Imposter Syndrome

 

So I’m staring down forty

over the horizon

and I don’t have an MFA

or a big publishing deal

or a six figure contract

I am crawling away

from the depression nest

of my faltering career

subsided from a bright flame

to coals from burnout

I never got famous as an editor

 

As a writer, I’ve dragged my feet

remembering to tell people is hard

and I’m trying to make it a habit

“Oh yes, I’m a writer and an artist”

it’s easier if

you pretend you’re talking about someone lese

who isn’t faking it: someone who wrote

several collections, a complete space opera series

a couple attempts at literature

a dystopian series faltering

but going ahead

a cozy academic trilogy

releasing now, serialised on Substack and Patreon

                                             

“I go by SciFiMagpie,” I say;

“You can call me Magpie”

 

And I hold my second name

Like a charm in my fist

I clutch that

and my strange pronouns

and my peculiar family

and my gothic affectations

only sheepishly permitted

to myself in adulthood

because I’m too old to be cool

and somehow, giving up on that

made me sexier

 

I take my scraps of identity

and I do my best to weave a nest

not to hide in while I’m depressed

but to hold ideas, hopes, plans

brooding over my future

rather than wondering

how I’d make it to thirty

 

Live like you’ve already failed

and everything else

becomes a gift.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Did you know that Chinook Phase is out?

 

Or at least, the first chunk of it is out! You can read the first 13 chapters, with a new one coming every week, on my Patreon or my Substack - and on Patreon, they're all free! (So far!)

That said, if you fall in love and want to kick a couple of dollars my way, that would be amazing.

What is Chinook Phase, you ask?

Well, it's the first novel in my cozy academia trilogy, a love-letter to my home town and university. Set in the early 2010s, it follows the multiple interwoven stories of a group of friends and frenemies, trying to sort out their love lives and friendships - and you know, maybe getting stabbed, drunk, or stalking each other along the way.

Follow Natalie, Charlotte, Kyla, Amanda, Rachel, and Greg through mishaps, heartbreaks, and disasters. Come for the gossip, stay for the friends-to-lovers and "I can make him worse" villain couple.

Check out the beautiful new face for the first novel!

SHE'S SO BEAUTIFUL! Amazing work by Rachel A Rosen, Renaissance woman extraordinaire. Get your covers from her!

Anyway, so, catch my first Prairie Weather posts on Patreon or Substack!

***

Creation of this project was made possible in part by the generous funding of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the author gratefully acknowledges their contribution.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

A History of Failure

 

Art by Rachel A Rosen, who also designs amazing covers for books (HINT!)

This essay is not about Taylor Swift – or at least, it’s got far less to do with Taylor Swift than my last essay. But there is a connection.

It’s pretty hard to deny that even though it’s made adequate bank, Life of a Showgirl has had – at least on parts of the internet I’ve seen, i.e. my Discord channels and my Youtube and Substack algorithms – a pretty negative reaction from fans and a lot of critics. The line between “fan” and “critic” is blurrier than it’s ever been, in this current era of accessible content creation and platforming. You don’t need to be an expert for your opinion to matter; you just need to catch the algorithm at the right or wrong time.

Regardless, some people are treating the album, and Swift, as a laughingstock, and not for the first time.

Now, in my own life, I mentioned in my last essay that I was running for the local public school board, and while I managed to get over 2900 votes, from a voting turnout of about 18% and about 20k voters or so, I didn’t get a spot on the school board.

 (My shitshow of a provincial government apparently is floating the idea of just abolishing school boards anyway. If you’re Albertan, this is a reminder to make a fuss and do your best to piss off the UCP. Operation Total Recall is underway, and please check it out, because this government is attacking our democratic rights and everyone’s interests, regardless of preferred political affiliation.)

Now – my personal failure here was a disappointment, but I’ve had a much kinder reaction from people. Partly, I don’t have the expectations placed on me that, you know, a seasoned political candidate or a world-famous celebrity like Swift does. And while I’m proud that I made the attempt, there’s still a certain shadow over any effort that doesn’t bear fruit.

It got me thinking: what does failure mean?

