The Vivisection of Lindy West

Content warning: this post features graphic discussions of disordered eating, cannibalism (symbolic and otherwise), body dysmorphia, misogyny, and general messy mental health struggles.

Failure is a fascinating thing. On one hand, it has a sort of relentless finality, in culture – a certain inevitability that we absolutely refuse to acknowledge. No matter how good an artist is, eventually, they’re gonna produce something that either you don’t like, or nobody really likes.

The more famous they are, the more reticent we are to admit that they might, possibly, have missed the mark. At a certain point, artists often become “too big to fail” – well, if they’re men, anyway. Women and non cis-men, or men who fail to conform to masculinity, are ripe targets for failure, always hovering a breath away from falling off the balance beam and slamming ourselves square in the crotch.

Taylor Swift got an unfortunate taste of this with her Life of a Showgirl album; Lindy West isn’t as much of an international household name, but she’s certainly getting the same treatment right now.

But maybe you don’t know who the hell this is, or what I’m talking about. (If you’re the kind of person who reads my articles, you probably do know…but hey, more context and validation of facts is generally prudent.)

What everyone’s talking about

If you’ve heard of this memoir from feminist it-girl of the 2010s Lindy West, a seminal and influential confessional writer, you’ve probably heard about The Controversy.

Now, I’m a little trash-picking corvid at normal times. I enjoy gossip and Discourse and I love thinking critically about things, turning over nuggets and crystals and bits of broken glass from the culture, appreciating and evaluating them and hoarding them in my thoughts. I have a strong stomach for rot and filth; I get my hands dirty. I usually don’t do so in the public view of the internet, because I have seen too many people barely survive trolling incidents, but in private, I rejoice in the confessional spaces of group chats and gleefully, ardently consider mess.

Generally, I prefer fictional mess, where no real human beings have gotten hurt – tabletop roleplay games and various genres of fiction are ideal for exploring drama and its fallout. Hell, I’ve written an entire trilogy (I promise I’ll go back to posting chapters soon!) that’s basically just drama: the early 2010s musical.

This is as much to say that when I saw Lindy West’s name crop up on ICYMI, I jumped on it like the magpie I am, viscerally excited about the prospect of scandal and discourse. Then it came up on another podcast I absolutely love, There Are No Girls On the Internet, with a rather scathing take on the whole thing – particularly the absolutely unhinged and deeply unprofessional email that Aham, Lindy’s husband, sent journalist and essayist Scaatchi Cole.

I will have some words about the whole thing with Aham, but that’s for part 2, because I need to get deeper into the book to really share my thoughts. Suffice to say that I’m writing this article with Neko Case’s “The Pharaohs” playing on repeat. “I want the pharaohs/but there’s only men…”

Then yet another podcast I adore, The Worst Bestsellers, weighed in with guest Margaret Willison, Bossy Dame and polyamory alumnus, as she revealed in an episode of Love Letters.

I don’t always dive several episodes deep into researching a topic, but well, this one caught my interest. And then a friend in one of the book clubs I’m in wanted to read Adult Braces.

Reader, of course I enthusiastically supported this proposition. But although I was curious about the “real story” with the whole polyamory situation, I didn’t truly know what I was in for. I didn’t know I was going to walk around a corner and slam face-first into a funhouse mirror version of myself.

The Fame Monster

I’ve always felt a certain guilt about my own lack of success as a writer – surely, had I just tried a little harder and posted more, and etcetera, I could have become a Name; Marlon Brando At The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender,” etcetera. Who knows, I still might; I’m not dead yet, and even death isn’t necessarily a bar to success (although it’s not a marketing strategy I plan to utilize, for the record).

But until reading Adult Braces – and admittedly, I’m halfway through, but my burning thoughts demanded an article already – I hadn’t realised quite how cannibalistic success really is.

Dr Devon Price wrote a rather good piece examining this side of the memoir. Now, the poly stuff in the memoir is going to be something I touch on, but first I want to talk about this thing that very few people are discussing: Lindy West’s quiet fall from relevance due to what looks like burnout.

