaces for women who have experienced harassment at the gym in the past, she wonders if women are “preoccupied with having an emotionally seamless experience,” turning away from their discomfort with what’s unfamiliar and intimidating by separating themselves from such spaces altogether. Jamison writes that her initial discomfort in gyms wasn’t born out of men intimidating her, but by her not being physically strong and capable yet, and seeing men who were. What’s helped her feel less out of place is simply working out in gyms where men are, proving that she has just as much right to be there as them. “Fitness spaces are mine, too, and I feel deeply emboldened by making that known in a co-ed gym among men who damn well should see me and other women there,” she writes.

Likewise, the appeal of cycle-synced, biological determinism is a promise of logic and security. A means of dismissing physical discomfort and sexism by leaning into that which is “natural” and separate. In reality, men and women are fundamentally more similar than they are different. Each gender is overcome with transient moments of lethargy and lunacy, tied to the physical and metaphysical. Neither gender should be solely defined by its singular parts. Women menstruate, and they don’t. They need to eat, they need to move their bodies, and they need to rest. They are capable of overcoming great challenges, of imparting great change, and also capable of suffering and wreaking havoc. No universal key exists. There is no opting out of culture and solely into biology, and vice versa.

Making the leap from girl to woman in the public eye is no simple feat. Public viewers are generally dismayed when child actors grow up and lose their unbridled rosiness. Given America’s tendency to fetishize childlike traits in women (frailness, hairlessness, empty-headedness), the transition from girl to woman is a specific kind of cultural tragedy. Women become aware of being gawked at in ways that young girls, not yet hardened by social conditioning, are thought to be oblivious to. They may grow uncomfortable with this perception, or wield their perceived charm and sexual appeal in their favor, or both. Women are calculated and in control; girls are accidentally charming and beautiful. You can imagine which one America finds more romantic.

Olivia Rodrigo achieved mainstream popularity on the precipice of adulthood, straddling the girl-woman boundary literally, as well as sonically and visually with an aesthetic identity I’ve previously dubbed the “twenty-something teen.” This is in sharp contrast to Sabrina Carpenter, who dove headfirst into Grown Woman branding, to the elation and chagrin of many.

Carpenter and Rodrigo are often compared and contrasted due to their 2021 beef, which inspired Rodrigo’s breakout hit “drivers license.” In the song, Rodrigo laments her past boyfriend, Disney actor/singer-flop Joshua Bassett, who jumped into dating Carpenter two weeks after their breakup. Rodrigo dubs Carpenter “that blonde girl” who is “everything she’s insecure about.” The public turned on Carpenter, who returned a few weak comeback songs, before finally finding her footing on her 2022 album emails i can’t send, deploring the public’s cruel treatment of her on “because i liked a boy.”

The two artists have since assumed separate identities outside of this tiff, but remain inexplicably linked due to their public personas being direct foils. Sabrina Carpenter is decidedly sugar, and Olivia Rodrigo is spice. Carpenter is soft pinks and blues, bouncy curls, disco synths, and Dolly Parton vocals. Rodrigo is purple and black, electric guitars, girlish screams, chipped nail polish, and ripped fishnets.

I’m a fan of both artists, but have tended to reach for Carpenter’s music more, perhaps because I find her more relatable, being closer in age to me. Not completely unlike Britney and Christina, Carpenter poses as a bad girl pretending to be good, while Rodrigo is a good girl pretending to be bad. And Carpenter’s performance is a bit more convincing. Stomping around in Doc Martens and black cherry lipstick, Rodrigo has often seemed like a Disney Channel rendition of a bad girl to me, toggling between defiant feminist lite guitar tracks and piano ballads about her physical insecurities. I’ve always felt a little outside the target demo.

But I’ve been excited to see how Rodrigo’s artistic identity evolves. Her sophomore album, Guts, successfully matched the magic of her first album, Sour, but didn’t necessarily surpass it. Both tracklists follow a similar formula, opening with a girl power banger and then toggling between guitar and piano, before closing with a more esoteric statement about Relationships or The Industry. It’s a formula that’s brought her a lot of success, but a formula nonetheless. While I think that women artists face excessive pressure to completely “reinvent themselves” with each project, I do think some variance over time keeps things fresh. To Rodrigo’s credit, there’s only so much personal change one undergoes between eighteen and twenty. But now, at twenty-three, I’m interested in seeing how coming a bit more of age has changed her relationship to music, if at all.

The cover for Rodrigo’s forthcoming third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, is a slight shift for her aesthetically, evoking twee sensibilities in a pink, Peter Pan collar dress and socks with heels. On the cover, Rodrigo is swinging high in the sky on a swingset, head flung back, in ecstasy, dress flying up to expose her underwear. The image bears a slight resemblance to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 painting The Swing, with its buoyancy and carefree quality. It’s as if Rodrigo might fall backwards off the swing and land face-first on the earth, which could be five or five hundred feet away; there’s no way of knowing.

The signature purple has also shifted to bubblegum pink; a pink wall on Melrose Ave features her album title in a curly font, along with bubblegum for passersby to chew and stick on the wall. If the color palette and playfulness of this rollout are any indicator, Rodrigo may have finally committed to Evergreen Girl branding once and for all.

Relatedly, Rodrigo just ended a two-year relationship with British actor Louis Partridge, her longest and most close-in-age public boyfriend to date. Before Partridge, teenage Rodrigo had been linked to internet creatives Adam Faze and Zack Bia, who are six and seven years older than her. Her relationship with Partridge, at least from the outside, seemed a lot less clandestine and suffocating. The two were constantly seen giggling on Instagram at Glastonbury, Wimbledon, and strolling arm-in-arm in Manchester.

There’s no evidence of the relationship ending with a harrowing crescendo, apart from some tears shed outside Lily Allen’s Christmas party in December. Rodrigo is known to kick off her rollouts with a tried-and-true heartbreak track, but the lead single off you seem pretty sad is “drop dead,” a sparkly, synth-pop track about the onset of infatuation. Rodrigo alludes to Partridge being the subject of this song, dropping their star signs in the bridge and situating herself in Europe, with nods to Versailles and “taking that Eurostar to France.”