There’s something really interesting about failing these days. Now, maybe it’s a modern problem, or maybe there’s a historical precedent here, but at least in my own English-speaking, Western cultural context, it seems to me like failure has developed this moral weight to it.

A Quick, Dirty History of Success

I’ve alluded to the basic concepts of Calvinism and gestured at the Protestant work ethic and its resulting trauma before. In a quick, dirty overview, a prominent strain of Christianity held that some people were chosen for Heaven and others simply aren’t, and the seats are limited: predestination. However, and here’s the extra nasty bit, people thought that God would hint at who was destined for eternal salvation by favouring them with success in their earthly life.

So of course, people who belonged to Calvinist strains of Christianity ended up working as hard as possible to try and demonstrate their state of blessedness. Mix that into the cultural soup of the Industrial Revolution, and you have an extremely toxic recipe for the future.

This whole belief system has kind of evolved into what’s now called the Prosperity Gospel, which is a more aggressive focus specifically on the idea that God will reward you in not only Heaven, but your earthly life, with actual riches. Immortality in a paradise of fellowship amongst loved ones and a divine parental figure is no longer enough to satisfy people who are scraping to make ends meet.

John Steinbeck did not actually say, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” The thing that this popular misquote gets wrong is at least partly its attribution of blame. It has this implication that damn it, these poor people are just stupid and stubborn, or ignorant – if only they’d see what’s gone wrong!

That perspective glides over the extremely intensive propaganda efforts that have gone into making people believe that poverty is their own fault. After all, if you just work hard enough, you can be a billionaire too, right? Ignore the widening legal loopholes for transference of wealth, avoidance of taxation, and the inheritance chains of property, wealth, and privileged advantages that directly tie into chattel slavery and European aristocratic families, of course. It’s just about luck and working hard! Get on that grindset, girl!

Back to Failure

The thing about focusing on success and The Power of Positive Thinking, and other similar late-Victorian and early 20^th century self-help texts, is that it doesn’t really account for what the fuck happens if…you just fail. In The Secret, one of the more recent and deeply influential permutations of modern prosperity gospel, there’s a whole thing about “The Universe” wanting to reward you by giving you whatever you think about most. Of course, that means that worrying about failure will actually result in failure…because the universe is kind of stupid and bad at consent, I guess.

Perhaps, dear reader, you can see the direction I’m pulling you in. The logical corollary of the axiom that success = favour from God or the Universe…is that failure means God, or the Universe, is disappointed in you.

I haven’t seen this discussed much, but the idea lurks like an urban legend intruder beneath the bed, breathing and panting damply, evident but too terrifying to confront directly.

“Bad Things That Happen to You Are Your Own Fault”

People don’t say this out loud in exactly these words, but the implication sits there, and turns up constantly, just like that urban legend slasher. Even after #MeToo in the late 2010s, people still say and imply that one’s clothing or behaviour could have been responsible for sexual assault and harassment.

Not attaining the success you expected at work, missy? Clearly the problem is that feminism has failed, and it’s time to Retvrn to the (imagined) past mode of life. Be more…traditional. You want a family, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be relaxing to just spend time with your children at home while your husband takes care of things? All you have to do is the chores, and you already do those! Why work in addition to that?

This particular message is all over social media, popping up in different forms like mutating toxic mushrooms around the earthen cellar door where fascism dwells.

Never in this line of propaganda is there a discussion of, say, fertility problems. Despite the wide accessibility of fertility treatments in our current era, having any kind of trouble, say, getting pregnant or impregnating someone, still carries the sting of humiliation. Never mind the question of what happens if you find out that you can’t crack it as a parent *after* you have children, or the constant, pervasive fear every parent has of failing their child.

As mentioned, the dominant cultural milieu in the West is flavoured by both capitalism and Christanity. Both the wealthy and the super-wealthy benefit from having the broad working class focused on aspiration rather than justice. If people are trying to grind their way to the top, and fighting each other for scraps, they won’t target the people actually holding the reins of power and wealth. Furthermore, if people see wealth as a blessing from God or the Universe, poverty indicates either withholding of a blessing, or failure.

