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andhaveapleasanttomorrow · 2 months

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if you could scientifically engineer a new boy band what do you think theyd be like. what traits would they have

you've successfully baited me into writing over a thousand words on a topic I don't know very much about

as far as scientific engineering goes I don't need much aside from a willingness to let me puppet them around and make them dance. it's better if they're not engineered, I think, for the concept I've been tossing around in my head. I've been thinking about a few different things in tandem, one of them being some recent attempts to create a "western kpop[1] group," which haven't really been crazy successful, and wondering what it would take for something like that to work. for one thing, the only western kpop groups I know of have been girl groups, and at the risk of overgeneralizing I don't think the idea would work as well for a boy group, mainly because there are less male kpop fans and therefore less guys who would be eager to undergo that kind of training/lifestyle or have dreams of becoming that kind of "idol." I've also seen people say that a north american "mindset" isn't conducive to the idol lifestyle as it exists in korea because of cultural differences but I don't know how much I'd agree with that. I do think that rather than trying to get them to be precision-built silicon dolls like modern kpop idols it would make more sense to counter that and have them be more "real" and perhaps a little "rebellious," but like, not in any actually potentially subversive or offensive way. so I guess it would help if they had that feeling.[2] I think that would also make them more appealing to the general public, which is where kpop falls short. the language barrier doesn't help.[3]

another thing I've been thinking about is how important the accessibility (or perceived accessibility) of a star's personal life is now, in american pop. this is a big part of why taylor swift is so huge and I think another snagging point for kpop. people feel that it is very important that stars have "authenticity" and things like this, and like to do things like compare their lyrics to things that happened to the star, and so on. so for my perfect boy band there would have to be a sense that they were heavily involved in the creation of their songs somehow. (to be fair, I don't think this is unheard of in kpop.)[4] a third thing I've been thinking about is this idea of the "fictional real boy band" (the monkees, the jonas brothers, big time rush.[7]) I've been thinking about it because I don't really understand it. the first two at least were genuine stars, and big time rush wasn't like, globally renowned, but, you know, they did okay. where I get stuck is in understanding why people liked them, it doesn't seem like it should work; the contract between the pop star and the audience already has a fiction/reality dissonance that both parties just sort of have to accept, but starring in a television show with fictionalized versions of yourselves seems to be turning that upside down and violating it somehow. but people liked them.[8] the jonas brothers managed to make something of a real comeback, at least for a little bit, although I'm sure that was 90% fueled by nostalgia.[9]

anyway the fact that there's a precedent makes it odd to me that no one has attempted to modernize it with social media. I mean, obviously pop stars use social media, kpop idols do livestreams and tiktoks and things like that, there is a connection to the fans in that way, one direction even had their video diaries when they were teens, I'm more thinking of like an "influencer house" type of situation. this is where I think it becomes a bit unethical. I think as it is there's another little contract, where the audience understands that celebrities make certain kinds of posts online as promotional work and most of what they're saying isn't actually "coming from the heart," and celebrities know the audience knows. there's probably two ways to curveball this; lean way into it and turn it into an "I-know-you-know-I-know" thing, or obfuscate it entirely and pretend it doesn't exist.[10] the latter is really hard to accomplish and I'd really like to see it done successfully. the drive to call people nepo babies or industry plants is really strong these days, but so is the drive to feel like you know a celebrity on a personal level, so there's a bit of a tightrope situation here. basically my idea is to put the monkees on tiktok. but I don't want the audience to know they're watching the monkees, I want them to think it's real. also yaoibaiting is mandatory (also not unusual in kpop). imagine you follow a group of roommates online because they make funny posts about each other, but they're also incredibly famous, and they make music together, the lyrics of which can easily be interpreted to be about each other, like fleetwood mac. I want to create parasocial bonds that could topple empires. not for money I just want to see it happen

there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge because I don't know anything about the music industry and I'm also not entirely sure why kpop (or anything) "works," in a societal sense, or why exactly american pop has been so heavy with soloists for so many years when that wasn't the case before. I also don't even really listen to pop music, I mostly read what other people say about it because I find the social aspect of it more interesting. I like thinking about it so I'm going to continue thinking about it

[1] here used to refer to the specific management/training/production model of the idol industry in korea rather than a catchall for "korean pop" [2] I don't know how exactly that would be executed, I'm bad at predicting what people will clock as "cool" or "phony" because I have my own axis of how I perceive that kind of thing. [3] I do have a theory that part of the reason western kpop hasn't been panning out so well is that kpop fans are largely koreaboos and even if the idols are managed by korean companies they won't go as hard for them if they're not korean because they lose that sheen of the "culture," and because they don't get to call them unnie. if you don't create a group that's mainly geared towards kpop fans (because, I think, the american general public doesn't have an appetite for that kind of group anymore), you don't have that problem [4] I've also been thinking about 5 seconds of summer, and how they were, I think, the last really big actual band boy band, who like played their instruments and shit. don't talk to me about waterparks and twenty one pilots and fall out boy [5] and whatnot because that's not what I'm talking about and besides waterparks is overrated. I've never listened to their music but I can tell they're overrated. my point is my boys wouldn't need to play instruments, and anyway if they did then how could they do their little dance moves?[6] [5] they're all too old to be boy bands. [6] granted… I do think the general public would be more responsive to a real band-type-band than a pop group right now, but I don't have any real reasoning behind this [7] hannah montana's not a boy band but I suppose she also did this, the difference being that the actual star is "miley cyrus," not "hannah montana." [8] obviously there's something to be said that the target audience for most of these were like, 8 year olds, who don't have a very good grasp on the reality/fiction thing anyway, which is probably why I can't understand it [9] nostalgia is, of course, the only thing running the cultural engine these days, which is why I'm even thinking about this in the first place- it's weird to me that with the "y2k" thing being very popular there are no really big mainstream american pop groups like there were then [10] you could also just violate it and not filter the pop star at all, but that's less of a curveball and more of a foundational destruction, and would fall apart very quickly

#ask #anon

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twopoppies · 3 months

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Would you have a rolling stone subscription or any of your followers please? https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/american-idol-lgbtq-contestants-1235027350/

It doesn't seem to be behind any sort of paywall for me, but I tend tp be cautious when reposting entire articles because blogs have been taken down for it before. Here's most of the worst of it, though. DM me if you want more and can't access it.

Travis wasn’t aware that he couldn’t carry a tune until his audition aired on TV a year later, in January 2006. Seated in the living room of the same halfway-house counselor who had driven him to the audition, he thought to himself, “God, I do suck.” But the realization was too late. His phone was already being blitzed with calls, first check-ins from friends and family members and then requests for interviews with People and Us Weekly. Soon after, Travis says the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD (which did not respond to a request for comment on this story) telephoned with the offer of taking action against Idol on his behalf. He thought to himself, “What the fuck did I just do?”

The public reaction to Travis’ off-key rendition of Whitney Houston’s 1993 single “Queen of the Night” is perhaps most succinctly summed up by the title of a YouTube video of the tryout: “American Idol Audition Boy or Girl.” Travis wore bell-bottom jeans in a feminine cut and a white tank top to his audition, pulling his wavy blonde hair behind his ears. Simon Cowell, infamously the harshest critic among the show’s original trio of judges, appeared horrified by the sight of Travis, his mouth agape. After Randy Jackson, the panel’s swing vote, kicked things off by asking the contestant to say “something interesting” about himself, Cowell asked, “That’s necessary, is it?” Cowell proceeded to stop Travis in the middle of his performance, which he called “confused.”

Travis has come a long way since Idol. After pivoting to a successful career in gay porn under the name Kirk Cummings, he retired from the adult entertainment industry and now works as a dog groomer, a profession he finds peaceful. But even 19 years later, he finds the footage of his audition tough to watch. As he left the studio in tears, editors added the theme music to The Crying Game, the 1992 film that uses the sight of a trans woman’s body to shock viewers. Today, Travis presents as male and uses masculine pronouns, but at the time of his audition, he had hoped to someday transition. He even had his new name picked out: Kelly. When he was incarcerated, others would try to dissuade him from pursuing a future as a trans person by telling him that it’s a “really hard life,” and Idol seemed to prove them all right.

“I thought, ‘Wow, if this is how my life’s going to be, then I don’t want any part of it,’” he says. “My experience is not the normal experience of a trans person, but because I had chosen to be on a television show, I saw the worst of it.”

Open cruelty is no longer part of the Idol brand, now that the show is in its second run on ABC after Fox canceled the long-running program in 2015. The series, like much of contemporary reality TV, now trades on positivity, and the annual tradition of airing bad auditions has long been discontinued. But during the height of its popularity in the 2000s, schadenfreude was a major part of the show’s appeal. While launching the careers of instant household names like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, Idol was also the show where tens of millions of viewers watched Cowell tell Season Three contestant Heather Piccinini that she’s “ugly” when she sings and belittle Season Five’s Crystal Parizanski for overtanning; he even pulled Parizanski’s mother into the room to humiliate the contestant further. The show’s June 2002 premiere, in which Cowell advised a young woman to sue her vocal coach, made it clear what Idol would be selling.

That feed-them-to-the-lions approach made Idol the number-one program on TV six years running, the longest stretch at the top in broadcast history — but the show tended to prey on its most vulnerable contestants, perhaps unwittingly. Idol producers were forced to issue an apology after Cowell compared Season Six hopeful Kenneth Briggs, who has facial malformations due to Aarskog Syndrome, to a “bush baby.” Season Five’s Paula Goodspeed took her own life outside judge Paula Abdul’s home in 2008 after Cowell criticized the contestant’s metal braces following a performance of the Creedence Clearwater Revival/Ike and Tina Turner standard “Proud Mary.” Goodspeed was reportedly an obsessive stalker who changed her given name in tribute to Abdul, and the contest judge publicly criticized Idol’s producers for not doing more to protect her, saying she alerted them to Goodspeed’s behavior prior to the audition. (A spokesperson for the show did not comment on Abdul’s accusation at the time.)