The music video for the single, directed by Petra Collins, features Rodrigo running around the Palace of Versailles in frilly socks, a babydoll-style top, and bloomers, dancing unabashedly to music in corded headphones. The video has a soft, camcorder focus, making the grandeur of Versailles feel small and intimate, almost like a home movie. One of my favorite parts is in the first chorus, when Rodrigo sings about stalking her beau on the internet. She scrolls on her laptop while lying on a makeshift bed in one of the Palace’s grand rooms, the blue light pulsating on her face. She’s oblivious to the golden ceiling, ornate oil paintings, and chandeliers, laser-focused on the contents of her computer, evoking the feeling of the world at your fingertips as a teenage girl on the internet.

Her aloofness carries through the end of the video. Running around Versailles, Rodrigo is adrift in lovesickness, unaware of the splendor surrounding her. Her expression is pure, internal elation; the Palace walls could just as well be the walls of her childhood bedroom. The feeling is almost reminiscent of being a teenager on a family trip to a beautiful site, like the Palace of Versailles, smiling to yourself, not because of the exquisite environment, but because of the phone burning a hole in your pocket. Waiting for a text, fast-forwarding through all the possibilities, a whole other world in your head.

The internet had long been critical of the “I’m just a girl” sentiment, positing that it emotionally stunts women, allowing them to freely claim and succumb to feelings of powerlessness, feelings that girls are made to feel by interlocking systems of oppression. A while ago, I argued that adult women’s identification with teenage Olivia Rodrigo, along with a fixation on bows and coquettish imagery, was a byproduct of releasing responsibility, of delaying the process of growing up. “I’m just a girl!” women on TikTok seemed to cry for years, white-knuckling their youth, resisting the freedom inherent in owning their life choices.

Anxieties that seem similar on the surface, but are not the same at all, appear to be rearing their head at the sight of Olivia’s babydoll dress, bloomers, and knee-high socks in the “drop dead” video, with critics alleging that she’s feeding into pedophilic beauty standards. One comment on Instagram reads “Epstein vibes.”

At the heart of this strawman argument is the perception that Rodrigo is sexualizing herself in this video. But her ruffles and bows exist within the context of her acting out the unencumbered euphoria associated with early-onset love. Babydoll dresses were first conceived as pajamas, before transitioning to daywear in the 1960s, evoking a kind of non-performance of a girl dancing around her room when she should be sleeping. And as this great Teen Vogue article retorts, the babydoll dress has a rich history among girl rockers, with Courtney Love, Kat Bjelland, and Kim Gordon known to don them onstage, blending girlishness and grunge sensibilities, as Rodrigo has long done sonically, to evoke a sense of irony.

I think that crying “pedophile” at the sign of every bow and ruffle is a way of easing our collective anxiety about how unprotected young girls and women are in this country, and how power-hungry men act without consequences when given access to wealth and status, which is incredibly misguided. These types of sentiments shift focus away from actual suffering, so we can argue about symbolism and avoid confronting the actual gaping viscera that is American corruption, greed, and apathy towards girls and women. This argument shifts blame onto individual women, instead of looking at the systems of thought and behavior that lead us to think a young woman running around in bloomers is co-signing a system of oppression.

I was skeptical of how long girl branding could endure as Olivia Rodrigo steps into her maturity. I was skeptical of how long she could keep me as a listener, given that she’s closer in age to my little sisters. But as the saying goes, love makes fools of us all, or better yet, youth of us all. The “drop dead” song and video smartly tap into this universal feeling of childlike aloofness that those in love experience, a feeling that people of all ages can recall, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago. I find myself beaming, giddily, to myself when I listen to the song, and I don’t have a problem with that.

But whether the public is literate enough to read girlish imagery as it’s intended to be read in this particular context, and others, is another story. I suppose that “girl” and “woman” will continue to be morally charged figures in our culture until they stop getting exploited by those who have the power to defy repercussions. In the meantime, learning where to position our anger is the only way to resist falling into these hamster wheel squabbles.

Everyone embarking on some creative or novel project has moments of second-guessing themselves; it’s a necessary part of doing anything worthwhile. I’m not talking about self-critique, which is also necessary to improve upon a craft. I’m talking about the whispers and wails of disbelief. That feeling that washes over you, usually around four in the afternoon or eleven o’clock in the evening, that you have no authority to assume you have talent. That sense that the artistic goals you’re striving for are a means to an end, and like everything, that end is dust.

I have to choose to believe that everyone doing something off the beaten path has these moments of intense self-doubt, even those with iron-clad self-assurance. I just have to. My doubts creep in on lizard brain time, when I’m at my most tired or hungry, when my environment is at its most unstable or liminal. When I start to wonder what the hell any of this is supposed to be for, I know it’s time to close out of the Google Doc and watch my hands rise and fall on my stomach.

In these moments, when I’ve been wrestling with thoughts and words - the immaterial and material - for too long, I’ll start to believe, in earnest, that writing is an easy task. I’ll start to assume that everyone thinks in terms of narrative. I’ll think that writing is just a process of transcription, jotting down the words as they appear in perfectly formed sentences in your head. It’s when I read really good writing or really bad writing, usually not mine, that I remember otherwise.

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If we’ve learned anything from the Great Global Project that is Substack, it’s that Sabrina Carpenter is an acquired taste. From her tongue-in-cheek lyrics and choreography to her adherence to girlish femininity to a man grabbing her hair on her album cover, she always manages to upset somebody on this website while playing on easy mode.

Carpenter is a sharp artist, leavening the dead seriousness of pop stardom with some healthy derision. The “Juno” poses, the sexual innuendos, the 60s references, it’s all very clever. She’s constantly breaking the fourth wall to throw us a wink, informing us that she’s in on the joke, and none of it is that serious.

But if you look up “Girl Pop Star” in a dictionary, you will see all five feet of her pasted there, sparkly two-piece set, platform heels, ribbons of shiny blonde hair. She’s equal parts palatable and edgy, but doesn’t sit perfectly right with any one crowd for that reason. To borrow language from George Civeris and Sam Taggart, Carpenter straddles the boundary between Target and Pitchfork, snugly situated in the pockets of suburban moms and urban baristas alike. It’s a good and lucrative place to be.

Carpenter’s music has only gotten more Looney Tunes with each subsequent album, and I really love it. She makes music you can laugh to, and sometimes even laugh at. Her songs are highly absurd, blending the best parts of ABBA, Dolly Parton, and Rocky Horror to create a sonic and lyrical style that’s increasingly singular. Each year, she bends her mold a little further into a shape that only she can fit in.