Failure and poverty are thus made uncomfortable housemates, necessary to each other. Any type of failure risks the danger of poverty, and poverty itself is a form of implied failure.

Let’s Make It Worse

So, this is pretty bad, right? Like if you take apart the idea that failure is always your own fault *and* a result of not being good enough for the Divine Parent (whether that’s God or the Universe), it’s pretty scary and daunting. It’s a damn hard standard to meet.

Now put that in the context of our panopticon society. Speaking of 19^th century morality that’s stabbing us in the ass, the panopticon was a prison design meant to allow constant surveillance of prisoners, to make sure they were reforming properly. Constant scrutiny and an absolute destruction of privacy is clearly the way to stop someone from hurting people, right? Of course, if we’re talking about people breaking the law, we should probably allude to that whole “poor people commit crimes because they’re poor” thing that tends to happen. So basically, if you surveil and shame people adequately, it should be possible to fix their unfortunate moral defect of poverty.

The best part is, now we have the thing where user interfaces on social media treat every person like a content creator, people feel both social pressure and algorithmic pressure to post regularly. Between the data exposure required for social media and actually posting stuff about one’s personal life, we’ve developed a societal system of self-exposure and peer surveillance.

Now, peer surveillance has always been kind of a thing – people have been up in each other’s business for as long as we’ve been social animals, and in fact, other animals are nosy, too. But the current mode of peer surveillance transcends previous social models. Before, you’d have to be seen or heard doing something you weren’t supposed to; your thoughts, at least, were sacrosanct.

But now we share our thoughts as well, and present the world with an entirely new path of judgement.

And, in a world where the middle and lower class are collapsing together, rather than forging class solidarity and focusing on our mutual opposition, we resort to cannibalism, in hopes of temporary catharsis and relief. After all, if we can root out the class traitors, the “Treatlers” who still order snacks from food delivery services, surely we’ll be able to defeat our enemies, right? Somehow, people bullying each other on social media platforms has failed to trigger the revolution.

How the fuck do we fix this?  

The thing is, this situation isn’t unfixable. In addition to plain compassion and critical thinking and asking ourselves questions – should I *really* repeat this or engage with this content? Am I being too harsh on other people? – we need to practice both self-compassion and compassion towards others.

This sounds extremely boring and un-fun, so if you find yourself with superfluous hostile or mischievous energy, direct it towards the real targets: people in power. You have a right to be angry for what they’re doing to us, so write angry, ferocious letters, make art, or find other creative outlets to express your anger. People in power are so much more fragile than we think they are. We should make them scared again. For legal reasons, I am not directly advocating violent action, but I am advocating protests and strikes, and whatever forms of disruption you can manage.

Harass politicians and political figures who are trying to strip your rights away. Cover for your coworkers when they’re sick or “quiet quitting”. Ignore shoplifting customers, especially if you’re a fellow customer. Buy food for homeless people (and also just give them money). Find out what your neighbours’ names are and actually say hi to them. Be nice to random people on the internet, especially when you don’t want to. And above all else, reframe how you see failure.

What failure really means

Not everything we try to do is going to succeed, but instead of seeing failure as the end of a story, see it as part of a cycle. We can’t learn what works without failures along the way. Like death, failure is an inevitability. Also like death, it tends to be terrifying until you actually encounter it, and realise that it’s an essential part of living. In various ways, we will fail over and over – so the trick is to see how long one can keep going before the next failure; as well as to stop treating failure itself as a moral judgement on everything about us in our lives.

This is hard, slow work, and sometimes being nice to yourself is harder than being nice to other people – so turn your compassion outward; towards friends, family, and strangers, even celebrities.

(Compassion doesn’t mean blind defense, but if you don’t know the difference, maybe go spend some time sitting with that before you yell at me. There’s your first lesson: stop wasting your time yelling at random people on the internet when you could be trolling and harassing CEOs of large corporations.)

With practice at turning compassion outward, it gets easier to ask, “Would I say this to my partner? My best friend?” when dealing with negative thoughts and judgements rooted in the Christian/capitalist paradigm.