I’ll have an article about burnout coming out soon, but I don’t want to write four essays crammed uncomfortably into a SmartCar, so forgive my brevity for the time being. Let us, for the moment, discuss a nasty little overlap between the way Lindy’s work is treated and the way Lindy’s body is treated.

In the memoir, particularly the sections set in Hollywood, West describes being alienated and dehumanized by people who are basically feeding off her work for the show. Now, it’s unfortunately true that a narrative show is just going to have changes made to it. It’s not a documentary, and hell, documentaries lie all the time. But that doesn’t invalidate or decrease the fundamental disrespect of herself and her life experiences that she ran into down in the Hollywood hellscape.

Fat Girl in the Mirror

Lindy either hasn’t quite connected it or hasn’t said it yet (or I missed it, in the 45% of the book I’ve read), but surely, at least some of the dire self-loathing of her body must have been influenced by living in LA. The way she talks about herself in Adult Braces, it would be easy to assume she’s plain, even undeniably ugly, some cartoonish cautionary tale housed in woman’s flesh.

So imagine the shock that washed over me as I read about this famous fat woman, writing about loathing her own body, and I looked her up – and was shocked to see that she was undeniably beautiful and hot, conventionally pretty.

Now, I’ve occasionally alluded to and mentioned that I struggle with body dysmorphia. I’m fat – a “small fat” in the lingo of fat activists; an absurd term that sounds like a slightly unappealing latte order – but visibly fat nonetheless. Somehow, I have three partners, and multiple other people have been attracted to me visibly over the years, or flirted with me. As a fat femme, this is one of those things we end up compartmentalizing or just putting in a box. Sure, I’ve been flirted with, but I’m still ugly and undesirable.

To be fat is to be subjected to traumatizing social and personal attacks, over and over; is it any wonder that most of us struggle with disordered eating in some way? Of course, the assumption will always be that binge eating is to blame, but this isn’t always true. Conventional anorexia and bulimia diagnoses use thinness as fundamental diagnostic criteria.

It’s entirely possible to be obsessively counting calories, peering at your tracking app after every morsel that crosses your lips, debating the cost of every bite and just how your metabolism will handle it, feeling intense guilt and shame as you dare to eat something you enjoy. It’s possible to struggle with intrusive thoughts about calorie counting years after you abandon the apps, advertisements for various trackers on otherwise innocuous phone games popping up and offering you impossible, AI-generated perfection or the classic before-and-after photo tricks. It’s possible to sit and stew and wonder if maybe, just maybe, this will be the time that your metabolism and body surrender to restricted calories and shed the prisoning rolls of flesh that lie between you and “acceptable” attractiveness.

Ask me how I know.

But Lindy knows too, and the weight of apparent self confidence, of being A Successful Fat Person who publicly loved herself, was drowning her. Now, some of the issues we struggle with are always going to be calls coming from inside the house, our internal voices projected onto other people like bad dubs over 2000s anime. But for Lindy, plenty of those shitty thoughts were being sent directly to her inboxes and comment sections by real people.

We love celebrities because we are desperate to steal a little of their light and prestige and power, to bask in their reflected glow and imagine ourselves in their places of pride. But when does that love become crushing, suffocating, toxic? When you can’t escape your own shadow, as happened to West.

In the early 2010s, that currently romanticized time, there was a serious penchant for TEDTalks, for clickbait solutions, for One Weird Trick that would dispel bigotry or grant self-confidence or heal whatever psychological or social ailments we suffered. Surely, with just the right words, we could reach a racist bigot and fix them! It’s that Aaron Sorkin, cowboy speech type heroism bullshit that poisons an awful lot of Western culture. All it takes is one brave, divine saviour to martyr themselves or fight the Ultimate Evil, and we will all be saved.

Am I saying that Lindy West is Jesus? Sure – but in the sense that every fucking person weaned on the goddamn fucking Hero’s Journey is Jesus. Or rather, that we are being trained and taught to see ourselves as the next potential Jesus, the person whose brave sacrifice and hard work will be enough to tip the Cosmic Balance towards good.