Among those most targeted by Idol’s alleged abuses were anyone who was outside of the norm, as defined by the extremely narrow standards of Bush-era popular culture. This often included contestants who were experiencing mental health issues, individuals with disabilities, people of color, and plus-size singers like the late Mandisa Huntley, the Season Five contestant of whom Cowell infamously asked: “Do we have a bigger stage this year?” But Idol enjoyed a particularly contentious relationship with the queer contestants who hoped that the series would offer their big break into an unforgiving industry, many of whom had only started to come to an understanding of their LGBTQ+ identities. In another exchange condemned by GLAAD, Cowell told Travis’ fellow Season Five hopeful Charles Berry, who now is an out gay man, to shave off his beard and “wear a dress,” saying that he would make a “great female impersonator.”

Keith Beukelaer, whom Cowell famously called “the worst singer in the world,” knew immediately after his Season Two audition that it would end up being broadcast. “It’s something that I don’t know if I ever fully recovered from,” he says. “I remember it as if it was yesterday.” A devoted Madonna fan, he performed “Like a Virgin” in a green mock-turtleneck sweater, gyrating his body in sync with the song’s suggestive lyrics. Beukelaer has come to understand himself as having Asperger’s Syndrome, although he didn’t have the language for it at the time, and he came out as gay a few years after appearing on the program. He still struggles with the notoriety that his brief appearance on Idol brought, the decades of mockery that followed six minutes of air time.

Cowell did not return multiple requests for comment for this story. Neither did Jackson, longtime host Ryan Seacrest, or Idol creator Simon Fuller — who based the show off his own U.K. series Pop Idol, which aired from 2001 to 2003. But a source close to the production, who requested not to be named in this story, defended the show by affirming that “every single person who came on Idol, whatever their race, color, creed, or sexual preferences, was placed squarely in the firing line for Simon’s barbed critiques.”

[...]

What was a queer paradise for some, however, was a nightmare for others. Of those who spoke on the record, many say that Idol effectively forced them into the closet, and they believe it’s because the show was fearful that an openly queer contestant would alienate the show’s largely conservative viewership.

[...]

There was no rule saying that queer contestants couldn’t discuss their personal lives, but some singers say that Idol made it clear that some things were best kept secret. R.J. Helton, who uses they/them pronouns, went back into the closet and started dating a woman before they auditioned for Idol’s first season, hoping to make their family happy. Helton’s parents always envisioned that they would become a pastor or a Christian music artist, and when Helton’s boy band, the Soul Focus, went their separate ways, competing on Idol felt like a logical next step. Having recently broken things off with their fiancée, not wanting to live a lie, Helton began seeing their Idol stand-in during the season. Although they kept the romance a secret from producers, Helton says the other contestants knew. “None of them cared,” they say. “It was the first time that I felt accepted by a group of people.”

Idol producers never found out about the relationship, but the stakes were nonetheless made clear when executive producer Nigel Lythgoe, the show’s most influential creative voice, pulled Helton aside after seeing them exchange a friendly peck on the cheek with a male member of the crew. “Listen, we love you,” Helton says the producer told them. “We think you’re great, but let’s continue on the sweet side, with the Christian boy thing.” In their on-camera interviews and stage performances, Helton says they tried to tone down their natural ebullience, “butching it up” and staying as quiet as possible. A team of publicists, they recall, followed Helton everywhere “because they didn’t want me to break character.”

In an email to Rolling Stone, Lythgoe asserts that he “never stopped any contestant from coming out” and says he “never would have done so.” “I did work with a number of individuals who, sadly, were struggling with issues around coming out, and I provided feedback that was very common at the time: that they should let their talent do the talking and not allow others to denigrate them based on their personal lives,” he says. “If anyone was hurt by my advice on those issues, I can only apologize, but I only ever wanted to help and support the wonderful young people who competed on the first seasons of Idol, several of whom, tragically, were torn between a desire to live their truth openly and a great fear about how they would be treated on returning home by their families, by their communities, and even by God.”

Helton, now with the clarity of hindsight, wishes they’d had the confidence to present their full self to America. After being dropped from their record label following a 2006 interview in which they came out as gay, Helton recently came to the realization of their nonbinary identity. “I know it was a different generation, but there are parts of me that think: ‘If I could have worn a gorgeous evening gown with a full beard, I could have won,’” Helton says. When producers would tap them on the shoulder to remind them, “Hey, we don’t talk about this,” it made Helton scared of losing the only affirmation they’d ever had. “As a young person, that really plays with your psyche, especially when you’re not used to the spotlight, loads of fans, or the money. You just do what you’re told. I don’t know if that’s selling your soul to the devil, but it did feel like that. They lifted me up, put me on a pedestal, and told me that the pedestal will only be there as long as I play this part.”

Helton’s fellow Season One cast member Jim Verraros has spent years in therapy working to unlearn many of the unfortunate lessons he says Idol taught him, namely that it wasn’t OK to be himself. That education began with the Pygmalion-esque makeover given to the show’s aspiring superstars: Idol immediately traded in his nerdy aesthetic — wiry glasses and jean jackets with the collar popped — for a generic rock look, sleeveless vests with leather cuff bracelets. He got contacts, lowered his voice half an octave, and put away what he calls the “theatrical and stage part of me that comes also from having deaf parents and being expressive.” “It comes at a cost,” he says. “When you’re told that you aren’t enough — or that this version of you doesn’t work — you spend a big part of your life taking parts away from you so that you can achieve those dreams.”

Although Verraros made the Top 10 of his season, he struggled with the role created for him, and the miscasting of a nebbishy gay Midwestern boy as a conservative-friendly heartthrob led to friction with the show’s creative team. Former co-host Brian Dunkleman, who emceed Idol’s first season alongside Ryan Seacrest, says he overheard Cowell and Randy Jackson discussing plans to directly target Verraros, hoping to get a strong reaction out of him that they could film. “We’re gonna nail Jim,” he recalls the judges saying as they were having coffee in an Idol break room. Cowell tended to reserve his harshest critiques of the show’s inaugural cast for Verraros, and following that discussion, he told the contestant live on air, “I think if you win this competition, we would have failed.”

Idol did get the emotional reaction it sought from Verraros in a scene that ultimately landed on the cutting-room floor. Prior to the announcement of the season’s Top 10 finalists, Dunkleman says that Cowell informed the contestants they would be using the “judges’ veto” to oust one of them from the show. “Jim, you’re out of the competition,” Cowell told Verraros, prompting the young singer to burst into tears. (That’s when Dunkleman recalls that Lythgoe came over and instructed everyone to sing a modified version of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” to brighten Verraros’ spirits. “Cheer up, sleepy Jim,” fellow contestants sang together in unison.) For reasons that are unclear, Lythgoe opted to backtrack on the judges’ decision, Dunkleman says, allowing Verraros to move forward to the next round after all. “Later that night, I was at dinner and I got a pretty frantic message from Nigel saying, ‘Look, there’s been a change. Jim is back in the competition. Just please don’t tell anybody about anything that happened today,’” Dunkleman remembers. “And then the next night he made the Top 10.”

Those incidents, Dunkleman adds, played a major role in his decision to part ways with Idol, calling the program “evil.” He also recalls that a judging panel needed to be refilmed so Cowell could call Helton a “loser” instead of a “monkey.” “That’s what it was,” he says of Idol. “It was about how mean they were. It was about how shocking this was and how much they were making fun of these singers.” He isn’t sure, though, why the show singled Helton and Verraros out in particular. “Is it conscious targeting or is it subconscious? That kind of undertone, maybe they weren’t even aware of it.”

[...]

AMERICAN IDOL often strained to fit queer contestants into an instantly recognizable mold that producers could market for the widest possible audience. Simon Cowell declared that he would quit the program if Sanjaya Malakar, an affable Season Six hopeful with a perpetual smile, won the competition. Malakar, who is half Bengali and performed with the Hawaii Children’s Theater during his time living in Kauai, was unlike any singer the show had ever seen. He was earnest and goofy, striding up to the judges’ table to dance with Paula Abdul during a performance of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.” He also straddled the lines of gender, flat-ironing his chameleonic locks for a winsome cover of John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World To Change.” After weeks of all but begging viewers to vote Malakar off the show, Cowell commented regarding the latter song: “Maybe it’s your hair that’s keeping you in. I don’t know.”

Malakar came out as bisexual many years after Idol was over, finding himself after taking a job at a karaoke bar in New York where he found freedom in anonymity. What was hardest for Malakar to navigate, he says, was not the constant scrutiny from Idol’s judges but the vitriolic reaction from fans. A MySpace blogger vowed to stop eating until Malakar was sent home, although the contestant outlasted the hunger strike, which ceased after 16 days. The website Vote for the Worst, which urged fans to subvert the Idol system by keeping on its quirkiest and most divisive contestants, took up Malakar as a personal cause.

Looking back, Malakar believes that it’s the ambiguity of how he presented that bothered people so much. The judges and viewers just couldn’t figure him out because, as a 17-year-old kid who hadn’t graduated high school yet, he hadn’t figured himself out. “There was no way to really understand how to define me,” he says. “They didn’t know what culture I was. They didn’t know what sexuality I was. They didn’t know what genre I was. I was this anomaly that made people uncomfortable.”

The queer singers who had the most painful time being reshaped by the Idol system were those who stood out the most, whether they were flamboyant and over-the-top in their performance style, like Malakar, or their gender presentation skewed toward the effeminate. Season Eight runner-up Adam Lambert — who declined to speak for this story, citing his shooting schedule for The Voice Australia, on which he is a judge — has said that queer contestants who didn’t have the ability to hide were used by Idol as “comic relief.” “Anytime someone came on the show that was perceived to be gay or it was obvious enough that they were gay, they were a joke,” he remarked to the British music magazine NME in a 2018 interview. He added: “To be fair, some of them weren’t great singers, but there were a couple of really good singers that came on. And they weren’t taken seriously.”