The other thing to do with failure is to see the freedom in it. If you’ve already failed, you’re already “a sinner”, and “damned” – so what comes next?

Well, actually, anything you want. If you’re already lost, why not go further? Modify your approach. Find a new goal. Instead of waiting for happiness later, find small happinesses now.  Instead of longing to be a billionaire, or waiting for heaven, ask yourself – what were you hoping for from those things anyway? To help your friends? You don’t need a billion dollars to do that. Life only gets better when you realise that the metrics of success were impossible anyway. To quote a song I like, “we’ll never get to Heaven ‘cause we don’t know how.”

Now, do I actually succeed in living by all of these precepts? It’s a work in progress. But hey, the more I fail, the more I have a chance to try again.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

The "Life of a Showgirl" Backlash is Making Me Nauseous

 

This essay is not an analysis of Life Of A Showgirl. Not exactly.

Is it even a coherent analysis, or is it just a messy, confused vent about what happens when a woman is famous? Well, dear reader, we’re going to find out together.

First, a disclaimer on my own biases, my own little standpoint theory discursion.

I have a Swiftie in my life who’s very important to me, and that definitely prejudices my perspective on this. I started out as a pretty thoughtless Taylor Swift hater myself. She was tall, blonde, and pretty, and I’m none of those things, depending on who you ask about the last one; it was easy to project the cruelty I’d suffered at other people’s hands onto her as an aggressor.

Commentators I like, like Todd in the Shadows, also were very happy to make fun of her. Did I unpack this at the time? No, that had to come later, with some maturity.

Still, nobody is ever neutral about these things, and anyone who thinks they’re an objective critic is being fooled by the very concept of objectivity.

So, let’s start with the album itself. What did I think?

Source.

The Album

Life of a Showgirl is fine. It’s pretty mid, but it’s not the worst album I’ve ever heard by a female artist – that dubious honour belongs to 0304 by Jewel, which failed so spectacularly at its concept of mixing Big Band music with showtunes that my teenage heart was broken.

Still – it has some clunky lyrics, yes, and the songs aren’t as catchy as on some albums. Is it one of her best albums ever? Absolutely not. But it’s also not the artistic massacre that some people seem to think it is.

Between this and The Tortured Poets Department, my personal analysis of the last two releases is that Swift has started putting out music for herself, rather than with her career and her fans in mind. It’s also entirely possible that she’s going through what I’ve seen happen with many authors; namely, she’s too big to critique properly, and people who should be her creative aides are yes-manning rather than editing her.

The thing about the album that I personally appreciated, though, was that she seems happy.

The internet, however, has lost its goddamn mind over this album.

Mass Hysteria

By and large, this album has been succeeding financially, but failing with fans and critics. A bunch of people I know have absolutely loathed this album, and there’s a huge backlash among both Swifties and Swift-haters alike.

The thing is, though, the backlash isn’t just a matter of dunking on clunky lyrics. There’s an aura of self-righteous triumph among critics, and a sort of woeful, “Whoa, was she really Bad all along?!” response from a lot of fans, that’s seriously skeeving me out.

Now, this backlash comes in multiple parts; let’s start with arguably the most damning and justified part.

The Woobification of Charlie XCX

The song “Actually Romantic” is apparently a riposte to “Sympathy is a Knife” by Charlie XCX. Now, podcasts I like (such as ICYMI) went into detail on this, but not quite *enough* detail.

As this essay put it, ghere’s no getting past the aggressive element and tone-deafness of writing a song called “Sweetheart” about other women picking on you, then writing “Actually Romantic” and what could be read as biphobia/homophobia. I’m not going to defend that perspective, because at best, it’s a bad look, and shortsighted.

The interesting thing is, people are mostly going from the context of the song “Sympathy is a Knife” and this song – but that’s just not the whole story about whatever has gone on between Charlie XCX and Swift.

For one thing, as the Swiftie in my life pointed out, Charlie didn’t *just* write the song. She made tweets and other cagey references to Swift online. And there was also this photoshoot, which totally is just symbolic of Charlie’s struggles with fame and definitely, absolutely, not a reference in any way shape or form to the friendship bracelets that are a huuuuuuge thing among Taylor Swift fans.