Now, I don’t know Lindy West personally. I’ve never met her, I’ve only read a few of her articles over the years. I don’t have a deep, profound type of parasocial attachment to her, unlike an awful lot of my fellow fat folks. (This is not to insult or denigrate them – if I was immune to idealising public figures, I wouldn’t have spent months in mourning after finding out that Neil Gaiman is a piece of shit.) But I will say that there’s something about Lindy West that hurt her, and has protected me, as I’ve slowly developed it over the years.

Lindy West is a kind, nice person, who cares about other people’s opinions. The visceral hunger for approval and love burns in her writing. And that is only human, and deeply understandable, but Lindy does not have what I have: I’m a mean, bitchy person, and until now, I never realised how much that has saved me.

Surviving the Internet

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time on the internet has gotten hurt on it. It’s as inevitable as gravity. Either by accident or by encountering someone thoughtless or seeking attention for snark, you will get hurt. I’ve certainly gotten hurt many times.

I had a bad experience on GoodReads with snarky reviewers taking potshots at my first book, sometimes misogynistically and queerphobically. (It was 2013, and snarky book blog reviews were all the rage. These were the heyday of vile attack pages like RequiresHate, after all, and the movie review culture of trying to cram in as many jokes per minute as possible.) I had a small but cutting run-in with Gamergaters after I dared to criticize a reviewer I used to like – someone from that dunking school, ironically enough. I’ve had uncountable fights with conservatives and fellow progressives and leftists on Facebook, taking exception to and being scolded for poor word choices and small oversights.

People on the internet are fucking mean, but also wonderfully kind, and publicly interacting on websites is a daily spin of the roulette wheel. But humans, like so many other creatures (including pigeons), are willing to gamble. And so we all do, because most of the time, or enough of the time, people are kind and good and warm enough that it’s rewarding.

But adulation is addictive, and as West describes, there’s poison in the honey. But there’s also something oddly compelling about the harm, as West admits, describing her profound act of self harm in cataloguing every bit of trolling she received, thousands of screenshots’ worth.

To survive the internet means having to accept the randomness of human interaction and the horrible unkindness as not necessarily deserved, but inflicted on yourself. As my wife often points out, people can be cruel and unkind because of shit that’s going on for them. This is certainly true of an awful lot of trolls, or even of normally reasonable people who lash out on a particular bad day. It’s worth remembering the basic humanity of everyone we interact with, even the worst people.

However.

What Lindy West seems to struggle with (so far, in as far as I can tell from reading a memoir and not knowing her as a real person in private or offline), is that some people’s opinions ain’t shit. It’s not that “opinions are like assholes; everyone has one and they all stink” – it’s that, in fact, some people act in ways that fucking suck, and are disrespectful, and it’s extremely important to learn how to not give a shit.

Perhaps my readers will have been surprised to hear about my appetite for mess, and drama, and Discourse; those who know me personally probably aren’t at all. And the reason for this is that, fucking frankly, not every opinion needs to be shared on the public internet.  I don’t share my messiest, juiciest, nastiest thoughts with everyone, because quite frankly, I don’t want to contribute to the toxicity in public discourse. It’s one thing to talk shit in private, but I am constantly aware – as I guess, most people fucking aren’t?! – that there’s a chance the subject of my speech could see something posted publicly.

So I don’t. In places where my thoughts can be accessed by search engines, I hold my tongue; I curate my thoughts; I am deliberate, as much as any one imperfect human can be. We are all at a party, and we can all be overheard, and people need to actually think about the fucking concept of privacy and discretion in how they communicate on the wide public internet.

It’s probably good to speak positively, in general, and to compliment people’s work. When I do reach out to or comment on creators’ projects that I admire, I try to write like I’d talk to them if I met them at a convention. That is, sure I’m warm and friendly, but I maintain a self-awareness of the fact that a) I know this person’s work, not the person themselves, and b) they don’t fucking know me, which means that c) I’m not entitled to speak to them in certain intimate ways. It’s okay to form an emotional attachment to someone’s work, and their persona. Hell, the current landscape of the creative internet actually requires that creative people encourage a degree of this attachment to fucking survive. You’re supposed to want to see every update from a “creator”, every video clip, every breath we take.