Listening to Carpenter’s music in isolation is kind of like listening to a musical theatre soundtrack without seeing the stage production: it’s good music, but made even better with the visual accompaniment. It’s a lot easier to “get” Sabrina Carpenter after you peruse her music videos and watch her live shows, all of which are crafted with pitch-perfect narrative and tone. While it may seem sweaty on the surface, I admire how comprehensive her musical brand is. I find it endearing and impressive that she puts so much effort into music videos and tour sets in an entertainment industry that increasingly prioritizes streams and TikTok virality over all else.

Given what an adept live performer and visual artist she is, I was thrilled to watch Carpenter’s Coachella livestream from the comfort of my couch. And, wow, did she deliver. The performance was in her usual key of Old Hollywood, directly referencing classics like Lost Highway, A Chorus Line, Sex and the Single Girl, and Dirty Dancing, with Cher- and Monroe-inspired glamour. The show featured a series of cinematic vignettes. Carpenter crooning on top of a custom “Sabrinawood” sign in the Hollywood Hills, twirling around a 60s-style recording studio and rehearsal room, shimmying with showgirls and muscle men, getting doused in rain, and dancing on vintage cars for the closer.

While I can’t speak to the experience of watching the performance live, from where I’m sitting, Carpenter is easily an all-time headliner. She had big shoes to fill early in her career on the heels of Gagachella. But she rose to the occasion in her own voice. The fact that she was able to essentially pull off a ninety minute Broadway show in the desert without slipping in her heels, hitting an off note, or letting excess hair get in her lip gloss is an absolute triumph.

As always, a noisy minority thinks otherwise, arguing that Carpenter’s performance lacked fan engagement and involved too much pandering to the livestream cameras. During one of the brief moments of fan interaction in the first weekend, Carpenter faced heat for mistakenly mocking a fan emitting a Zaghrouta cry, a traditional cry of joy in the Arabic world. In her defense, the cry came during a period of silence in between songs, and from Carpenter’s position, it likely sounded like a muffled heckle, hence her sarcastic response. She was also likely mentally frazzled, given that she was in the middle of performing one of the more important shows of her career. She did apologize publicly in a tweet. The situation was unfortunate, but it seems like an honest mistake.

But Carpenter used up all her honest mistakes on singing songs about sex. While she’s dodged a full overhaul cancellation, I’m wondering if this is the new standard for women in pop music: maximizing mistakes with little nuance and then forgetting, chiseling them away until they disappear, only to come back seven years later with a tell-all Netflix doc and comeback tour. At the rate that the public is picking at Chappell Roan’s scabs, for example, I am doubtful she will ever release a full-length album again.

Like Carpenter, Chappell Roan has come under fire for all kinds of action and inaction, including yelling at paparazzi and setting boundaries with fans. Recently, Brazilian footballer Jorginho Frello publicly accused Roan of sending security to harass his wife and child, only for him to retract the statement as a “misunderstanding.”

I predicted the inevitable cancellation of Carpenter and Roan in 2024, though I hoped I would be wrong. They are still far from fully toppling off their pedestals, but people are quick to rock their boats, uncomfortable with their deft speech and self-assurance. Whether they last in the public eye is a matter of how much vitriol they can withstand.

It’s impossible to talk about the quiet, perverse treatment of celebrity women without evoking 2010s feminist sentiments, which we’ve since conceived as overly simplistic and corny. Analogizing pop stars falling from grace to witches burning at the stake is weak, melodramatic imagery - there are far worse matters at hand. But what I will say, with the fullness of my chest, is that people still struggle to distinguish an immoral woman from a woman they find personally annoying.

Justin Bieber took the Coachella mainstage the night after Sabchella, fans online buzzing about what he would perform in the lead-up to the show. Many speculated that Bieber would perform his “eras”: purple zip-up hoodie, sagged pants, microphone headset, and all, even though it’s been years since he’s busted a move on stage. His Grammy’s performance a few months prior featured him stripped down to shorts and socks singing solo over a guitar loop.

Bieber’s Coachella set was similarly intimate, featuring him screen-sharing his laptop on the jumbotron, searching up YouTube videos of his old songs and covers for him and the crowd to sing over. His newer tracks from SWAG and SWAG II were performed more fully, Mk.Gee accompanying him on guitar for “Daisies” as the closer.

Centering YouTube, where Bieber was first discovered nearly twenty years ago, was clever, functioning as a kind of career retrospective, without crouching too much in nostalgia. Bieber could pull off a laidback set because of his long-held bond with devoted fans, and reliability as a pop culture fixture and laughingstock.

It’s hard not to compare Carpenter and Bieber’s polar opposite performances, one succeeding for its maximalism, the other for its minimalism. It makes sense that an artist like Sabrina Carpenter, merely two years into mainstream stardom, would pull out more stops, while Bieber strips his down to distance himself from teeny bopperdom, amplifying his more recent associations with R&B and soul.

While I’ve got my Venn Diagram out, I can’t help but also consider the public’s treatment of these two artists. Bieber has gotten entangled in actual scandals: a DUI, urinating in a mop bucket at a restaurant, egging his neighbor’s house, resisting arrest, and writing “Hopefully she would have been a Belieber” in the guest book at the Anne Frank House. In 2014, an online petition, hosted on the White House’s website, demanded that he be deported and garnered over 270,000 signatures. He’s been known to get into embarrassing, but funny, fights with paparazzi, spinning up the viral “it’s not clocking to you” clip.

There was a time when Bieber faced overwhelming spite for public indecency. But we’ve all managed to forgive him based on the understanding that he was a child star, globally fawned over and fetishized as young as fifteen years old. Seeing his eyes light up in his Grammys and Coachella performances feels like welcome proof of joy amid many years of broadcasted instability. “This industry tried to strip him of everything, but they couldn’t strip him of his talent, his dignity, or his hope,” reads one of the top comments on his Grammy’s performance video.

I’m of the mind that stars can and should be able to repair their relationships with the public. Happiness and healing for Bieber is a beautiful thing. I think he is one of the best male vocalists of our time, and I’ve loved his recent performances. But I’d venture to guess that the public would not be so willing to welcome back a woman star with a similar record. There is a chasm in the standards we hold for men and women when it comes to public performances, on and off the stage. I can’t think of a single woman pop star for whom it would be acceptable to screenshare and YouTube surf for a main stage Coachella performance.