 

Source.

Add to that, the fact that Charlie XCX – who is not a tiny, up-and-coming indie artist, even though she’s obviously not Taylor Swift – was previously opening for Swift on the Eras tour, and that she’s married to a bandmate of one of Swift’s exes, Matty Healy…and it all just turns into something a little less cut-and-dried. My personal read is that they’ve probably bickered in private, and stuff has happened that the general public doesn’t know about.

But to read and hear about the internet’s reaction, you’d think Taylor Swift had football-kicked a puppy.

To summarize, then: is it homophobic? Kinda. Petty? Definitely. But is there more going on here than meets the eye? We have no way of knowing, but the internet sure isn’t pausing to consider that.

A History of Misogyny and Victimhood

The reactions I’ve seen to this album’s release have been, to put it mildly, fucking unhinged – particularly because the album itself is being read in the absolute worst faith possible, and being used as an indictment of Swift as a person. I’ve seen comments that included, but weren’t limited to, the idea that Swift is “lowering herself” with Kelce and that she “could do better” with a partner; the idea that she’s now signalling herself as a tradwife and is secretly MAGA, to the idea that her opalite necklace is a coded white supremacist nod. (On the necklace, there are 8 lightning bolt charms and 14 links between them, which some people think is a dogwhistle about the Nazi meme “1488” – recently referenced by Pete Hegseth in an infamous military address with top generals. 1488 references the fourteen words, a white supremacist pledge, and 88 references the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, and stands for “HH”, meaning “Heil Hitler”. It’s a whole thing, because fascists used to have to hide their shit, and couldn’t just say things the way they seemingly can nowadays.)

Source.

So, is Swift drifting rightward?

The problem is, it’s almost impossible to extricate the conjecture about Taylor Swift from both normal press misogyny and the problems she’s created for herself. Swift has built a career as a confessional songwriter, coding in little hints and references to past relationships in her songs, and the press and fans have been delighted to hunt for these Easter Eggs. The problem is, hunting for patterns that sometimes exist is ripe ground for conspiracy theorists. Now, Taylor Swift isn’t the right kind of chronically online politics nerd who’d understand the danger of this, but it’s somewhat directly fed into the problem of the Gaylors, chronically online queer conspiracy nerds who’ve concocted increasingly elaborate explanations for how Taylor Swift is secretly in a relationship with Karlie Kloss, a former best friend. (And of course, “Actually Romantic” isn’t exactly going to help these allegations.)

But, back to the subheading. Is Swift a victim or a perpetrator?

God, that’s a stupid setup, and yet it’s the one we’re all being offered, twenty-four-seven right now. The shine is off the apple! This will sink her career! Never mind the fact that this kind of background radiation has been in the air since, I don’t know, Reputation? Or Lover? I understand that not every news story can be a serious piece about, say, the rise of fascism or the ongoing climate crisis that I guess we’re all just fucking ignoring now. Still, the way international press and media are crowding around to join in on the Serious Speculation about whether Swift has *finally* lost her touch is, frankly, terrifying.

From the whole reference entrapment with Kanye West – where she agreed to be referenced in a song, though not in the way he portrayed her (as a naked wax doll in bed with him, in the context of sexual conquest and saying he “made that bitch famous”) – to whichever jeering article has come out about her dating history, it seems like the media is genuinely trying to knock Swift off a balance beam at every opportunity.

The White Woman Conundrum

There’s a queasy problem at the heart of criticizing Taylor Swift. Let’s talk about white women.

Now, I don’t really identify as a “woman” anymore; that particular word has always stuck in my throat. But as a “political woman”, i.e., someone perceived as a woman who experiences misogyny and etcetera? Yeah, for sure. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to lump myself in with womanhood, because that’s how I’m perceived and how a lot of my experiences fit.