To illustrate his point, Lambert noted the example of Adore Delano from Seasons Six and Seven, who would later contend on the reality competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Delano declined to participate in this story, but in a 2023 Instagram video publicly announcing her transition, she said that she went back into the closet to compete on Idol. Appearing on the show led her to suppress her transness in order to present herself as “something that was so uncomfortable,” she recalled. And yet her effervescent femininity couldn’t be contained: During her second appearance on Idol, she performed a sassy rendition of “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley that Cowell deemed “hideous” and “verging on the grotesque.” Delano was ultimately eliminated from the Top 16 after a performance of Soft Cell’s queer anthem “Tainted Love” that Cowell declared “absolutely useless.” She dyed her silky hair purple for the number.

Like Delano, Atlas Marshall auditioned for Idol twice, making it to the Top 36 in Season Eight and then trying out again for Season 16. Both experiences were extremely fraught. Following a performance of Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” during her first appearance on the show, Cowell looked at Marshall and remarked, “I think you probably would.” Even as a guileless 18-year-old with frosted emo bangs and angel-bite piercings, Marshall realized it was a “loaded comment.” “The joke around that song is that it’s about anal sex,” she says. After the audience booed Cowell’s remark, Ryan Seacrest, then the show’s sole emcee, invited Marshall to come sit on the judge’s lap, but Paula Abdul intervened and beckoned the contestant to rest on hers instead. Marshall was voted off Idol the next day.

[...] Marshall’s mother, who recently passed away, was a lesbian, and she raised her child in a queer household where it was OK to be “open, flamboyant, and fabulous,” as Marshall recalls. Being taught by Idol that the outside world might mock the parts of herself she was taught to embrace was a rude awakening. “For so long, there was a lot of shame around it,” she says of her first Idol experience. “I felt gross. I didn’t like myself.”

[...]

While the team behind Idol’s current iteration did not offer a comment on the record, the source close to the Fox production contests the idea that the show stopped contestants from expressing their most authentic selves, while adding that “coming out might have damaged certain contestants’ chances for success.” “No one ever prevented anyone from doing so, but there was often a sense — right or wrong — that it would be better if the American public’s vote was based more on their judgment about the performers’ talent rather than their sexual orientations,” the source says.

[...]

Although it would feel convenient to point the finger solely at Idol, the show at its peak reflected America’s culture as much as it defined it. When the series premiered in 2002, polling from Gallup showed that 43 percent of the U.S. populace still thought homosexuality should be illegal; Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down sodomy laws in the 14 states where gay sex was still illegal, wouldn’t be issued for another year. A majority of Americans wouldn’t support the right of same-sex couples to marry until 2011, during Idol’s tenth season on the air. That was also, coincidentally, the first season not to feature either Paula Abdul or Simon Cowell on the judges panel. Abdul, hailed by sources as a major supporter of queer contestants behind the scenes, parted ways with the program after Season Eight. Cowell left the following year to launch the U.S. spinoff of The X Factor, the British singing competition he created in 2004.

[...]

For all the troubles that some queer contestants say they had on the show, many argue that Idol’s missteps paled in comparison to how cruelly they were treated by the rest of the media, the music industry, and even America at large. Idol voters eliminated Season Seven’s David Hernandez the week after an Associated Press story revealed that he had previously worked as a dancer at a Arizona strip club that catered to a “mostly male” clientele. By that time, photos that allegedly showed Hernandez bartending at a gay nightclub had already been published on Vote for the Worst, although Hernandez says the pictures weren’t even of him. He says that Idol was already well aware of his work history by the time the reports surfaced, as he disclosed the information in the extensive questionnaire the show required contestants to complete; spanning over 100 pages in length, it also asked singers to name their past sexual and romantic partners.

[...]

The media persecution of queer Idol contestants was so de rigueur during the show’s imperial era that few even questioned it. Jim Verraros’ coming out in 2002 prompted a two-page spread in the Globe, a U.S. supermarket tabloid, asking: “Who’s Next?” Chatter surrounding Adam Lambert’s sexuality made the New York Times after photos circulated of the singer, eyes covered in makeup and glitter all over his face, locking lips with another man. Following the Season Two finale, Clay Aiken says that the first question that he was ever asked by a reporter was: “Are you gay?” He wouldn’t formally come out until a 2008 People magazine cover story coinciding with the birth of his son, and for years, he says, confirmation of his sexual orientation “was the only thing that anybody in the press wanted” from him. “I never did an interview where somebody was not trying to ask me if I was gay,” he says, later adding: “Everybody wanted to be the one who got it.”

Aiken says that speculation regarding his sexuality reached such a fever pitch that, for a time, he stopped leaving his house. Even then, there was no hiding from it: “If I heard anybody setting up a gay joke on a sitcom or a late-night show, I held my breath because I knew my name was coming. Eighty percent of the time I was right.” The topic was a frequent punchline of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who frequently booked Aiken to appear on his show, and comedian Kathy Griffin spent a full 15 minutes discussing Aiken’s sexuality in a 2005 stand-up special on Bravo. “I do find him to allegedly be the gayest man in the free world,” she said in the routine, calling him “Gayken” to hearty applause from the crowd. Even two years after he had actually come out, a Season Eight episode of Family Guy saw Stewie, during a parody of Family Feud, being asked to name a “popular fruit” and responding: “Clay Aiken.” “I laugh at them now,” he says of the jokes, noting that he calls Griffin a friend. “I find them hilarious now, but at the time, it hurt a lot.”

Full article here

#american idol #clay aiken #adam lambert #simon cowell is a bag of dicks #suicide tw

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billspotts · 12 days

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“You are the product of the Venezuelan elite, and you don’t understand the revolution.” A classmate said that to me during my first year of college in Maryland in 2021, during our Nonviolence and Liberation class. These comments, although not new to me, always stung. Each time I heard them, I was reminded that my perspective as a Venezuelan refugee didn’t align with the prevailing narrative in the room. It was as if my lived experiences didn’t matter if they didn’t fit the ideological frame of those around me.

Every day while walking through campus, I passed two posters with images of Chávez—one declaring, “The revolution will not be televised,” and the other “Que siga la revolución.” These posters, plastered on the walls of a liberal arts college in the United States, were a daily reminder of the ideological battles I was fighting alone. Despite my repeated efforts to have them removed, I was told they were protected by free speech and had educational value. While my peers saw them as symbols of resistance or anti-imperialism, I saw them as painful reminders of the suffering my family and I had endured. It became clear that many of the people around me were romanticizing a revolution that, in reality, had brought nothing but hardship to those it was meant to uplift.

I lacked a heavy accent, came from a college-educated, white-collar family, and was enrolled in a private liberal arts college. None of this fits their image of what a refugee is to be.

To them, I wasn’t a person who had fled political persecution—I was a privileged outsider, speaking from a place of right-wing indoctrination. Every time I tried to share my experiences, my voice was dismissed, often with the suggestion that I had been brainwashed by anti-left propaganda. It was frustrating, especially having personally witnessed the devastation caused by a government that, while promoting the ideals of socialism and revolution, systematically dismantled democratic institutions and plunged millions into poverty.

Another vivid memory from my college days was when a professor casually remarked, “You shouldn’t really complain about the dining hall. Didn’t you grow up without food in Venezuela?” I was left speechless, exhausted from constantly having to explain the complexities behind my homeland’s collapse– complexities often dismissed by the oversimplified argument that U.S. sanctions were responsible for Venezuela’s shortages, migration crisis, and lack of necessities. However, I left Venezuela long before Trump’s 2019 sanctions, having lived through the 2014 crisis when market lines stretched for kilometers, medical supplies were scarce, and corruption was rampant at every level of government. Blaming U.S. policies alone for Venezuela’s downfall overlooked years of internal mismanagement and growing authoritarianism.

I often found myself in a lonely battle—not only educating my peers on the harsh realities on the ground but also challenging professors who romanticized revolution and liberation, views rooted in theory but far removed from lived experience.

I chose my small college because of its active student organizing and political activism. However, my time at Goucher College was overshadowed by the reality that opinions not immediately aligned with the left or deviating from the narrative that “everything on the left is good” were often dismissed. I spent significant time and energy explaining and defending the reality I had left behind, sometimes making me question my experiences. I was disappointed and further isolated by the lack of openness or willingness to discuss the dictatorship, not just from my American peers but in general. The ideological rigidity I faced in college mirrored the fractured society I had left in Venezuela, where strict political adherence divided families and destroyed friendships.

This experience extends beyond my college as prominent left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders have hesitated to outright condemn Maduro’s dictatorship while advocating for free elections. This reluctance reflects a broader struggle within left-leaning politicians to confront authoritarianism from ideologically sympathetic regimes. Many hesitate to denounce authoritarian actions within left-wing governments because doing so undermines their narratives of social justice, anti-imperialism, and equality. In Venezuela’s case, Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution was initially seen as a hopeful alternative to neoliberalism and U.S. interventionism; as Maduro’s oppressive regime intensified, it challenged their belief that left-wing regimes inherently represent the people’s interests, complicating the narrative that right-wing governments are the sole oppressors.

Figures like Sanders, who have built their platforms on anti-imperialism and opposition to the U.S.-backed regime change, fear that taking too firm a position against Maduro could inadvertently lend support to interventions they oppose.

This has led to a form of rhetorical tightrope walking—where there is a clear condemnation of the lack of democratic processes but a reluctance to call out Maduro’s government in the stark terms applied to other authoritarian regimes.

The Venezuelan crisis is not just about sanctions or foreign intervention; it’s a complex story of corruption, political repression, and economic collapse. And yet, many preferred to see it through the simplistic lens of an American-backed coup, as if Venezuelans themselves are incapable of recognizing the failures of their government. This dismissal of Venezuelans’ capacity to understand and navigate their own political and social realities is yet another manifestation of a form of paternalism that centers the U.S. in a narrative that is not, and should not be, about them. Revealing a deeply ingrained bias, where people from the Global South are viewed as passive actors in their own lives, reliant on external powers, particularly the U.S., to “correct” their course or provide solutions.