As Lauren O’Neill points out for Polyester, Carpenter doesn’t have a deep enough history with the public yet to warrant a small-scale career retrospective. She’s still building her library of hits, whereas Bieber has dance monkey’d enough to take things down a notch. But woman artists of Bieber’s stature - Gaga, Taylor, and Beyoncé, for example - wouldn’t dream of padding around a stage in undies and socks. “Stripped back” pop projects like Joanne, folklore, and Cowboy Carter (which I suppose was more “acoustic” relative to Renaissance) still contained elaborate visuals. A woman pop star is a portal to another dimension, while a straight male pop star (and make no mistakes, Bieber is a Pop Star, capital P and S) can call for simplicity under the guise of being a boy genius, as is the case with Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, and Charlie Puth.

The public performance of being an off-duty pop star is no different. Chappell Roan yelling at the paparazzi is a mark of ungratefulness, a charge worthy of public banishment. Justin Bieber yelling at the paparazzi is a viral audio on TikTok. This is when the chasm in our standards is most consequential, when behavior that’s laughed off in men is admonished in women.

I would fold Kanye into this analysis, seeing that he just sold out two nights at SoFi Stadium following five straight years of co-signing and spewing bigotry. But his fanbase, presumably dominated by straight men, has a different relationship to morality policing. There’s clearly a higher tolerance for Kanye antics. No one would ever attempt to cancel him, or any other male singer, for singing sexual songs or yelling at paparazzi; that’s just what’s expected.

We are much choosier about women idols. We contain them within tinier boxes, expecting them to never step out of bounds, ignorant of how their center of gravity wobbles as they ascend upwards. Perhaps it’s because we expect more of women, knowing that we can only expect so much of men. It’s good enough that they’re no longer publicly urinating and emitting anti-Semitic slurs. The women, however, should be equal parts Madonna and whore, diplomat and entertainer.

Love pop stars, hate pop stars, it won’t change anyone’s immediate circumstances. But how we treat women at their most idealized informs how they’ll be treated at their least idealized. There’s satisfaction in fully understanding your sense of taste. In backing opinions up with logic rather than an inkling in your chest or a regurgitation of a fleeting internet thought. A vague sense that “something’s always been off about her” is far more hollow than outright disliking something with reason.

The Drama (2026), written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, is a comedy, depending on which state you live in. Much like the marketing campaign for failed Oscar hopeful Marty Supreme, promotional materials for The Drama were quite sneaky, which everyone is now quick to call out, as if deceitful advertising is an act of blasphemy and not a crucial element of the trade itself.

The clever paid and earned media to promote this film include a grid post on the Vogue Weddings Instagram, an interview on The New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, as well as a one-day wedding chapel in Las Vegas sponsored by A24. The movie’s marketing emphasizes traditional conceptions of romance; “weddings,” more specifically, as the film revolves around the hectic events leading up to Emma and Charlie’s matrimony. The trailer lures viewers in by teasing a big secret: Zendaya’s character Emma reveals something terrible that she’s done in her past, derailing the trajectory of an otherwise happy relationship. What exactly is this terrible thing? Come to the cinema to find out.

The film’s advertising obviously sought to set a certain expectation, so it could be subverted. All is fair to get butts in seats, but from an artistic standpoint, this extratextual lifting does kind of feel like cheating. Bumpers on the bowling lane, a push to get the swing going.

Given the marketing and Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s lanky physical attractiveness, I assumed that this film was going to be more of a vehicle to gawk at beautiful people and beautiful places, served up with some light relationship quandaries. And I was quite game for that. I assumed Emma’s “big secret” was going to be a buzzy desire for polyamory, or a slightly perverted sexual fantasy. Topical dinner conversation for urban zillennials, mulled over skin-contact wine. A pseudo-intellectual romp for a new age, attempting to capture the complexities of modern romance. I was maybe off by a few yards.

The movie starts off all coffee shop meet-cutes and corny wedding speeches, charmingly aware of its clichés. But about twenty minutes in, after the Ari Aster producer credit hits the screen, we’re taken to a scene in which Emma and Charlie are sampling wines for their wedding with their friends Mike and Rachel. They’re all a bit buzzed, and Rachel, the firiest at the table, asks everyone to share the worst thing they’ve ever done. Mike once hid behind his ex-girlfriend from a crazed street dog in Mexico (?). Rachel locked her disabled kid neighbor in an abandoned RV overnight (omg?). Nervous, bashful Charlie recalls cyberbullying a kid in high school, causing him to move to a different town (this sounds like a lie as he’s saying it).

Then Emma, uninhibited by the wine, drops her big one: at fifteen, she planned to do a mass shooting at her school, practicing with her father’s rifle and everything, but backed out at the last minute. The entire table grows uneasy. Charlie laughs uncomfortably, Mike glances around tensely, and Rachel is instantly irate, as her cousin was a victim of a mass shooting and now lives life in a wheelchair.

Anxiety hums in the background of everything for the next one hundred minutes, as Charlie tries to figure out whether or not he should marry Emma later that week. He questions her rigorously. He plays back every time she’s ever been aggressive. He tries to identify instances of childhood trauma that could have driven her to this place, blaming her for not “being in therapy” as a kid. But Emma denies any trauma outside of schoolyard bullying, depression, and a need for attention. She stresses that she hasn’t felt an impulse like that in a long time. In a turn of events, she actually turned to gun control activism later in high school, which satisfied her desire for recognition and belonging.

But every time he looks at her, he sees a fifteen-year-old holding a gun. She also happens to be deaf in one ear from holding her dad’s rifle too close to her face while testing it in the woods, a physical reminder of what almost was.

Beyond concerns for his physical safety, Charlie is quite wrapped up in how he will be perceived for marrying someone like this, given that his best friends heard the confession. He deliberates the real dilemma with his friends and parses it into a hypothetical scenario with his coworker. If Emma’s disclosure had happened more intentionally and in private, maybe he would be thinking more with his heart and less with his head. But now he’s all bumbling attempts at logic, trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, given that nothing actually happened, in a physical sense.