There’s this weird, uncomfortable thing where white women are simultaneously protected from our possible failures in a certain way, and also the most delicious, juicy, easy target for certain kinds of misogyny. As usual, I’m going to talk about a Canadian and American context, because that’s what I know best, but your personal cultural context may include more than what I’m talking about. Whereas Black women, Latina women, and Asian women are highly sexualised and fetishized, white women are weirdly both de-sexualised and the object of desire. Everyone is supposed to be like “us”, but we’re supposed to collect traits and clothes from other cultures, trophy-like. We mete out discrimination against other women and often hand down violence, but also end up being really, really comfortable targets for hatred.

White women are both allowed to express ourselves sexually, yet also seen as virginal and weirdly de-sexed. The standard for beauty and success, but also an extremely easy target for criticism, both on the left and the right. White women are also the figureheads and standard-bearers for what is deemed to be cringey.

Now apply these thorny contradictions and nuances to Taylor Swift. As a conventionally beautiful white woman who’s suffered from disordered eating and anorexia in the past, she’s both defined beauty standards and suffered from them. As someone who’s also suffered from disordered eating, there’s something that breaks my heart about this. Even someone who defines the beauty standard both didn’t feel like she was enough.

Swift has definitely lashed out and been petty in public and private, and she doesn’t seem to see her own role in conflicts very well. The song “Karma” from Midnights, which is my favourite of her albums, exemplifies this perfectly well. She has a tendency to re-open old wounds and dig up past conflicts and relationships. She puts her foot in her mouth. She can’t leave well enough alone – and sometimes she recognizes these traits, and sometimes she doesn’t.

The Morality Trap

The thing that makes me, personally, deeply uncomfortable with the backlash to Life of a Showgirl is that people seem to be addressing Taylor Swift without an iota of self-awareness that a) she’s never going to see their thoughts, and b) most of the people who will…are just her fans.

Now, it’s really fucking tricky to criticize something that people like. Angry clicks get attention. Hell, there’s something deeply uncomfortable to me about even writing this essay, because in a way, I’m still participating in the same attention economy around Swift that I’m criticizing. There’s an ouroboros of criticism on the left in particular that really worries me; an endless well of critique and self-critique that sometimes verges on the political equivalent of self-harming your movement. Self-reflection and accountability are important, but do we really think Taylor Swift is going to experience either of those from our critiques?

What’s more likely is that a) Swifties in your life are going to see you mocking her work, and feel kind of vaguely shitty and uncomfortable, or b) feel that peer pressure to join in. Or, in my case, c) wonder just how many of these invisible and extreme standards are actually in the back of people’s minds, and being applied to other women.

Because here’s the thing that’s eating a hole in my brain, and has been since I started seeing articles about how Swift getting engaged to her football boyfriend was “a disappointment”.

How many of the standards being applied to Taylor Swift are actually representative of people’s background thoughts about the women in their lives?

White women like Swift tend to get a lot of criticism, but also a lot more forgiveness for our fuckups. We have a lot more chances to come back from disappointments and rebuild our reputations – so many nonwhite women, particularly if they’re Black, get absolutely fucking wiped out and persecuted for far, far smaller and much more dubious offenses than Swift has committed. 

So the question is, who are all these thinkpieces *for*?

Talking to Ourselves

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to process your feelings out in the open, but I do think there’s something really interesting and possibly rather bad about the way that sometimes, criticism influxes from the right and left create a confluence. Swift has been getting a fresh backlash of hate ever since she started showing up at her boyfriend’s games. Meanwhile, people on my side of the street are very earnestly criticizing her for what we certainly think are more meritorious reasons, with actual grounding.

But when does criticism just become a kind of misogynistic blur of background hate and radiation? It’s awfully hard to make a good point when you’re just part of a crowd, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed on the internet, it’s that people are absolutely shit at contextualizing their perspectives with those of others.

One person hating something is an observation; two dozen hating something is a clamour; two hundred thousand is a sort of oceanic roar, for which all the details blend together.

So, then, what do we do? Does that mean we can’t hold public figures accountable?

The thing is, I’m not so fucking sure that all this critique is really about accountability. I also don’t know if people who are talking about accountability see how they’re pretty much just playing out games of punishment and shame, just with updated language and internal self-justifications that this time, the hate is justified, and the target is big enough that really, it’s harmless.