At this new juncture in Venezuelan politics and history, the narrative of foreign interference continues to thrive. Protests organized by Venezuelan expatriates in major U.S. cities, calling attention to the electoral fraud committed by Maduro and his terror campaign as well as demanding recognition of Edmundo González as the rightful president-elect of Venezuela, are often met with American counter-protests. These counter-protesters, echoing Gonzalez ‘s victory a U.S. intervention, hold signs and chant old slogans like “Hands off Venezuela.” The assumption that Venezuelans need Americans to define their struggles or guide their revolutions is rooted in a condescending worldview that strips them of their agency and dignity. The mass exodus of Venezuelans, now one of the largest migration crises in the Western Hemisphere, stands as a powerful testament to the disillusionment and despair caused by years of authoritarian rule, not external interference. Such narratives fail to acknowledge the intelligence and determination of those who continue to fight for a better future.

For Venezuelans, the reality of living under an authoritarian regime is not about political theory or ideological purity—it’s about survival.

My experiences in college made me steadfast in my resolve. I am Venezuelan; I lived through the horrors of the Chávez and Maduro regimes and I fled to the United States seeking a better life. While I acknowledge the privilege that allowed me to do so, that privilege neither erases nor minimizes my suffering, nor did it shield me from living in fear while in Venezuela. That I survived, along with the mental scars carried by myself and the 8 million Venezuelans in exile, are not up for debate.

It is my belief that when ideological loyalty surpasses empathy, humanity is lost. We cannot let political beliefs blind us to the suffering of others, especially when that suffering is happening so close to home. To dismiss it isn’t just a lack of compassion—it’s willful ignorance. And those who claim to understand “the revolution” better than those who lived through its devastation are not only out of touch—they’re complicit. Blinded by their arrogance, they refuse to see the truth, choosing self-righteousness over justice, and in doing so, they betray the very humanity they claim to defend.

#venezuela

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forsetti · 2 months

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On Voting: Read A Civics Book And Do The Right Thing

Once again, like the swallows returning to Capistrano or the sun rising in the east, Democrats are in full panic mode about the upcoming Presidential election. They go through this ritual every four years because, as a group, they are really, really bad at political strategy and basic civics.

Of course, they will never admit this because they think they are intellectually superior to their right-wing counterparts. In many ways, this is absolutely true. However, when it comes to elections and voting, their political opponents are much, much better.

The phrase, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” was most likely coined by someone who has watched the left’s political strategies and voting histories.

Voting isn’t American Idol. It isn’t about who performs best on a stage at any given moment.

Voting isn’t a reality show.

Voting isn’t about who looks the best on television. I know the OpticsPolice™ love nothing better than to over-analyze body language, voice modulation, and speech patterns… over content and context. However, it is easy and intellectually lazy.

Voting isn’t about who looks the most energetic. We all have known bosses or colleagues who talk loudly and quickly and almost to a person, they are full of shit. Being verbally active doesn’t signal anything positive. This should be especially true when it comes to governing. I don’t want a used car salesperson running the country. I want someone who is thoughtful and deliberate.

Voting isn’t who you’d like to have a drink with at a bar. You aren’t voting for who would be a good hang. You are voting for who will do a good job. If my kid needs their brain operated on, I really don’t give a damn if the neurosurgeon has a great bedside manner. I care about if they can do the job.

Voting is about who, of the options available, will do the most good. Even if you believe in the idiotic view that a particular election is between “the lesser of two evils,” less evil is ALWAYS better than more evil. There is no moral calculus where letting more evil win is the ethical choice. I can’t even believe this is a thing but it is remarkable how many on the left use this “argument,” to justify their bad choices and strategies.

Voting for president in America, like it or not, is a binary choice. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with the fact America has become a two-party system or want it to be something different. It is. Any political strategy that doesn’t accept this and act accordingly is about wish casting, not reality.

Voting for president is about the agendas, policies, and people they surround themselves with, as much or more than the candidate, themselves. The makeup of administrations matters. The right/wrong Cabinet member or department head can make a world of difference.

Voting is often not getting a chance to vote for your favorite candidate. Democracy does not guarantee you get the opportunity to vote for someone you really love. Sometimes your favorite candidate isn’t a good candidate runs a bad campaign or isn’t as popular with others the way they are to you. Just because your pet candidate doesn’t make the cut doesn’t absolve you from your responsibilities, as a voter.

The first rule of voting is the same as the Hippocratic Oath -First, do no harm. If your vote or lack of vote brings about terrible consequences, you’ve failed to do your job as a voter. If voting for someone won’t benefit you directly but will benefit others, especially the most vulnerable in society, that is the right choice EVERY SINGLE TIME.

The second rule of voting is a corollary to the first: “Vote the way the most vulnerable in coalition votes. The most vulnerable in your coalition have the most to lose in any election. They know who and what is best for their situations. If you aren’t a member of this group, you don’t and should act like you know what is best for them. Listen to them. Follow their lead, even if it means voting for someone not at the top of your list.

Voting isn’t just a right, it is a civic, moral responsibility. What you do/don’t do has consequences. Voting for Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, or Hammurabi in 2016 is directly related to a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court and all they have done to roll back progressive laws and polices in the past few years. No amount of linguistic or logical gymnastics makes this not true.

Voting isn’t about the individual candidates as much as it is about their worldviews. Even if you vote for the right candidate and they win, sometimes they are unable to do what they want to do and what you want them to do. Presidents are not all-powerful. They can’t just do whatever they want. It’s a complex, complicated system of government, intentionally so. The Framers didn’t want wild fluctuations in laws and how the government operates. They opted for consistency over the ability to change course quickly. This limits what a president can/can’t do. Sometimes all the political stars align and a lot can get done in a short period of time. If/when that happens, you want the person most willing to make those changes.

I don’t care who runs against Trump in November. If that person loses, they will be blamed for fascism taking over America when the ugly truth is those responsible are every single person who voted for him and those who didn’t vote for his opponent. That is how American politics works. It doesn’t matter if you agree with or like it, that doesn’t change the reality. If you don’t cast a vote for the Biden/Harris ticket in November, you are directly responsible for whatever consequences follow. There is no moral horse high enough for you to straddle to avoid the consequences and culpability.

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misfitwashere · 4 months

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Dr. Timothy Snyder - Thinking about...

Dear Friends, from time to time I will use this space to discuss a new book. My essay today serves as a foreword to Julia Davis's new book on Russian television propagandists, In Their Own Words, which I heartily recommend to you.

Russian propaganda is in the shadow of America. Whereas the America only covers Russia when there is something to cover, and usually not even then, Russian propaganda television starts every night from the premise that whatever has happened that day is America's doing and America's fault. This does not reflect reality -- or a typical American's experience of reality.

It does reflect the problem that Russian propaganda is meant to solve. Since Vladimir Putin is the boss of bosses in an oligarchical regime where domestic policy is impossible, the propagandists must direct attention to the world beyond Russia in a way that makes Russia's leadership seem righteous.

Russian propagandists do this in the confidence that no one beyond Russia is watching. But Julia Davis has been, to the great benefit of us all. Thanks to her new book, In Their Own Words, we can understand the propagandists' job description, but also the tensions they feel when the outside world causes them problems.

Their basic posture is that America is in a constant war with the Russian Federation. Because Russia cannot fight and cannot win any actual war of that description, the propagandists are most comfortable when America is turned against itself. They talk almost never about Russian domestic politics, but obsess over every piece of evidence of American domestic weakness.

Donald Trump is their favorite weapon against America. Trump is described as a friend and ally, "our Trumpushka" and "Donald Fredovych." Out of office, he is described as Russia's great hope. He is "sorely missed"; Russia is "ready to elect you again". Russia propagandists had no trouble predicting that Trump would try a coup when he lost in 2020, because that is a familiar sort of behavior to them. They rejoiced when he did , because they thought that this could lead to a civil war in the United States. Their coverage of Trump's coup attempt was at first highly positive. When it failed, a very awkward pivot was made to the position that it had all been some sort of provocation by the Democrats.

One of the things that Russian propagandists expect not to be noticed, but which is brought home in the book, is that they believe that Trump is an idiot. Of course, it's hard to see, from their perspective, how they can believe anything else (except, perhaps, that he is a traitor, as is also sometimes hinted). In their public worldview, destroying the United States is the main aim, and here is an American who follows their talking points.

The same goes for Tucker Carlson. He is celebrated on Russian television, of course, and his clips replayed. But Russian propagandists naturally think anyone beyond Russia who is on their side must not be very bright, and they cannot quite stop themselves from saying so. It is the one point on which they are completely sincere.

It is important to note, and Julia Davis gives us all the details, the hypocrisy of the anti-American pose. A leading Russian propagandist sent his girlfriend to America to give birth so that his child would have Russian citizenship. Propagandists are clearly personally hurt by sanctions that separate them from their property in the European Union or make it harder for them to travel abroad. They send their children to study and work in the West, They don't have any real animus towards the West. This is, I think, one more reason why they can't resist thinking of Americans on their side as idiots.

When Putin ordered a full-scale war on Ukraine, the propagandists suddenly had a problem. Before the attack, as we are reminded in this book, there was great confidence among Russian propagandists that Ukraine would fall to Russia in "two days" or even "ten minutes." But when Russia actually did undertake a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it set off a chain of events that the propagandists found hard to master.

For one thing, they had been cut out of the loop. The invasion was meant to be its own propaganda, a "special military operation" that overthrew the Ukrainian government in three days, followed by a victory parade and a warm welcome by the Ukrainian masses. This did not happen, and was based upon a worldview (Putin's) that was both obviously wrong and impossible to criticize. Russian propagandists switched immediately to the comfortable idea that the war was really against America, and that America had initiated. Rereading Julia Davis's essays, I was struck by how quickly this happened -- within a few days.

The Ukrainians themselves had to be dehumanized. This was a direct consequence of the senselessness of the war. Russians had to be made to feel that they were somehow superior, and that war had some kind of logic. Its premise, as Putin had made clear, was that there was not really a Ukrainian state or nation; this was all a conspiracy, and would collapse immediately. If, as it emerged, more Ukrainians defended themselves than expected, that did not mean that Ukraine was real; it just meant that logic of the special military operation, killing the elites, had to be extended ever further downward into the population.

As Julia Davis shows, Russian propagandists use openly genocidal language over and over again, urging the extermination of vermin, worms, demons, zombies, etc. Putin's grotesque "denazification" framing of the war is genocidal. If all Ukrainians are defined as Nazis by nature, then it is right to kill them all. The "Nazi" claim has never had anything to do with political reality (the actual fascists, the ones in Russia, are calling for genocide), and always had everything to do with justifying that murderous project. After the Hamas attack on Israel, there was split in the Russian media elite between Russia's non-Nazi fascists and the Nazi ones. This too is chronicled here.

A house bombed in Chernihiv region, Ukraine (photo TS, September 2022)

When reading Julia Davis's essays carefully, it becomes clear that America is not just needed as a propaganda target, but as a de facto ally, called in by the propagandists to correct the (unmentionable) mistakes made by their own (supposedly infallible) dictator. Russia needs Trump because it cannot manage on its own. Trump allows them to claim that everything is America's fault and that this is confirmed by America's own leadership. And then everything can go on in Russia as before.

Russia needs America to bail it out of its war with Ukraine. When you read Julia Davis's summaries of Russian propaganda day after day, it is abundantly clear that the propagandists themselves (despite all of the bluster) are aware that the war did not go according to plan, and indeed is going very badly. Again and again they are put in impossible positions: when Ukraine takes territory; when Russia fails to take territory; when more Russians have to be mobilized; when Yevgeny Prigozhin tries and coup. They cannot criticize Putin, and they know that Putin cannot win unaided: and so they root for his allies abroad.

This itself is worth emphasizing, at a time when many Europeans and Americans seem to be asking how Ukraine can win. The answer is simple. Ukraine can win if Europeans and Americans believe it can, and continue to help. Ironically, that emerges quite clearly from these pages. Russia's propagandists know this. They are relying entirely on their own domain, that of discourse. The war is not going well for Russia on the actual battlefield. The Europeans and the Americans are bearing essentially no costs. But if they can somehow decide that they are weary, Russia can win.

Russia can't win its own war, is the propagandists' evident conclusion -- but America can win Russia's war for it. America is of course not all-powerful, as the Russian propagandists claim to believe, but on this point they are right. As we near the U.S. elections, their discussions of Ukraine, like their discussions of Russia and everything else, focus entirely on what is happening inside the United States. The regime they serve, and the senseless and genocidal war it began, can be bought some time, if and only if the United States fails to support Ukraine. And so the heroes of Russia's war, in Russia's own propaganda, become the Americans who support it.

TS 10 June 2024

#timothy snyder #in their own words #war in ukraine #russian invasion of ukraine #russian propaganda #Thinking about...

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darkmaga-retard · 14 days

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After a period of calm and a superficially patriotic convention, the Democrats are turning up the rhetorical heat again.

By Christopher Roach

September 10, 2024

Less than two months ago, Donald Trump was nearly killed on live television. Amazingly, this extraordinary story has already been memory-holed. Among the mainstream news, there is shockingly little curiosity about what the perpetrator believed, his motives, and how he was able to nearly kill a leading presidential candidate.

This attack followed years of extreme rhetoric against Trump, describing him as a unique threat to democracy, claims accompanied by unprecedented criminal prosecutions and civil suits, which collectively aim to force him out of the race and otherwise ruin his life.

In the wake of the shooting and Trump’s miraculous survival, there was a brief moment of bipartisan magnanimity. In the immediate aftermath, President Biden said, “I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally . . . There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.”

He added later, “It’s sick. It’s sick. That’s one of the reasons why we have to unite this country. You cannot allow for this to be happening. We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

This was all very welcome, and Biden was not alone. People across the spectrum condemned the shooting. It was a wake-up call. Regardless of one’s personal politics, most people recognized that it would have been a disaster for the country if Trump had been killed. In addition to being the most violent and extreme type of election interference, it would have fueled, with some basis in reality, a lot of suspicion and hostility on the right about conspiracies involving the Deep State.

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grits-galraisedinthesouth · 2 years

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The lux cottage couple of SAN YSIDRO RANCH

When the Frogmore Cottage renovation project was announced to the British tax payers, Meghan used her personal "mouthpieces" to express displeasure with the choice. She found this cottage beneath her expectations for a royal standard of living. She publicly compared Frogmore Cottage to the homes of William and Catherine, and took to twatter to express her disdain for the free "staff" accommodations.

We already knew she detested Nottingham Cottage before Megflix because she lived in a rented house in the Cotswolds. A detail they conveniently forgot to mention in the mockumentary.

While her public disdain for rent-free housing is ON BRAND for Meghan, it is no coincidence that she moved to CA and deliberately chose a luxury COTTAGE as the faux Hollywood set of their reality tv show.

Meghan & Harry's Santa Barbara Cottages & Gardens represents another sign that she has always obsessed with setting up her rival faux ROYAL court. The BRF security team is obliged to flag these seemingly unrelated decisions as more evidence of Meghan's disordered bunny boiler personality which I have termed PCDD¹.

I still believe Meghan was crazy enough to name ARCHie and their ARCHewell BRAND after the word monARCHy. I also believe she named her tig blog after William & Harry's lost dog TIGger and their beloved lost nanny TIGgy. She used the word TIG to wickedly trigger Harry's boyhood traumas rooted in losses. In this case, a dog and a 2nd mother figure. Harry was a Marked man (now a Markled man) long before they met in Istanbul, Turkey.

Their decision to burn unearned wealth to cosplay in lux COTTAGES only feeds Meghan's Princess Catherine Derangement Disorder (PCDD¹) and her deluded fantasy that she is destined to become QUEEN of the world.

To keep up their lux cottage couple lifestyle, from 2020-2022 Meghan Markle potentially burned through a min of $56,000-$84,000 per WEEK to stage zoom calls and create a fake lifestyle of luxury for a megflix mockumentary.

That is at minimum $1,000,000 (million) per year on luxury hotel fees all the while suing & shaming the British tax payers for SECURITY. This is CRIMINAL.

The money Meghan & Harry burned on a weekly basis (during a pandemic) is the amount of money average Americans hope to gross in 1 year. The average family in some of the poorest countries in the world could transform their entire village with what these (2) two spent in 1 week to stage zoom calls. No wonder Meghan was in debt when she married Harry. She's the fraudess who went into debt to create her HUMANITARIAN brand to "bag a Prince.²"

It doesn't add up: they own a 16 bathroom mansion and yet the director of megflix quit the job because Meghan & Harry weren't willing to film their REALITY TV show out of their home. They will write off the expense of these lux cottages. With the publication of SpareUs, they released photos and articles all about the cottages and the property. No doubt Meghan negotiated a reduced rate to act as brand ambassadors.

But why the deception?

We learned that Charles cut Harry a check for a few million dollars, and yet ungrateful Harry went before the entire world with his lying wife and lying NOprah to shame his father for cutting him off financially. According to Harry it was only the millions from his mother (his very own patron saint who communicates with him from her grave) that made it possible for them to avoid homelessness.

NOprah had the audacity to publicly shame the British people for wasteful spending in honor of their Queen's Platinum Jubilee. This hypocrisy from the woman who televised the moment she gifted a room full of MULTI-MILLIONAIRES with an extravagant pair of diamond earrings. Her media mogul mentee, Tyler Perry, purchased 2 Rolls Royce vehicles: 1 for a billionairess, NOprah & 1 for a millionaire, Gail.

This cottage couple cried to NOprah because their royal baby didn't have SECURITY. Bethenny Frankle was even contacted by A list celebrities and told to take down her criticism of Meghan because they couldn't AFFORD to pay their SECURITY bills.

Free people should do whatever they desire to do with their own money; however in this instance, it is Meghan's pretense, her hypocrisy, and her penchant for deception that voted her the 2022 #1 celebrity that people are most sick of and of course Harry took the 2nd place spot.

Harry's law suit against his grandmother's government has already cost the British tax payer $300,000. This selfish, greedy California cottage couple has the audacity to demand that the UK tax payer cover their annual $3,000,000 SECURITY bill. You couldn't make it up.

This comes as no surprise to us bc we observed her celebrity NO work ethic at a mere 72 engagements.

If you pay UK taxes or live in a Commonwealth Country, please write to the MPs and to your Prime Minister. Sussex titles need to be stripped, thereby relieving the cottage couple (and their invisibles) of their ties to the UK and any need for tax payer funded SECURITY.

Admittedly, Meghan cares nothing for the sacrifices that were made by the British people (dead or alive). She feels entitled to other people's money. Unfortunately Harry, like his wife, lacks a pure desire for servant leadership.

William and Harry's mother, who actually worked hard for a living (even as a house keeper), would be appalled at Harry's sense of entitlement. Sadly, Harry has managed to embody the egomania his mother feared might result from an uber privileged upbringing.

In selecting Meghan, it is evident to the world that Harry has again tragically lost the mother he knew for the first 13 years of his life.

In 2019, Tatum O'Neal was asked about Meghan's infamous bad behavior at Wimbledon, and she seemed genuinely disappointed. "This is not Diana...I don't know what this is..." More evidence that Harry was told by numerous people who actually knew his mother that this wife lacks his mother's virtues, and yet he prefers to believe & parrot her lies.

youtube

On Megflix, Meghan expressed that she's frustrated because after all this time (and Money on PR) people still don't have "a good sense" of who she is. For her to make such an outrageous statement only confirmed that South Park got it right, Harry's wife is "stupid."

Meghan dear, which one of your multiple personalities carried out those 72 engagements? Were we watching your clone? Did the British press tamper with the footage? Go back and watch yourself, preferably with a REAL medical professional. And while you're at it, print out the transcripts of those horrid podcasts. Everyone can see the real you except for you and your dumb now husband, H.

Harry had the audacity to say that unlike his British family members, he and Meghan never worried about how they might perform in front of the press because they are AUTHENTIC.

The fact that Harry believes Meghan is his mother incarnate is enough to warrant a wellness check visit on the invisibles by a qualified social worker. Obviously Dorito's CA license isn't worth the paper it was printed on.

The words of Harry's friend(s) about her rented apartment being Soho House "touched" certainly ring true today. I still don't understand the full meaning of those words, but even Dumb Harry wrote that she lived out of Soho House hotels where they stored her luggage.

"Soho House Touched" Living Accommodations

If you watch the home videos of Meghan, it affirms what her Uncle Mike said about his brother Thomas: he created "a prima donna." Sadly the entire world has been impacted by Thomas' creation. Meghan, the faux humanitarian, has shown the world the level of destruction an ungrateful adult child is capable of inflicting on her own families, and on all the families she never had.

So many elaborate schemes executed to feed the world an illusion of two innocent lovers who escaped their awful life inside the gilded cage of royalty, only to act out a modern day tragedy on a global stage.

Carry on duke & duchess. Carry on

¹PCDD Princess Catherine Derangement Disorder Last year I read a comment that summed up the root of Meghan's psychosis with a simple link to this photo:

²Gina Nelthorpe Cowne Quote

They negotiated a price cut from Mr. Warner. Too bad he also allowed them to redecorate w/Meghan's tacky home furnishings.

#cottage couple #San Ysidro Ranch #revenge #tom bower #megxit #frogxit #santa barbara #staged #fraud and fraudess #worldwide privacy tour #waaagh #like a spare #spare us #strip the sussex titles #four seasons #beanie babies #Ty Warner

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ambrosearietes · 1 month

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We (and by that I mean myself) demand more headcanons cuz they go hard asf😈

i have so many i’m gonna break these up by character. i will only do like the major ones. these are not all my headcanons just my big ones.

ADAM

despite living in slavic countries for most of his life, adam speaks english with a british accent because he learned it from anthony. he can also do a perfect american accent because he played WAAAAAAAYYYYYY too much fallout

adam is autistic (this one actually is canon, i mean come On dude) but also has ADHD and C-PTSD

scrawny because he was malnourished during his time as d-class. very insecure about it.

he and sylvester sloan know each other through anthony. i mentioned that sloan babysat adam occasionally, i was completely serious. he let adam watch star wars and adam literally wanted to BE luke skywalker.

yeah luke was his gender awakening

uses she/her to refer to his younger self from before anthony saved him as a coping mechanism— in reality he’s trying to deny that it even happened to him in the first place.

smokes weed when the team is off. calvin does not approve.

marries harvey in every stardew valley playthrough.

romances halsin in baldur’s gate 3.

cracked at fromsoft games.

CALVIN

bisexual, he just doesn’t realize it.

calvin is a gamer. he had adam build him a setup. they play together. adam beats his fucking ass in everything and makes fun of him for it.

really, really bad habit of bottling his emotions (which is why olivia keeps dumping him)

was ~19 when he got arrested for the stuff hyun-ki mentioned. vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence is considered a felony charge.

grew up in the midwest. talks like a midwestern dad.

his aunt owns a horse ranch. calvin REALLY likes horses as a result.

he once promised adam to take him to meet his horse and teach him to ride after everything. poor guys :(

he and aaron would have had a father-son relationship.

he was a very “difficult” child due to him not being believed about his mother’s death. he had no idea how to cope with it. often got into fights, which is why his aunt ended up sending him to boarding school. she got a lot of calls even when he was there because calvin just. got into a fuckton of fights.

he didn’t go to therapy until the insurgency MADE HIM go to therapy.

legally can’t drive. doesn’t give a fuck.

he would occasionally let adam just lay on top of him like a cat. he thought it was platonic. like just guys being dudes.

would be a good father.

if he saw his dad again he’d shoot the guy without any hesitation.

blames the foundation’s negligence for his mom’s death.

likes planes a lot.

OLIVIA

sees adam as her little brother. they’re extremely close by O5-3’s chapter. she’s rather protective and very quick to defend him.

adam taught her to play dungeons and dragons and gives her book recommendations. she plays a halfling life-domain cleric/college of swords bard (multiclassing)

loves mystery novels.

adam introduced her to stardew valley. she usually marries leah.

bisexual. does not know this.

easily frustrated with calvin because calvin is terrible at communicating his feelings. calvin is trying to work on this. it’s going terribly. despite this, calvin is very affectionate with her and she does how open he is with that.

very relationship-centric person. this is mostly because she didn’t get much characterization in twie.

keeps a sketchbook. mostly doodles flowers.

her and sophia would have gotten along amazingly.

likes to dabble in poetry.

would romance wyll in bg3

huge fan of law and order. adam questions her taste in television shows.

if she had procreate she’d be fucking unstoppable.

i don’t have much on her bc characterization is so lacking :((

would have gladly taken sam (O5-11) with her back to the insurgency. deeply regrets that she didn’t. she thinks about sam a LOT, it genuinely haunts her. like she will try to sleep and she’ll just hear that gunshot and want to throw up.

VINCENT ARIANS / ANTHONY WRIGHT

i don’t remember if i mentioned this in the last post but vincent is a cat person. had a cat named mira. she was a calico.

insomniac.

in his ‘ideal world’ he would have lived with aaron and been able to raise adam.

very, very envious of people with ‘normal lives’.

we don’t know much about what vincent did in the foundation— the dialogue from O5-13 at the end of the children matches up with what he tells aaron in the apartment scene so i assume vincent was felix’s predecessor and felix held another number. as for what he did, we do know he was, like, an ACTUAL engineer who designed bombs at some point (stated in O5-5’s chapter); he could have been in charge of security.

it’s implied he had a second-in-command type position under aaron and likely was on the first delta command before his first ‘disappearance’, unless he wrote the summa modus operandi then just vanished off the face of the fucking earth for a while.

records of vincent are next to impossible to find within the insurgency as he worked so closely with the engineer and they don’t even know who the engineer was.

aaron thought vincent was dead until he received reports of anthony wright working with calvin.

anthony and sloan were good friends and out of all members of delta command during the way it ends, he respected sloan the most. anthony would have considered an actual relationship with him if he wasn’t like “no, i’m probably gonna disappear again or just straight up die soon anyway.” anthony was right, he did in fact die.

sloan knew who vincent arians was, he just had no idea that anthony and vincent were the same person.

genuinely, anthony wanted to die.

adam gave him a reason to live outside of vengeance.

GENUINELY sees adam as his son. he’s a bit harsh on him during TWIE because he never wanted adam in the insurgency at all. he and adam had a conversation at some point where anthony expressed this and told adam he wished the latter just went to a good college and worked in programming or IT.

would not have been able to kill calvin had he made it to the end. would also have not been able to kill aaron.

frederick traumatized this man just as much as he traumatized aaron, vincent just absolutely refuses to acknowledge it.

sophia knew about vincent’s love for aaron and may have even encouraged it.

if his love for aaron was reciprocated, they likely had a relationship while aaron was with the insurgency and tried to be secretive about it but felix carter just “I know what you are.”

he would be very sweet as a lover. very sappy. hopeless romantic. given who he was in love with, are we even surprised?

cigarettes are part of how he started aging again.

the insurgency kind of knows he’s older than he looks, they just say he’s in his fifties because he looks like it, but even TWIE says he’s been around as long as anyone can remember. likely, vincent surfaced as anthony wright around the same time that sylvester sloan joined the insurgency.

his plan in case anyone saw any old photos of vincent and noticed that he looked eerily similar to anthony was to say that he’s vincent arians’ grandson and that his mother was arians’ daughter.

vincent had no children, but he did like being around kids.

during his years with the foundation he’d often lock himself in his lab just to cry. aaron often checked in on him.

frederick repeatedly called him aaron’s dog as a joke that vincent found very not funny. vincent/anthony isn’t really big on dogs because of this.

if anthony saw adam today he’d be immensely proud.

if anthony had made it to the end he would have tried to make aaron tell him why he left. aaron would not have been able to tell him.

anthony was a bit scared of how much like aaron calvin is.

would have liked O5-11 if they met.

AARON SIEGEL / O5-1 “THE MAN WITH THE INFINITY GUN,” “THE FOUNDER”

if you claim to be frederick’s #1 hater and you’re not aaron siegel then you’re fucking lying.

very sappy romantic, similar to vincent, but only with sophia. she thinks it’s adorable. he just really loves his wife a lot.

cannot let go of anything for shit. if he was at the scene of vincent’s death he would have tried to bring him back.

had a very weird father-child relationship with sam.

tolerated most of the other O5s at best, especially rufus (O5-6) and valerie (O5-7).

felix has always been his favorite aside from sophia (and vincent during the insurgency days)

borderline personality disorder

capable of straight up hanging up on frederick. this annoys the absolute fuck out of frederick.

PETTIEST BITCH IN THE WOOOORRRLLLDDD he’s like a fucking crow

sees mortimer (O5-5) as family because he’s the grandfather of alison chao, at least in other realities. mortimer gets along well with aaron.

very easily sent into overstimulation, it’s unknown why. he’s only ever perfectly calm in a sensory deprivation chamber.

extremely pale.

lives at overwatch. often falls asleep at his desk or on the fucking floor.

wreck of a man, but a surprisingly exceptional leader when he actually feels like leading instead of letting valerie handle things.

the other O5s don’t even know much about him.

visits san marco as much as he can.

FREDERICK WILLIAMS / THE ADMINISTRATOR

obsessed with the string theory, literally discovered it before the idea was even conceived.

had a wife and daughter, both died horribly. his daughter was extremely young and he’s a tad bit obsessed with the idea of bringing her back. driven by grief but also the fact he’s just a Bad Person in General

extremely manipulative (canon), but also just likes to fuck with people.

sometimes he doesn’t even call aaron or calvin he just speaks into their heads.

sometimes he’ll just call them and ask shit like this. aaron would hang up on him but calvin can’t.

can manifest however he wants, he usually chooses the phone.

reality bender (canon) and extremely powerful at it. like it’s lowkey concerning.

god complex.

totally the kind of guy to go “no don’t kill me im just a girl”

adam ivanov as the engineer would beat the shit out of him if given the chance.

what aaron described in the apartment scene was literal psychological torture. aaron was not the only person he subjected, just his favorite punching bag.

aaron, near the end of his life, got him a world’s worst boss mug and kept it next to the phone. calvin got a second one just to drive the point home.

a bit obsessed with antediluvian anomalies (project paragon). talks to calvin about them extensively.

hated vincent for no real reason he was just a bitch.

#ouroboros the cycle proposal #the way it ends

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popentertainment-interviews · 2 months

Text

Alan Cumming

As Host of The Traitors, the Multi-talented Star Brings a New Flamboyance to The Peacock Network's Hit Reality Game Show

by Brad Balfour

Not one to watch reality TV, I didn't really get what The Traitors (the US version) was all about. But since it was hosted by Alan Cumming, the gender fluid actor/artist, I was intrigued to hear him speak about the show. He's the host of the reality game show, which is based on De Verraders, the Dutch show created by Marc Pos and Jasper Hoogendoorn.

Having completed two seasons, the offbeat American version features Cumming in flamboyant costumes making grand gestures and arch pronouncements as contestants in the game move into a majestic castle. As a result, Cumming has garnered an Emmy nom for Outstanding Host for A Reality or Reality Competition Program (The Traitors). This further enhances the show's impact – but hopefully positive results will be in when the 75th edition of The Emmys airs September 15th on ABC.

The contestants work as a team to complete a series of dramatic and challenging missions. All of this to earn money for the prize pot. Some contestants are loyal, some are traitors – all of them established characters from other reality series.

Cumming – born on January 27, 1965, in Aberfeldy, Scotland – has had a long and distinguished career. He's done everything from editing pop magazines, a cabaret show, dramatic TV series, various stage versions of Shakespeare's plays and many starring roles in award-winning films. And, according to IMDB.com, "he's able to flawlessly change his voice and appearance for each role."

Now as he tackles The Traitors reality show, as both host and a producer, Cumming creates a new icon to connect to the LGBTQ community. At a recent screening of an episode, he spoke about this series just in time for Pride Month and preceding the Emmy nominations.

Alan Cumming, what makes you such an incredibly fun host to watch is that, unlike a lot of other reality shows, you really get into character. You become part of the cast in so many ways. What were your thought processes in coming into the show and figuring out how to play the role that you do within Traitors?

When they first talked to me about it, this was unlike anything I've ever done before. I couldn't quite understand why they'd ask me, but it sort of sounded fun. My agent said, "Oh, there's some show in a castle and they want you to do it." I took the meeting and realized they wanted me to, in a way, subvert the form of hosting a show like this by playing that sort of character. Everyone does a version of themselves when they host something that's not very true. But in this [case], it was actually a version of me and it's a very down-to-east Scottish layout. [My dog] Lala wasn't allowed to come the first time because of her papers, or COVID or something. But I said, "Oh, I should take my dog and pet her like a James Bond villain." I thought of it, and I still think of it as a character that I play who happens to be hosting all these people in this castle, which happens to be being filmed for American TV.

What makes the character so interesting is that for long-time fans of reality shows, you have a lot of personalities who are binary in nature and larger-than-life. That is why we watch them year after year, characters like C.T. and Adra, who have been on American television for decades. You somehow manage to out-character them in many ways. It's like navigating a lot of those personalities while playing that character.

In a way, it's because they have characters and they all come with their shtick. That's what's so interesting about doing it. The first series was comprised of half-real and half-reality people. Definitely, the people who are used to the camera and have an inbuilt persona already. They play themselves very well and understand the role they have to do. Then they're thrown into this thing where everything's destabilizing for them. I just guide them into situations that hopefully will destabilize them even more. That's what's fun about it. Everyone has a character in a way.

I think we're used to C.T. or Phaedra or people we've known for years. We understand their characters. We're now associates getting to know my character in it. I'm the stern daddy of it all. It's interesting to play that role and also, to try to keep some distance from them – the cast – on set. I don't talk to them or do takes. I don't engage with them in a chummy way like you might in a normal [situation] when there's other cast members. I very much think it's important that I have authority. They're scared of me. Then, of course, now, after it's all done, I can be like a normal person with them. I think you find that really overwhelming. They all came to my bar as it was when they were here earlier in the year doing the press thing. It was so hilarious. It was like them seeing Father Christmas having a drink or something.

That's the sign of a good host – that they're scared of you.

They should be scared of me because I've got to reprimand them sometimes. There's a lot of things, obviously, that are captured in the show that I've got in those situations where I've really got to intervene. My word is law. It's great fun. Clearly, I'm a terrifying figure, but I don't think I'm scary. Also, I don't take any shit. I know how to play a scary person. I'm fair but firm in real life.

Part of what makes The Traitors so unique is that in so many other reality shows, both competition and lifestyle, there's no real setting other than the competition. You go to Survivor Island and do this thing. Or, if you look at Real Housewives, it is their real-life kind of, from time to time. Here, you have this beautiful gothic backdrop. A lot of the events, whether it's the funeral or going to a cemetery, feels very theatrical – and creepy. We're almost subverting the narrative of what this type of show format really is while also being [true] to the format.

What I think is liberating is the theatricality of it. Everyone in television is very scared of theatricality. If you ever try to pitch a show to a TV executive, the word "theater" or "theatrical" is poison to them. It's very liberating that theatricality is in its very DNA. It's gothic and camp in the true sense of the term. American people sometimes don't have the same understanding of what camp means to British people. What we're doing on the trade is camp. There's an annoyingness to it, an archness of theatricality, and a winking at the audience all the time about what it is.

There's me in those insane costumes in this castle saying, "Welcome to my castle." We're bringing all these nutty personalities out of their comfort zones and then making them do insane things and pitting them against each other. It's so amped up already in a sort of gothic [manner] of what it's trying to do. The core of it is just a game. All those shows – as I've discovered now in my crash course in reality competition television over the last couple of years – are basically the same.

Survivor is the same as RuPaul's Drag Race is the same as the chef one. They're all people doing things and then slowly one person gets put out and then they have to hold. Then there's intrigue. Basically, it's just like schoolyard games of pushing one person out until it's just the next thing. In a way, what's good about this is that that's all it is. But it's got all these psychological layers that I think people underestimate. Also, you're in a castle and they're maddened, these contestants, because they're not allowed to pick up their phones. They're not allowed to talk to each other. All they think about from morning to night is the show and the game. And they go nuts. It's great.

We mentioned something, this idea of camp in the British sense of the term. Not necessarily what we think of it as evidenced by the Met Gala themes.

The theme was a good idea. People just didn't understand it.

The Traitors has a British counterpart. There was a version of this before the U.S. version. What's your take on what had to change within the format for a different audience, or if there had to be any changes, because television has become so much more globalized? Audiences are more open and receptive to different types of formats of television and different types of humor.

I don't really know how to answer that question. I saw some of the first season of the British one. It's not as camp and theatrical as ours. I think this is probably the first time in television history that an American version of the show is more camp and theatrical than the British one. I think that's me, in my opinion. But I feel like, in a funny way, we were able to have more leeway in that department. That's partly down to the costumes and Sam Spector, the stylist – he and I had an idea of the character I wanted to play.

[The British host] Claudia Winkelman has such a lovely personality and a lovely way in which she deals with people. They have real people, as well. They don't have celebrities. It's all a bit toned down and quite British. Whereas we were able – partly because it was a new show and partly because of the costume thing and me being this character – we've amped it up. It's got this higher level of theatricality built into it. I think sometimes other countries try to do that. But I don't think they're quite as nuts as we are. I know that now there's something someone said, "Claudia does your thing when she throws a picture on the floor now." I was like, "Yes, you bitch, throw away my little picture." But it's kind of funny. Sometimes I see little clips of people from other countries' versions. It's like, "Oh, it seems like it's sort of a fever dream." You know vaguely what they're talking about, but the circumstances are all different.

Going to the opposite of toned down, your outfits on the show are probably some of the best parts of it. They somehow get even more fabulous and glamorous every episode. How involved are you with choosing the outfits versus someone else?

Well, very involved. I talk to Sam all the time. especially in the first season, because I said I wanted to be this dandy Scottish laird. You know what a laird means? It's like lord in a Scottish accent, a Scottish dandy, an aristocratic gent. To me, that means a lot of tartan, a lot of cloaks might be featured, things like that. I went to him with that idea and those sorts of things. Then he ran with it. We go back and forward. Then the second season, we were able to amp it up a bit. He themed the missions with my clothes. There's one with birds. I just have a funny big peacock on my hat and stuff like that. For the next one, I'm about to go and do it again. It's amped up again, more about layering things.

I have this great relationship with him. We text all the time. He sends some stuff to me, just ideas and things to improve. I think we're going more and more and bigger and bigger. I think surely, they're going to stop us soon. But one thing I really do like about it is that – in terms of if we think about what's happening in America and the way that trans people and non-binary people are facing lots of hatred and challenges – me, in this show as a middle-aged man, I'm being quite femme-y and wearing a lot of practically feminine female clothes. What's really interesting is to be able to do that in a mainstream way, and challenge people's perceptions of what male and female is, and maybe be a bit in the middle.

Hopefully, when the audience sees someone in the street who is non-binary or non-gender conforming, they won't be as shocked or horrified. They'll see me in a fanny dress and a cloak the night before. That's a really positive, accidental thing that's come out of this theatricality of the costumes. One of the things that didn't make it is ... I saw it today in my dressing room in my house because I was doing a fitting for some little film I'm doing. I opened this cupboard in the last episode of the last season. It was all on this big ship, which was another story because we had a hideous storm, and it was like "Triangle of Sadness." It really was. I was vomiting into a metal bowl. I'll never forget it. Thank you. And bon appetit. But there was a funny little hat that had a little galleon on it with sails. It was hilarious. It was this Tracy-esque sort of thing. Absolutely bonkers. So impractical and nuts. It was on theme for the thing. But it was so windy that day that it kept falling off my head. Now I have it as a little memory.

As hosts, you are effectively the audience of the show. We're seeing a lot of the things that you're seeing and your commentary throughout the challenges is both biting and reflective of how we're thinking. One of the themes that emerges in this episode you all saw as well leads up to this idea with these contestants, of gamers, those who have been on competitive reality shows and the non-gamers – what they refer to as the bravo, basically anyone that sits up and has fancy wine as part of their show. Is there a core advantage to one side or the other?

No, it was the funeral episode. The funeral. Yeah, hilarious. But I just love that because I liked it. As the series went on, they showed me more of me laughing. Obviously, it's Pedro falling in the water. I just loved seeing how he's always getting wet.

Who doesn't?

Who doesn't? But the thing I think about that, I thought was really interesting about the second season – this truly has been a crash course for me – I'm really at the center of it and I can experience it. I feel that a lot of people said that "Oh, the gamers, they know how to do this, the survivors, the big brothers, the CT did." The challenge, yeah. The perception is they are devious, and they know how to do this game, whereas the outsiders are, oh, you know. That's not true. It was proven wrong in this season because – like, who was the one who worked it all out, blew it in his execution of it – was the cutie little bachelor, Rafaela Peet. So, you know, the other non-gamer. That to me was really exciting because I loved when our perception about the game was just smashed. Although I guess two gamers did win, but you know ... it didn't necessarily mean it was because of their game win. It's that somebody had to win. I think it's really interesting. It's a much more level playing field. Also, it's a game of chance. You're a traitor because I tap you on the shoulder.

That's why I loved it when, a couple of weeks in, they're going mental. They're like, "I could never be a traitor." I go, "You would if I tapped you on the shoulder." That's why the show is so good. It really screws with people's minds, with the psychological, and the hurt and guilt that people get as well. The guilt [comes from] lying to your friends and everything. It's layer upon layer of awfulness. Having seen people in physical distress, it's always hilarious.

In the first episode of this [season], as you're walking around, you're going to pick the traitors. You do it a few times, and there's conversation afterwards amongst the cast members about the sound of your jacket rustling as you lift an arm. Or your footsteps and the sound of breathing happening. How did you approach that moment of, "I need to make this as secretive as possible?"

It was absolutely the most terrifying part of the whole thing. I could fuck it up immensely in one fell swoop if they heard me or something. There were more of them this year. I do all sorts of things. The first year, we filmed a thing where I touched every single person. We've got the close-up of my hand going on the thing. We filmed that first. They've got an idea of what it feels like to be touched. Then we go round and round and round and round. In terms of the rustling, I would do this. Right in front of their ears. It's so fun.

I really enjoy it; it's the scariest part because I have a thing in my ear all the time. I can hear in the control room. When we're inside the castle, they're all in the control room, which is like NASA. It really is insane. I could feel the tension because it was the first thing of the show. Obviously, it's very tense in the room. When you're blindfolded, your other senses get much more aware. So it's really, really scary. I'm trying to get in and just do it without touching anything. I was just talking with Sam, the stylist, this week about what I was going to wear for that bit. Of course, there were things on my lapels. I thought that would be terrible if you heard them. You have to be really conscious of stuff like that. It's because everyone's senses are so heightened. But it is exciting and terrifying.

Out of all of your friends or celebrities that you know, who do you think would be great on a season of The Traitors? And what would you have more fun with or which role would you think would be better – a traitor or a faithful?

I would like to be a traitor. I think everybody would like to be a traitor. It's just getting to go to the turret late at night and think who you're going to kill. I just think it's such fun. They get extra snacks when they go to the turret sometimes. But I don't know. Some people really don't want to be like that. That's why we do this thing now when I interview them. It's just hilarious. Lala and I are sitting there, and they come in one at a time, and they're really terrified. Some people are adamant they don't want to be a traitor.

Of course, that's actually quite a good idea to make them a traitor when they're doing that. That's what I love about the game, is all these weird, confounding things you can do. Some people very much do think, well, you're not going to. It's actually really interesting, the mix of people that we choose for the show is all based on a lot of factors. But in terms of people that I know, we were just talking about her actually.

I think Martha Stewart would be so good at it. She's so bossy and sort of strategic and so accomplished and everything. She would make that raft. She would get that catapult going. And, also, I just think she would be at home in a castle. So there's people like that. But I love those people who come on the show. I don't know who they are.

youtube

#Alan Cumming #2024 #actor interviews #The Traitors #Brad Balfour #Youtube

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gothicprep · 7 months

Note

even better, re: the cut: the ‘I think my husband is trashing my novel on goodreads’ article is the first of a NEW advice column by the same author of the disastrous ‘lure of divorce’ personal essay from last week.

lol i was debating talking about emily gould when that essay came out, but i figured "nobody cares about your weird interest in gawker media lore" and decided against it. but i'm going to interpret this as permission to just go crazy on main.

context for readers who don't know: emily gould, on valentine's day, published an essay that's ostensively about divorce, but it's actually about a lot of other things. not even *a* divorce, because she decides against getting divorced at the end of the essay. i wouldn't bet on anything that comes after the end of this essay, but that's a separate question.

it's probably important to establish who emily gould is for what i'm about to say to make any sense: she was a media darling in her 20s. she was one of the first people to get Very Famous from blogging, an editor at gawker, and probably the best known writer there during the mid to late 2000s. very american apparel indie hipster sleeze era personality. could probably be described as a "literary sex symbol" insofar as the literary world has those things.

there were two things that she was famous for in this era. one of them was this post she put on gawker about how she had broken up with her boyfriend and it was a massive success. if you comb through old archives, people were talking about this like it was the brangelina split. i want to say this was a dam breaking moment for a particular kind of personal branding/internet personality that involved revealing things about your personal life, which eventually took over more broadly and gave rise to the culture we have now online. the other thing was this very unfortunate appearance she had on larry king live or something after she'd been taken to task for the "gawker stalker" feature on gawker, where people would send in tips about celebrity sightings around the city. someone sent in a tip about jimmy kimmel being drunk and obnoxious in a bar, and because kimmel is the world's biggest baby, he flipped out and went on this whole tirade about how it was a threat to his safety. in reality, he was just mad that someone saw him drunk in public and said something about it. kimmel and a few other guys confronted her about this on larry king. she looked like a deer in headlights and either wasn't prepared/hadn't been prepared for what was coming. like kimmel told her she was going to hell on live television. mess. there was also some really public drama she had with lena dunham but i don't really remember the details.

she never really disappeared between then and now. she's been writing for the cut for a while, which i guess you could say is her aging into a different kind of women's journalism. she's published a few books, but she hasn't really found her footing since her breakout success in her 20s didn't turn her into the established writer she probably hoped she would be. there was a time where it seemed like she was positioned to be this generation's joan didion, but that didn't end up happening.

so that brings us up to this essay, which was preceded by the last little bit of gossip that i need to get out of the way, even though she mentions it in the essay. in her personal newsletter, she made a crowdfunding request for money to "taking an infinite hiatus from hetero marriage and monogamy. they are a trap for women, full stop. sometimes a trap can be cozy. mine was, until it wasn’t." she does mention she's having a manic episode. she's upfront about the fact that something is going on with her.

anybody who's at all familiar with gould and her financial challenges must question the wisdom of giving money to this, but she presents it very much in the spirit of "men are pigs. men are trash. divorce that man now." and as we learn later, gets money from lyz lenz, who has a book out that's basically the feminist case for divorce and being a single mom.

so gould is not just neck deep in this divorce literature, but producing it to some extent. maybe a crowdfunding request isn't truly a literary form, but it's written in a persuasive way that fits with other writing in the liberate yourself through divorce canon. but the valentine's day essay, while i don't think it's great, i do think it's interesting how it breaks from form. it's not an anti-man personal essay, and these always are. so it was nice to read something a bit different. well, maybe not different, but retro.

i've never been a fan of gould's work, but it did get me wondering "what itch are people trying to scratch when they read essays like this?" because it's like the reader wants them to be an explicitly moral fable, but they want it to be racy and spicy. like one of those mid century pulp novels with a painting of a woman on the cover looking kind of slatternly with a lot of makeup on. it'd be called something like "wild trash" and the subtitle would be "she couldn't wait for her divorce". it's smut about a woman who's sinning gratuitously and flouting society's expectations. and usually with these books, there'd be some kind of cosmic comeuppance for her where she'd get syphilis and die in a pauper's prison or whatever.

and i think people come to stories like this because they want to read something like that. you're gonna read about a woman who was debauched and all the naughty behavior in graphic, titillating detail. and at the end, you get served up a nice, neat conclusion. her husband divorces her and finds love with a kindergarten teacher from iowa. so it flouts the "rah rah divorce him" essay and the pulpy personal essay that some people want. if you're going to write a 3,000 word apology, at the very least, it is a novel take on it.

but i think what the problem is with an essay like this is that it's very... dated in its style. the expected thing with personal essays in the 2020s, the thesis of them usually boils down to something about what a great person the essayist is. most of them do this. that's why you get privilege disclaimers in them – the point of the essay is how the essayist is sensitive and kind and wonderful. even when there are flaws, they're overcome, or something systemic lead this to happen. a flawed woman is because patriarchy made her thus.

to give a better example of the kind of thing i'm talking about, you'll see an essay in the atlantic or new york times magazine and it follows the same formula. Woman Has Personal Life Grievance. Step Back. Here's Why This Is A Big Issue In Society, Bolstered With Statistics. Here's Why If This Woman Was Black Or Poor Or Gay Or Trans, It Would Be Even Worse. Back To The Personal Anecdote... you know what i mean? it's a very well established formula, but you can't have that with "also i'm a dirtbag". once you're talking about society and societal issues of which you're just a little representative – because those are the stakes. it has to be universal – you can't just be talking about yourself.

and then there's this question of personal writing more generally. you aren't a fictional character, you're yourself. and whether you want it to be or not, every personal essay is going to function like a cover letter. it's presenting you to the world. and i don't like these, but i don't want gould's style of personal essay to come back either. it straight up ruined a lot of women's lives who wanted to get their foot in the door in media, got $75 from xojane to write something lurid about their personal lives... and their career never took off. so now this is just on the internet forever.

this old piece in slate sheds a light on just how exploitative that whole thing was.

"don't make life decisions based on emily gould's writing" is useful advice for more reasons than one.

#gossipprep #this is my edrama tag now i guess

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