The Drama was not intended to be as political as it’s being taken. I’ll admit that it is jarring in some ways to see a high-profile film center gun violence in such a cavalier manner. Watching the movie in a public theater, a site I had previously avoided in the U.S. for many years out of a paranoid fear of mass shootings, certainly made it feel political. It is hard to even see images of teenagers, rifles, and schools onscreen without feeling a sort of dread. But none of the gun imagery or imagined violence in the film is gratuitous or unnecessary. Everything is depicted like a kind of fever dream, anxious, intrusive thoughts whipping through Charlie’s mind.

Brooke Obie argues that Borgli is operating far outside his scope of understanding, a European wielding American tragedy for a flimsy thought experiment. This movie offers no grand takeaway about gun violence in America, let alone any meaningful commentary on how gun violence is gendered and racialized, but that’s not what it necessarily calls for. The film does, however, nod to the fact that mass shootings are most often perpetrated by white males, which only emphasizes Emma’s past schemes as startling.

Zooming too closely in on “guns in America” would have detracted from the point entirely. The Drama isn’t about radically accepting just anyone who’s been pushed to the margins; the conflict, importantly, happens within the context of a romantic relationship. Gun violence is a conduit for the film’s thesis. Should thoughts be as consequential as actions? Are there limits on unconditional love? And is love really a choice?

This last question is of particular interest to me since I’m reading Wuthering Heights for the first time. In the novel, Cathy and Heathcliff are conceived as crazed soulmates, drawn together less out of choice and more because of a kind of psychotic pull, almost divinely ordained. Cathy’s famous passage goes: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” She expands on this a page later, explaining that there are literally no boundaries between her and Heathcliff; she regards the two of them as a single consciousness, sharing each other’s good and bad aspects. “Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

The Drama considers a modern interpretation of this feeling; this sense of two beings becoming one, of being inexplicably tied to and even embodying your partner’s goodness and wickedness by claiming them. Modern romances convey more free will in love than Gothic ones. We like to think we have more of a say over our destiny. Love isn’t just something that happens to us, but something we choose and accept, for all its benefits and detriments. Whether you can accept your partner as they are is also a question of whether you can accept yourself.

Social media, with its lack of context and impersonality, has brought black-and-white morality policing further into the fold, which Rachel administers in The Drama. A generation hyper-aware of image will naturally view relationships as a means of image maintenance. The question isn’t just, can you be okay bearing their burden, but can you be okay having others watch you bear it? This was a central theme of Celine Song’s Materialists (2025), a modern romance film that viewers were similarly split on.

In Materialists, Lucy is split between two romantic prospects: wealthy, charming financier Harry, or starving actor John, the latter of whom she has more chemistry and history with. To the dismay of many viewers, Lucy picks John, the lesser financial prospect, but the man she ultimately loves more. I remember feeling surprised about the public response to this ending, as it seems like the more predictable, conventional rom-com outcome; when has the Suit ever won over the underdog? When have we ever wanted that?

Materialists probably would have had a decent public reception if it had been released in the 80s and directed by John Hughes. Women are too smart to risk being scorned now; those clichés have only led us astray. We’re not seeing Chris Evans’ grand proclamation to Dakota Johnson; we’re seeing the off-camera fight that their characters will have about money in six weeks. We find ourselves in an era of optimization; biohacking and hearthacking our lives into perfect equilibrium. Free will allows one to wield their fate to their liking. Everything is in our control. How boring.

Of course, the alternative is equally fearsome; the idea that the heart has a mind of its own, that we’re completely intoxicated by love, incapable of untangling ourselves from another’s spell. This mindset allows for less accountability; we can act crazy and charge it to love’s tab, as Heathcliff does when he exhumes Cathy’s grave, loosening her coffin’s side panel, so the two can mingle in the earth after he passes, together for eternity.

Since The Drama’s release, director Kristoffer Borgli has come under fire for a disgusting essay he wrote in 2012 about dating a sixteen-year-old girl while he was twenty-six, originally published in Norwegian magazine D2. He rationalizes his pedophilia with the bullishness of his heart, referencing Woody Allen four times. The translated text reads: “I chose to see her that way, to define her by her age, and I chose never to see her again. But you can’t choose what the heart wants.”

We are not so powerless to our hearts. Throwing our egos to the wind to chase unbridled emotion is not a sustainable means of building a relationship, nor is engaging with someone too young to fully consent. A relationship is the meshing of affection and logic, not one or the other. What matters most is how we construct our logic, whether it’s nursed by a punitive culture, a stark conception of good people and bad people, and wanting to be seen as wholly good. Or whether it’s fueled by the thought that people are capable of harm, but also repair.

Nobody benefits from a world in which people are conceived as being permanently damaged, or from “imaginary injuries,” as Tell the Bees aptly put it. I think it takes love for us to understand that “good” people are capable of harm, and “evil” people are capable of changing, that the two binaries are never that distinct, black and white swirling into grey. To be loved is to step fully into the sun, which at times warms gently and at other times glares hotly. It’s to be completely and fully known and have someone still choose you, not because it was written in the stars, but because they want to, which somehow feels more like a miracle.

All this nostalgia for 2016, but few seem to recall that it was the year all of us became vegan. Google searches for veganism had been steadily rising since 2010, but between 2016 and 2019, the total number of U.S. consumers who identified as vegan increased by about 600%. The liberal activism boom of the 2010s feels partially tied to this; many young people coming of age on social media were made aware of climate change and the negative contributions of agribusiness. Obama’s presidency, the formation of Black Lives Matter, and the proliferation of girl boss feminism threaded together a convincing delusion that our sleeves were sufficiently rolled up and change was on the near-horizon. Everyone was eager to jump in, and almond milk lattes abounded as a result.

Social media allowed activism efforts to become immortally tied to our personal image. Food, and vegan food, more specifically, was also a site of image creation and maintenance online. One could post a photo of their smoothie bowl and avocado toast, which is already vibrant eye-candy in and of itself, and appear healthy and socially conscious.

Veganism was certainly a means of virtue- and clout-signaling at my liberal high school in Seattle, where half of my class sat during the Pledge of Allegiance, and school walkouts became a near-weekly occurrence. While I was never a full-fledged vegan, I tended to cook and order vegan dishes at this time under the pretext that I liked the taste of them. And this was occasionally the case, when the “vegan” dishes were pasta with marinara sauce, a veggie pad see eiw, or fruit. I also definitely received a rush of do-goodism, feeling as though I was making an informed decision about my eating habits, which made me feel like an intelligent woman in control.

It also made me very hungry.