Who’s Fair Game?

And now we come to the part of the essay that has been keeping me up at night. Who are we allowed to hate? I’m certainly not innocent of despising some famous women and people, or mocking them – preferably in private or semi-private, rather than adding my voice to the cosmic radiation static of hate and jeering that tends to blare from every portal to the internet.

For those who don’t know, I’ve been running as a public school board trustee in a local election. That will be over by the time this post is up, although results won’t be in yet. Recently, I was at a Pink Tea celebrating the Famous Five who brought voting rights to Canadian women (vote rights for white women, that is, because the five were also anti-immigrant eugenicists).

The topic of misogyny came up among some city council and public school board trustee candidates. We talked about our local member of parliament, Rachel Thomas, whose policies I strongly dislike (to put it somewhat mildly). She’s advocated against safe injection sites, voted against abortion, and voted against trans rights. While yes, she’s experienced misogyny, as older candidates pointed out, she’s also voted only in favour of certain women. The thing is, the more centrist people there were keen to protect and shelter her reputation and save her a seat at the table, figuratively speaking.

It comes back to the concept of white feminism. Can we trust those who don’t advocate for us? The question I would ask is, maybe we should focus on those who are not just failing to advocate, but directly advocating against us. But even then – how often do we let ourselves slide into the guilty secret pleasure of misogyny when we deem a woman to be safely hateable? I don’t have an answer for this one, but I’m going to be looking into the mirror about it for a long time to come.

But Taylor Swift is also not a goddamn activist, despite what people would like her to be; she’s a pop star, and an extremely normal person. I have been developing a terrible, creeping suspicion that all these billionaires and people in power are, in some regards, terribly normal and petty, and utterly unprepared for and unable to understand the power they wield.

That does not mean we should not hold them accountable – but it does mean that we should, amongst ourselves, fucking interrogate both our priorities and the meaning of accountability itself.

What we need are nuanced discussions. What we have is a trend cycle being doused in the gasoline of AI slop and propaganda.

And at the end of the day, I wonder – has all this cultural criticism of creative works amounted to a hill of beans?

Kurt Vonnegut dryly commented, “During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

I guess what I’m saying is, treating Taylor Swift’s marriage and parental dreams as a failure of her feminism is extremely stupid bullshit in the context of vicious backlashes against queer rights.

Pick your fucking priorities, people, and think more carefully about the standards you apply to women and femmes in your lives. It’s just a mid album, but there’s something fundamentally gross about being this excited for a woman’s downfall.

 ***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people’s manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

September Ended, I Overslept

I’ll get an essay or a poem out every Tuesday, I said. Can’t be that hard, I said. Well, at least I haven’t missed any days with the serialised release of Chinook Phase, the first book of the Prairie Weather trilogy. That’s going up for free on Substack and Patreon, and you can find the first chapters here and here! The most recent chapters are here and here.

This whole parenthood and life thing kind of kneecapped me, so here’s a quick rundown of where I’ve been.

• About 3 weeks ago, my kid got RSV, an upper respiratory infection, and was extremely sick.

• Only a few days later, my beloved cat Chester died.

• I’m also running for office for the first time, as a public school board trustee!

• I’ve been running my booth for Rainbow Bazaar Art Collective at markets.

• This weekend, my period slammed into me with the force of a semitrailer. I haven’t had one this bad in *years*.

So, all of that plus normal household shit, like cleaning and chores. If it sounds like a lot, it has been. But my brain also doesn’t have an off switch, so I do, in fact, have some essays planned! Next Tuesday is going to be about the release of Life of a Showgirl and some thoughts I’m mulling about internet cultural norms. It’s going to be uncomfortable, so strap in.

I might write a post about all the gothic horror I was reading (at least, until The Horrors slammed into me IRL) and how much I enjoyed my Gothic Girl Summer.

I also might write a tribute post about Chester, with some talk about grief, memories, and of course, plenty of cat photos.

What would you like to hear about most, readers? Drop me a line and let me know!

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A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people’s manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook