#hypernormalism

[beginningspod]

It's time for Beginnings, the podcast where writer and performer Andy Beckerman talks to the comedians, writers, filmmakers and musicians he admires about their earliest creative experiences and the numerous ways in which a creative life can unfold.

On today's episode I talk to musician and scholar Daniel Wyche. Daniel is a visiting assistant professor in Albion College's religious studies department and a brilliant guitarist - his album Earthwork was one of my favorites in 2021, and after his first appearance on the show back in episode 514, we've become friendly. As a former philosophy professor and current philosophy dilettante, I thought it might be fun to go off-topic-ish for an episode and have an actual PhD on to bounce my well-thought out yet unresearched ideas off of, but mostly to ask: is there a way out of our society's current irrational tailspin???

I'm on Twitter here and you can get the show with:

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[gale-dekarios]

rose dekarios, post-game ^.^

so you're a student wizard and your professor is a bit dry even though you can tell that he's trying.

one day in the middle of one of his lectures your favourite drag performer shows up, hands him off something he forgot at home, kisses him, tells him he'll see him later that night, and leaves.

your class immediately bursts into a flurry of questions, and it turns out that not only is your stuffy illusions professor married to your favourite drag performer, not only did they meet during the ilithid invasion of baldur's gate, not only did they themselves have tadpoles, but they were also the ones that stopped the invasion.

this is wild already. then your professor credits your favourite drag performer as the reason he didn't blow himself up with a netherese orb, which he was ordered to do by the goddess of magic, mystra, who he also used to date.

i have to reiterate that your professor unironically says 'pish posh' and thinks that reading books written three centuries prior is 'thrilling'.

what do you do?

[mightyflower]

some of my coworkers are such hypernormal women & one of them the other day asked a girl who just started whether she was childless bc she doesn’t want kids or bc she has fertility issues. i was like this isn’t even my fight but i myself would like to kill you with hammers.

[mistergoddess]

tonally insane movie night where i watch bitter lake (2011. fantasy short film where all actors wear fursuits. terrible reviews.) and bitter lake (2015. 2+ hour adam curtis documentary about the us in afghanistan. amazing reviews.) is absolutely going to happen at some point

[cl0ck-killer]

For those who claim that "the pandemic is over."

[thenervebible]

CONNIE PANZARINO at a pride march in Boston circa 1990

[ID: Connie is marching along in her sip 'n' puff (SNP) wheelchair. She is wearing a patterned poncho and sporting a green felt party crown on her head. She styles a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with her slicked back hair. She is smiling. Attached to the back of her wheelchair is a large green cardboard poster that reads "Trached Dykes Eat Pussy Without Comin' Up For Air!" followed by a pink upside-down triangle with a stick figure person in a wheelchair at the centre (a symbol for disabled women)].

the cyborg & the crip by Alison Kafer

[ID: “Trached dykes eat pussy without coming up for air.” Connie Panzarino, a longtime disability activist and out lesbian, would attach this sign to her wheelchair during Pride marches in Boston in the early 1990s. Shockingly explicit, her sign refuses to cast technology as cold, distancing, or disembodied/disembodying, presenting it instead as a source and site of embodied pleasure. “Trach” is an abbreviation of tracheotomy, a medical procedure in which a breathing tube is inserted directly into the trachea, bypassing the mouth and nose. Someone with a trach, then, can, in effect, breathe through her throat, freeing her mouth for other activities (another version of this sign is “Trached dykes french kiss without coming up for air”). From a cyborgian perspective, this sign is brilliantly provocative and productive. It draws on the pervasive idea that adaptive technologies grant superior abilities,not merely replacing a lost capacity but enhancing it, yet it does so in a highly subversive way. The message here isn’t about blending in, about passing as normal or hypernormal, but about publicly announcing the viability of a queer disabled location. It’s disnormalizing, adamantly refusing compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory able bodiedness, and homonormativity. As Corbett O’Toole argues, it challenges the perceived passivity of disabled women, presenting them as actively pleasuring their partners, thereby graphically refuting stereotypes linking physical disability with nonsexuality.]

[shoot-me-baybee-one-more-time]

definitely not the first person to notice this but memes are the new dada actually, absurd response to an increasingly uncertain world (or has it always been this way and I wasn't old enough to notice? though I do think there has been a paradigm shift, really)

have more thoughts on this if anyone's curious

[therobotmonster]

Anybody remember when Velveeta ran all those ads telling people what queso dip was because somehow its existence was unknown to a demographically-significant portion of the populace?

Now we have to "Normalize ranch with chicken and meat?"

"Normalize Ranch?"

Ranch with meat isn't just normal. It's Hypernormal. It's been a standard condiment since the Clinton Administration. It's mayo for people who hate mayo.

RANCH FACTS:

They give you cups of it at wing places, you don't ask for it. You have to tell them to give you something else.

They do the same at pizza places, and also sometimes ranch replaces the red sauce.

Ranch is so American it invades food groups like its looking for oil.

I'm in Oklahoma. We still had dry counties up until the twenty-teens and even we've been dipping our pizza in ranch since videogames came in a plastic cartridge.

It's so basic we've gotten desensitized and we're mainlining Green Goddess and Blue Cheese just feel something.

If you have too much shame to put ranch on something, like meatloaf, that doesn't stop us. We just put the powder directly into the meatloaf.

The average Midwesterner is 17% ranch dressing by volume.

Ranch hasn't become a beverage yet, but it's still trying.