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In 2006, a thirteen-year-old Miley Cyrus held a finger to her puckered lips, eyes open wide, faux-anxiously glancing to the side, in promotional images for Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana. Her expression was silly, uncomposed, and perhaps overacted, seeing as she was barely a teenager and the show was for children. Shhh! I have a secret! the cover photo announced. I’m a popstar, but I’m also a normal girl!

At last, a superhero we could see ourselves in. Fictional Miley Stewart was Peter Parker, an unpopular teenage brunette who was secretly loved by the masses when donning her alter ego’s costume. Just as Spiderman was a savior for bumbling, nerdy boys, Hannah Montana was an antidote for adolescent girls’ insecurities. Superstars were made, not born; the only differentiator between normal Miley and beloved Hannah was a blonde wig and sequins. Underneath the glam, Hannah Montana was a regular girl like you and me. At an age when boys were beginning to save and disseminate photos of Megan Fox on their hand-me-down T-Mobile Sidekicks, Hannah Montana was a helpful fantasy. Being seen as special and beautiful is just a matter of framing and lighting. Untouchable girl popstars were flesh-and-blood just like me.

This was an important message to receive at an impressionable age, though I had no way of knowing that at the time. I couldn’t have predicted how pervasive and understated cosmetic procedures would become, and how often my own physical insecurities would rear their head. Becoming a young woman is a process of grieving the way you thought the world saw you, and coming to terms with how it actually sees you. Across my American Girl Doll books and dystopian trilogies, I had a vast cast of complex female characters to return to to quell my feelings of ugliness and unworthiness. Hannah Montana was actually among them for quite a while.

That was then, though, and this is now. Now, Alix Earle is the Hannah Montana of today, only instead of taking off her wig, she’s telling her credulous audience of preteen suburban girls that she’s just like them, only with breast augmentation, lip filler, and veneers. She assures them that this kind of transparency is radical; she’s offering Big Sis vibes, being honest, so no one gets the impression that it’s possible to look like her naturally. But she’s only reinforcing the fact that adhering to conventional beauty standards will reward you greatly. Superstardom is still smoke-and-mirrors, but the barrier isn’t a wig, it’s a knife.

When Miley Cyrus transitioned from child pop star to adult pop star, adults were dismayed by her scantily clad outfits, masculine haircut, and her twerking on Robin Thicke, with her tongue hanging out of her mouth. This is Hannah Montana. What kind of model is she setting for the children! At thirteen, girlish optimism already dwindling, I was wise enough to understand that Miley Cyrus is a performer, and this is what performers do. What were people expecting her to become post-Disney? Jackie Kennedy?

At thirteen, I was well aware that women pop stars received social currency for touting their sexuality, especially if the world also knew them as a child. It almost felt offensive that people thought I was still aloof to this. How could the world take me for being so stupid when this was the oxygen I was breathing? How long did you think you could trick me? I know how you all look at me! I know how to be rewarded in this cruel world! Later on, when grown men would approach my sixteen-year-old friends and me at the mall and tell us how mature we looked, I knew deep down that they weren’t telling the truth. America is a sensational and pedophilic country. I didn’t feel ignorant of anything, but I sure wished I was.

Miley’s Bangerz-era crudeness was as much a costume as the Hannah Montana wig was. Only, instead of posturing as a teen pop idol, she was posturing as an adult performer. The foam finger, the tongue sticking out, swinging on the wrecking ball, all of it read as a demand to be taken seriously. Don’t look at me like I’m a child, I am not a child, urged Miley, then only twenty years old.

I wasn’t offended by any of this. Why would I take any of it personally? Besides, I kept the oath that Miley Cyrus was different from Hannah Montana. The critics conflating this new, crass Miley with teen Hannah Montana didn’t seem to get that. Even though all but a wig separated them, Hannah Montana was an entirely separate ethos. They clearly didn’t attend the Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Tour, or listen to the Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus double CD. Hannah and Miley were always marketed and billed as separate artists with separate songs. In this way, Miley could age and lean more obscene if she wanted. Hannah would always remain suspended in an ageless, innocent bubble, a relic of the past that nobody could touch.

That was the case until the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special, moderated by Alex Cooper, premiered on Disney+ on March 27, 2026. I thought nothing of this when I saw the press releases. Like the countless unasked-for Disney sequels and remakes of late, this seemed like another uncreative way to nurse a stunted crop of zillennials on nostalgia like mother’s milk, distracting them from their economic and existential anxieties and selling some ad space in the process. Dubai chocolate-Labubu-Heal Your Inner Child Through Consumption. I’m hardened to all of this. Try again.

I felt nothing until I saw the poster, in which an adult Miley Cyrus dons the Hannah Montana wig, mimicking her Shhh! pose from the original 2006 poster. In this new version, Hannah’s wig is a more subdued bronde, rather than a child’s sketch of yellow hair. Her cheeks and nose are bronzed and contoured, and her lips are a glossy brown-pink. Her eyes contain no glitter, but are framed with lush, wispy lashes. Rather than a cheeky glance offscreen, she looks at the viewer head-on, smoldering.

This is the answer to how Hannah Montana would have fared at thirty-three in the short-form age: immobile forehead, hollowed-out cheeks, and porcelain teeth. Let me be clear: Miley Cyrus is free to do whatever she wants with her face. Though something tells me that this pitch would have gone over differently if Miley Cyrus had more visible signs of aging. A Hannah Montana with crow’s feet wouldn’t have gone over well, but a Hannah Montana that’s sought to preserve herself? Hand over the wig. It makes sense that Instagram Face would plague the fictional pop star, as it has the pop stars of today.

But fiction is the whole point, I suppose. And everyone’s missing the point. I don’t need an answer to how Hannah Montana would have looked, dressed, and sounded today, because she exists within the bounds of a fictional universe that ended over a decade ago. Media events like this are a bastardization of IP, a way to quickly drum up watchable content by resuscitating a figure that so many who pay for Disney+ know and love. We’re willing to accept thirty-three-year-old Miley Cyrus frolicking in a teenager’s clothes because we’re not comfortable letting anything truly die.

Being a child actor can raise one into a state of perpetual performing. Miley has been vocal about the complications of playing a double character at such a young age, in which the “normal,” unpopular girl shared her name and appearance. Putting the wig back on twenty years later may have healed some wounds, no doubt. But not without also subjecting everyone else to the uncanniest of valleys.

Beyond many recent sequels and remakes being boring and unimaginative, they’re occurring so closely on the heels of the original work that it’s actually altering my perception of reality, if only for a split second. A live-action Moana that looks like it was shot on a public middle school’s green screen, released ten years after the original animated film. A live-action How to Train Your Dragon that is frame-for-frame identical to the one that came out fifteen years ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent so people can…watch a movie twice?

The most mind-bending remake as of late is HBO’s original Harry Potter series, coming out this Christmas. This series is essentially the Harry Potter film franchise, broken into seasons of TV. The trailer and marketing do not reference the original movies at all, almost making it feel like they’re trying to trick us into forgetting they existed in the first place. Nothing about the plot appears to be different from the original movies, and the actors are about as close to looking like Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson as possible, except Draco Malfoy, who now has a broccoli cut. I feel insane. Does anyone else feel insane?

Across all modes of entertainment, the streaming model of content delivery benefits advertisers far more than it does artists. Syndication and long-term residuals for actors are near obsolete. Television shows rarely extend beyond four seasons. Per-stream payouts for artists on music apps like Spotify are often less than a cent. Meanwhile, streaming advertising is far more advanced than advertising on traditional cable ever was, in terms of targeting, measurement, and interactivity. And given the fact that everyone is now addicted to their phones, far less effort is required to get eyeballs on screens, enabling streamers to incentivize quantity over quality and allowing for less creative brainpower. Old Hannah Montana, New Harry Potter; it doesn’t matter if it’s worthwhile, people will watch it because they need to watch something. Anything to keep out the quiet, anything to stay entertained.

Everyone is anxious and depressed, but sufficiently entertained, bellies full on blue light. Don’t pretend there isn’t a relationship here. We won’t be free from this hivemind state of jitters until we get comfortable with not constantly being entertained. Until we start expecting more from our brains.

Watching the latest, buzzy streamer show or reboot gives me a slimy feeling, akin to losing hours to TikTok, or personally tickling Ted Sarandos’ belly. I can guarantee you Sarandos isn’t spending his 5-9 rotting on the couch, losing hours of his life to become a data point. New TV is all static, and life is noisy enough. It’s chefs, doctors, and financial workers screaming at each other, or it’s literally TV Harry Potter. Or a Miley Cyrus interview. I am chipping away at a Mad Men rewatch that will hopefully take me several years. Please don’t make me stomach anything else. I’d rather eat my dinner in silence.

Now imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if the Kardashian-Jenners were Mormon? Well, you don’t have to imagine too hard, because The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives cast, also known as MomTok, is essentially that. The infamous “swinging scandal” that launched these Mormon women’s careers in 2022 could have similarly been a flash-in-the-pan. With the speed at which TikTok cycles through trends and public drama, some random, attractive Mormon women consensually making out with each other’s husbands is hardly enough to hold focus. But Taylor Frankie Paul, the “leader” and chief instigator of MomTok, was already signed to Select Management Group before the swinging scandal drew in fresh viewers. In 2022, Select began receiving pitches from producers eager to move the MomTok drama from the tiny screen to the small screen. A deal was drawn up with Hulu in a matter of days.

Today, the Mormon wives are some of Disney’s most valuable television IP. Not one, but two, of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives cast members competed on the latest season of Dancing With the Stars, helping increase fan voting by 163% compared to the previous season. And in September 2025, Taylor Frankie Paul was announced as ABC’s next Bachelorette, a decision that left many enthused and concerned.

The Bachelor franchise has historically cast the runner-up from the previous season as the Bachelor or Bachelorette for the next season, a smart strategy for creating evergreen fans in the 2000s, when people actually cared about the show. Today, there are far more titillating dating shows, Love Island being the most prominent one. The Bachelor’s squeaky-clean, Franken-edited plot always predictably climaxes with a marriage proposal and polite kissing, whereas Love Island is scattered, nonexhaustive, and highly pornographic. Love Island is practically engineered for short-form, and The Bachelor is for suburban wine night.

Casting Taylor Frankie Paul as the Bachelorette was surely a way to get younger, more chronically online viewers interested in the franchise again. Paul got her start on TikTok and is known to pick fights with other women and her on-again, off-again baby daddy, Dakota Mortensen, on Secret Lives, a show watched by suburban and urban Gen Z and millennial girls and women alike. All of these elements considered, Paul’s casting should have been a recipe for success.

Except, of course, for the fact that Paul has a very public history of domestic abuse allegations and charges. The pilot episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives opened with Paul’s 2023 arrest for aggravated assault against Mortensen, for which she’s still on probation. On March 16, 2026, People reported that season five of Secret Lives stopped filming due to an open “domestic assault investigation” regarding Paul and Mortensen, shedding some negative light on the forthcoming Bachelorette season, which was set to air just six days later. Mortensen also claimed he slept with Paul the night before she left to film The Bachelorette, and Reality Steve reported that Paul called Mortensen 150 times as soon as she got her phone back after filming.

All of this was already sowing doubt that Paul met the love of her life on The Bachelorette, but ABC finally pulled the season entirely after TMZ posted a disturbing video of Paul beating and throwing chairs at Mortensen in front of her daughter on March 19, 2026. The video itself was filmed in 2023, but it was almost certainly leaked by Mortensen’s team amid this open 2026 investigation. Disney is estimated to face a $70 million loss on the season.

All of this drama is made more gripping by the fact that Paul is supposed to be a pious woman. The whole sauce of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is the fact that these women, who claim to be religious, engage in behavior that appears to be or is outright sacrilegious, including drinking heavily, selling an image of promiscuity online, and beating their baby daddies. Given I’m outside the faith, I won’t outright evaluate how devout these women are. But the show editors and cast members certainly amp up the Mormonness to heighten contrast. The gap between the conservative reputation of Mormons and the actual behavior of these women makes the scandals all the more scandalous.

Paul is an interesting foil to all the other women on the show, who seem to possess the signature Mormon Woman Grindset that I witnessed up close growing up in the Northwest. As I’ve written about previously, Mormons were a fixture of my upbringing, particularly in my ballet classes. Among the best ballet dancers that I trained with as a teenager was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Mormon girl, who was shipped off to Russia one summer to learn from the greats. She was a firecracker of a performer who easily would have had her pick of collegiate dance programs. A few years after graduation, she was married with kids, pointe shoes presumably tossed under her bed.