To be famous at all is to live in the holding pen outside a slaughterhouse

And this is a recipe for self destruction, especially for marginalized people. For a fat person, or a person in a fat body – god, so many of us feel like we’re a thin person just imprisoned somehow! – there is something particularly cruel and horrible about the inevitable scrutiny on us. Lindy writes agonizingly about how people scolded her for losing weight as they projected their insecurities onto her.

It must have hurt. I can only imagine how it hurt. And it is as much a fault of the “good fan” for having shitty boundaries and poor distinctions of self-definition around Lindy, as it is the fault of a troll for dehumanizing her and targeting her. In a horrible way, every fan is a troll waiting to happen.

There’s a speech in the first Sam Raimi Spiderman movie, where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin emotively snarls advice at Tobey Maguire’s wide-eyed Peter Parker, about how what people love more than a hero is “to see a hero fall, see him fail.” The thing about a dead hero is that they can’t disappoint you. This is also true of dead women; they are perfect ciphers, sexy blank canvases upon which any fantasy can be perfectly projected, painted, embroidered.

Now make the beautiful woman fat. Because we don’t like talking about that, do we, that fat women can be incontrovertibly beautiful? But there is some horrible angle to this, to the way that fat bodies are subject to an extra level of scrutiny. Prodded, poked, laid out flat; as people performatively describe their disgust for us and demonstrate their own virtue at the expense of our fallen bodies. It is like being eaten to death by rats, devoured one bite at a time, though you’ll feel every nibble. Do it to Julia.

Societally, we do not discuss the beauty of fat forms; luxurious, plush flesh, a huge variety of different kinds of softness and welcome. A body you can sink into and rest on. It’s not all about sex: there is comfort here. My toddler son loves to sleep on my tummy, and the way he cuddles into what has been my most hated body feature gives me pause. He is comfortable, happy, on the fattest part of me, and my fat helps me nurture him, while cushioning my bones and organs against twenty-odd pounds of rambunctious little kid flopping against them. My lovers don’t mind my belly, but it’s my son’s joy that is eroding my self-loathing, bit by bit.

Sure, the nineties raved about big tits and the 2010s were the era of the thick ass and thighs – but fat on publicly celebrated bodies is sculpted, curated, strictly controlled; not permitted wildness or softness or malleability. To sag and give in to gravity’s arc is to fail at the task of womanhood, and increasingly, manhood; to admit defeat in the face of entropy. We are supposed to be young and firm forever. We do not discuss or even consider that, maybe, there’s beauty to be found in age, or even that aging isn’t as bad as we claim it is.

The people who hate Lindy West and other fat people would probably sooner stab themselves in the face than admit that maybe, possibly, some of them find us a little bit attractive, or even just don’t find us that disgusting. But fat bodies are common and normal. Fat bodies are normal.

 Just writing that sentence is, somehow, fucking iconoclastic, even after decades of fat activist work; just saying “fat bodies are normal” feels like it needs some sort of caveat, or apology, or context, or some swooping caveat to condemn the most extreme cases of obesity and high weight. As though stigma and scolding will save people from the shadow of fat this time, in defiance of literally every other piece of evidence we’ve got about the relationship between weight and stigma and mental health.

What Should Lindy West Do?

I can’t speak for what Lindy West needs to do, apart from like, probably more therapy – something, I hasten to add, that I recommend for pretty much everyone who can manage it – but I do think that, if Lindy were to read this article somewhere, I’d say she might wanna listen to some punk music. Punk music is, broadly, about expressing the emotion of telling someone to go fuck themselves, and she could do worse than listening to Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette a couple times. The Regrettes are also high on my recommendation list. I’d also mention Bikini Kill or The Suffrajetts, but I haven’t listened to much of their work yet. Same goes for The Bad Decisions, who are also on my music homework playlist.  