[sevens-evan]

idk maybe i'm being a whiny mra or a hysterical white woman or whatever it's #ontrend to call trans men these days but there is a very specific kind of bullying that is like. hypernormalized in online queer spaces especially but also extremely common irl. where cis women, esp cis queer women, will try to convince you that it is a) normal and b) harmless to just be mean to people because they're men. just. tell you to your face that you should kill yourself for being a man and then when you say hey that's fucked up they go no it isn't you're just a fragile loser male. try being less sensitive. idk if it's Literally gaslighting but it sure feels like it is. directly hurting someone and then saying no, i didn't hurt you, you hurt yourself by being fragile and pathetic. and it fucking gets in your head too bc i was literally out here for Years following people on this website who would make like 15 posts a day about how men should be shot in the streets or whatever and they had me convinced that i Deserved to see that stuff and Deserved to hate myself for being trans because that was just proof that i was being weak and fragile. as if being upset by someone hating you for an inherent aspect of your identity isn't the most rational response on earth lol

[viktorbezic]

Sociotype Journal #3 via Hypernormal

[scentedinksandwhackedseals]

a very important list of things julien says in a funny voice on her gayotic episode:

gottagetbacktowork!

this isn’t fair!

have you seen hypernormalization?

i was born on september 29th

born this way die this way!

bonus: the way she kinda sings “generationally wealthy person”

[froody]

There’s a community of people on TikTok who are smoke detector enthusiasts and enjoy identifying and photographing smoke detectors. Which isn’t weird, that seems like a fun hobby, people do that same thing with cars and coins. But while I’m scrolling through a slideshow of all the smoke detector models this person spotted at the Museum of Natural History, I’m wondering if people around them notice what they’re doing. Like, is security following this dude around trying to figure out if he’s searching up how to disarm the smoke detectors so he can set the place on fire? That’s what I’d be worrying about the whole time. Then again my social anxiety makes me try to behave hypernormal in public and I’m always sure lose prevention thinks I’m stealing and security things I’m a security threat.

[hoursofreading]

The ethos of contemporary therapy is highly questionable to begin with, and this has to be addressed before unpacking the implications of disseminating its principles in a highly gamified, fundamentally consumerist online sphere. As it stands, access to therapy hinges on class privilege, adherence to existing social norms, and a whole host of other factors that favor those who already have a safety net. Additionally, mainstream therapy tends to bolster the collective interest in individualistic self-optimization, worsening many of the issues it seeks to resolve in the process. We attend therapy to become our “best” selves, lead our “best” lives, and to signal to others we have done so. We savor the delicious superiority that coincides with telling someone who hurt us to go to therapy and advertise our own attendance on our Hinge profiles to signal our own immanent perfection. Therapy has become a litmus test for social belonging and inherent goodness, a sign that one is aware of and has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave.1 Even without this social signaling, the lessons we learn inside of therapy favor a sort of hyperindividualistic self-sufficiency that encourages clients to prioritize personal growth over communal welfare or institutional change. When you imagine yourself to exist separate from the world around you, and therefore seek to change yourself independent of it, the project of self-improvement becomes about adapting to oppression, rather than working toward a less maddening world. Therapy that prioritizes individual self-improvement with little other context functions to create hypernormal, docile subjects that live in service to power. We become our best selves, not in ways that allow us to find personal peace and better serve the world around us, but in ways that make us better workers and citizens. Even if the system is contributing to our pain, we are actively encouraged to find ways we can fit better into that system. The subtext is always that we have no other option. As therapy shapes us into obedient subjects, we internalize the idea that a “healthy” person is in control of their emotions, which they demonstrate through following increasingly narrow social scripts. There are countless infographics circulating about the “right” way to deliver an apology, for example. Falling in love with someone too quickly is “toxic,” or “unhealthy” but falling in love too slowly or struggling to connect with others is a problem too, and potentially a sign of narcissism. We make fun of the casually cruel, HR-ified social scripts that circulate the internet every few months, but I think those scripts are just extreme manifestations of a more subtle and insidious belief system that we’ve already bought into: we are supposed to be going to therapy to learn how to control ourselves. No more yelling, public crying, or any version of making a scene. No more being in a bad mood at your stupid fucking job. No more falling madly, deeply in love. The world has rendered you so fragile you might break at any moment under the weight of its cruelty. And you’re too weak to change the world (shh, you are) so you have to live in fear. You must be careful, and quiet, and good. This is how you survive.

Less TikTok, More Screaming - Persinette

[neuroclastic]

Understanding your Autistic child

In the current Aotearoa New Zealand Autism Guideline the existence of Autistic culture is not mentioned with a single word. Understanding Autistic people and Autistic culture is still a secondary concern. Civil society activists and child rights’ defenders from around the world are now joining together to create the Rights-Centric Education network. Some compare Autistic life in a hypernormative…

[dragonpride17]

IDs in alt text

hypernormalizationsongic | Hypernormalization by Rich Aucoin sonar flag

hypernormalizationsongic - a gender related/connected to the song hypernormalization by rich aucoin

[1rakus]

noooobody cares but i think my main problem with buccal fat removal (besides the actual main problems of misogyny and fatphobia crreating unrealistic beauty expectations + the hypernormalization of plastic surgery etc) is that none of the girlies getting it are serving nearly as much cunt as they could. like at least utilize your carved out angelina-jolie-as-maleficent, orochimaru-regurgitating-himself, nosferatu-sucking-dick-like-a-vacuum cheekbone jawbone tightcuntedness in a deliberate fashion and not cockie cutter tiktok lightwash denim straight cut jeans "chic"...