Similarly, Hannah Neelman, of Ballerina Farm fame, is a rigorous Mormon ballerina turned rigorous Mormon homemaker. Anecdotally, I can say with certainty that the ballet world is riddled with Mormon girls, but there doesn’t seem to be an explicit, scriptural endorsement of ballet in the faith. Ballet West and San Francisco Ballet were founded by Willam Christensen, who happened to grow up in a Danish Mormon family in Brigham City, Utah. Unlike the American Protestants who preceded him, Brigham Young was a vocal advocate for dance, urging followers to “go to the dance, study music, read novels, and do anything else that will tend to expand their frames, add fire to their spirits, improve their minds, and make them feel free and untrammeled in body and mind.”

Whitney Leavitt, another Secret Lives cast member, also has an extensive dance background. She recently made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago, driving the highest weekly ticket sales in the show’s 29-year history. Leavitt is easily the Rachel Barry/Sharpay Evans of MomTok. She has a natural inclination towards performance and a theater-kid-like drive for stardom, which can read as cutthroatness. MomTok, the Hulu show, DWTS, Broadway, and countless brand collaborations all seem to be threads in a greater master plan for some level of Whitney world domination. This is the Mormon Woman Grindset I’m referring to.

The draw of Mormon women to ballet might be less tied to scripture and more tied to an expectation of conventional femininity and self-discipline in the faith. Mormon women are expected to be abstinent, that is, until they’re married, after which, they’re expected to have many children consecutively, a practice that hinders many women from thriving in the paid workforce. The physical and mental fortitude required to birth and raise young children back-to-back-to-back, rehabilitating one’s body and mind after each birth and gearing up for the next, requires a discipline that is similar to what is instilled in ballerinas, smiling while their toes bleed.

Ballet has a reputation for being dicey for girls’ mental health, not because it exists in a vacuum, but because it emphasizes a propensity to constantly best oneself, a propensity that’s instilled in girls at a young age. While girls are conditioned to see one another as adversaries, their greatest opponent will always be themselves. The war of ballet is inherently feminized: a battle to be stronger, more beautiful, and more effortless than you were yesterday. To push yourself to a razor-sharp edge, separating pressure and pain, and endure as much as you can without letting any of it show.

Like ballet, Mormonism pushes women to a kind of brink. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives cast members each represent a different reaction to this brink, with Whitney Leavitt at one end and Taylor Frankie Paul at the other. Leavitt is the superwoman and superego, tap dancing through gritted teeth, eyes and mouth wide open. She has the three kids, the white picket fence, and the career she’s always wanted. And she’s somehow holding it all together, sweating just enough to show us how badly she wants it.

Taylor Frankie Paul, on the other hand, is the failwoman. Collapsing under the weight of her Mormon ego and human id, she is proof of the incompatibility of American conservatism and liberal online expression. You cannot functionally be a mother of three and beat your baby daddy in front of your kids, let alone subtweet him in a TikTok dance. This is not the way the world works, and yet it’s the way it looks.

The TikTok-famous Mormon wives - The Secret Lives cast, Hannah Neelman, and even Nara Smith - represent an interesting inflection point in American culture and influencer culture. The wives rose to fame due to their ability to posture as conservative, while subverting expectations in some kind of way, whether that’s twerking in front of their iPhone, being career-driven, or remaining incredibly calm as a saucepan boils over, nine kids clinging to their every limb and bosom. Amping up their more conservative or progressive parts is sure to enrage the crop of viewers on the other side of the aisle. The wives can constantly toggle between the religious and sacreligious to engender strong feelings from everyone.

This dance, however, is exhausting, and we’re finally seeing the ramifications of this exhaustion up close with Taylor Frankie Paul. There is a point at which you can’t cater to everyone while also angering everyone. There are only so many antagonistic ideas you can hold in your head until your brain simply breaks under the repeated trauma of them batting against each other. The logic of Mormon influencer women, being the primary caregivers, primary breadwinners, and primary faces of their families all at once, is so cognitively dissonant that it shouldn’t be able to last much longer. But it likely will, due to a gendered and faith-instilled drive to simply make things work, whatever the cost, whatever the pain required. And due to a tendency, on our part, to revel in women squirming.

Instead of watching Timotheé Chalamet realize the Marty Supreme plot by losing an Oscar due to hubris two Sundays ago, I watched the 2010 children’s sci-fi film Tron: Legacy, produced by Disney and starring Garrett Hedlund, Jeff Bridges, and Olivia Wilde. The film follows Sam, the son of legendary video game creator Kevin Flynn, who receives a digital message from his long-lost father and gets transported into a virtual reality called “The Grid.” In this reality, Sam, his father, and an “isomorphic algorithm” named Quorra must stop the evil program Clu from taking over the world. The film is a sequel to the 1982 Tron film, but you certainly don’t need that context to be entertained.

I was ten years old when this movie came out and remember its marketing being plastered across what felt like the world. Tron: Legacy was basically every other commercial on Disney Channel, giving my fourth-grade mind the idea that it was the biggest and best action movie ever made.

Since I had no interest in sci-fi at that time, and no brothers, I didn’t see Tron: Legacy when it was initially released. My boyfriend suggested we watch it, mainly so we could listen to Daft Punk’s original score, which was certainly the film’s most redeeming quality. While Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde did as much as they could with the PG writing and gaping plot holes, Garrett Hedlund, who plays Sam, could not hold the center in the slightest. His acting was more reminiscent of a Disney Channel Original Movie, and something about blonde hair and icy blue eyes does not scream Chosen One to me. I haven’t seen this man act in anything else, so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that he dated Kirsten Dunst for four years and had a child with Emma Roberts in 2020. I’m sure he’s still doing numbers in Us Weekly.

What fascinated me most about Tron: Legacy was its embodiment of this specific genre of preteen sci-fi/action movie that was only really a thing in the 2010s. The visual style is dark and stormy, often set in an inner city setting that most unknowing kids assume is New York. The Chosen One boy protagonist wears a leather jacket over a hoodie and is granted special powers by a wise, scraggly mentor, while a cute girl love interest looks on. The writing is intentionally digestible and sparse for a young teen audience. In addition to Tron: Legacy, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (starring Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel) come to mind when I recall this genre. If you thought I was surprised by Garrett Hedlund’s dating history, imagine my utter shock upon learning that all three of these movies came out in 2010. Let’s get into it.

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