(Don’t fucking gatekeep what counts as punk in the comments, or I will come to your house, knock on your door, look you in the eye, and tell you how much I don’t give a shit.)

No, really. There’s allegedly a  Zen koan that says, “If you see the Buddha on the side of the road, kill him.” The meaning of this is basically that like, someone claiming or appearing to be the Buddha is not the real Buddha, and it’s kind of meant to make you think about the concept of reverence compared to actual reverence, and like the whole sorta-atheistic nature of Buddhism qua not actually treating Buddha as a god but as like, a role model – and other stuff. I’m not actually a Buddhist; just someone who likes thinking an awful lot. In the same way, if you see an internet troll in your comment section, kill them (in your head; for legal and fucking logical humane reasons, I’m not advocating actual violence).

But relatedly, I think there’s a deep and profound importance to learning to shun people’s expectations, especially on the endlessly cannibalistic internet. Lindy West was never going to be good and perfect enough to satisfy everyone, to be a Perfect Fat Person, especially because different ideas and requirements for what it means to be a Good Fat Person exist, clashing and cracking against each other like her poor, abused teeth. But in the same way that her teeth needed the support of orthodontics, individual creators absolutely cannot get by without the support of colleagues.

Community is a bit messier and less ideal than we want it to be. To quote a good friend of mine, “being in community means being annoyed sometimes,” and that’s true. And being annoyed means dealing with your emotions, which sometimes means bitching and gossiping in private, then working your shit out so you can actually still be kind to the person who’s annoyed you. This, incidentally, is also how relationships work, whether platonic, romantic, familial, or some messy alterous nebulous thing you’re trying to figure out.

I’m still unlearning the anxiety and uncertainty and double-back clarifications that Tumblr and Facebook arguments taught me; the uncertainty in my own voice and fear of misinterpretation as I fail to cover ground for every possible meaning. It’s interwoven with real-life trauma I’ve been through in nasty, elf-locked tangles and knots. Some days I win against the self-doubt, some I lose. But when I see my girlfriend hesitate and struggle to share an opinion, the kind Tumblr would have flayed her for in her teen years, I support and encourage her, because in doing so, I’m also putting the boots to my own demons.

Sometimes it’s really fucking hard to tell whether the yelling is coming from inside the house or the street outside. The worst thing of all is when the monsters in the closet and the dickheads on the street are screaming the same things.

So fuck ‘em. Be angry at them. Maybe get real creative with your insults and dismissals. It feels great sometimes. And the best ways to disarm trolls are a) a casual acceptance of fault, if you did in fact fuck something up for real, and b) baring your teeth and showing them that you’re not a helpless little creature.  

And when people who claim to love you try to transgress your boundaries and hurt you, give them a chance to talk about it. And if they keep doing it, over and over, they also might need to go fuck themselves, and you might have to say it.

And I have more to say about that, but we’ll get to it in part 2.

***

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

Silence is Choking Me

 I had plans, last year, to try and write a post a week and publish a chapter of my finished trilogy a week.

That hasn’t exactly happened, but I’m trying to break through the feelings that have kept me silent and frozen, and well, that starts with a few words on a page, so here goes.

Oh, and this post comes with songs that inspired and fit its vibe. Let me know if you like that, because I might start including more song embeds and soundtracks to posts.

Never mind the whole “parenting takes time” thing – the real problems I’ve been struggling with are two primary issues.

1)       Everything is unbelievably hard and absurd

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zz4UG7nA3Q&si=6MoXUbaqbskegi3B – this song keeps playing over and over in my head periodically.

It’s not exactly revelatory to mention that, you know, the world order has been upended and norms have been disrupted further than we thought possible. Nor is it particularly shocking to hear a millennial lamenting, but hey, that’s what I’m gonna do – reflect on how I feel about where We, as a society and maybe as a species, are at right now.

So obviously, this comes with the caveat and blinders of being a white North American from Canada, but the fact that we’ve all just kind of gotten used to what ecologists and scientists are referring to as “ecocide” [citation] is um, a trifle fucked up? Just a little bit. One of my cousins, whom I love dearly, posted about this recently.

Ecological issues are deeply important to me, but I’m often unable to focus on them because of the sheer existential dread and grief that comes with trying to think about them. I’m certainly not alone there, but I want to remind people who are trying desperately not to think about the climate crisis and water issues and plastic pollution and methane levels and deforestation – you are not alone in being scared as fuck, and upset, and angry.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=v2e6nVHfXa0&si=XyY1DlX9hN9FFt8B

But there is an upside to this. Doomerism is the weapon of the elites against us, and it’s also a vast, inaccurate scientific oversimplification. Have things gotten worse? Well, yeah. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. But a hundred small things make a difference, and there is no point at which we should just throw in the towel. Yes, things can get worse, but they can always get better, too. Every inch we fight for counts. Every tenth of a degree centigrade that we keep from advancing matters. Every species we protect and give a chance to rebound, matters.

Nature is more resilient than we think. This is not a video game, where we fail at a number of conditions and the game is just fucking irreparably over and lost. It’s not even that we still have “a chance,” it’s that we have thousands of chances. And we should not, and cannot, squander them.

This entire screed also applies entirely and completely to the political situation we’re dealing with. Democracy is not fucking dead, and billionaires and the elites are not invincible. And yes, it’s hard not to give up sometimes, and yes we need to take breaks and focus on joy to survive – but friends, there is so much more fight left in us than we realise. We just might have to try some different strategies. I’ll be talking more about politics in a post soon.

2)       Oh hey, apparently I’m more disabled than I realised

So another fun thing I’ve been grappling with is a number of health issues that – I haven’t been ignoring, I’ve just been unaware/haven’t realised how much I was struggling with them. Reader, I recently went and applied for some specific programs and initiatives, government things. Without getting into the precious and specific details of my diagnoses, it wa truly humbling, shocking, and in every way upsetting to realise just how much I’ve been dealing with, without…really realising or understanding the extent of my own problems.

It’s so easy to fall into default expectations of physical ability, especially if any or most of your disabilities present invisibly. I kind of thought the whole mental illness and autism things were bad enough, but hey, apparently there’s more I’ve been struggling with, and having to describe it for bureaucratic purposes really put it in ugly, ugly perspective.

So honestly, I’m grieving right now; over what I thought I could do and time I’ve lost, and I’m trying to adjust my expectations of my future. I don’t have any conditions that are immediately life-threatening or degenerative – to my knowledge, and so far – so in some ways, I do count myself as very lucky. But it’s still not what I envisioned and what I expected, and adjusting to that is goddamn hard.

So that’s where I’m at, but I have too many long-form thoughts and poems and stories percolating to be silent for long. But hey, I don’t want this post to be entirely either a) a bummer or b) kind of toxic, hopeless complaining, so I’m gonna close with a list of some things that are bringing me joy right now.

3)       The comforts and remedies

I’m lucky to have really good friends and relationships in my life, and I haven’t really had any friction from the people who care about me or socialise with me over my struggles. I’m really grateful for that. I recently finished an absolutely epic-length play-by-post roleplay game based on the Monsterhearts 2 roleplaying game system, a Powered by the Apocalypse build, and it was very fulfilling and deeply satisfying. We’re doing a few little epilogue-y things, but the actual game and a bunch of emotional stuff is pretty wrapped up.

That said, many of the same people and a couple of new faces are also involved in a second play-by-post game with a different system and storyline, involving Triangle Agency (which is a really cool system and game in terms of its design; strongly recommended!) and that’s been a blast. These games have been absolutely essential to my sanity and morale over the past couple of years, and I’m so grateful to have made some excellent friendships and deep bonds with my tablemates.

In terms of my other creative pursuits outside of writing, I’ve had a pretty good time with my knitting and jewelry-making; my wife and husband got me a chasing hammer and a new set of flush cutters for wire for Mother’s Day, and my god, having the right tools can make such a huge difference. I’m also pushing myself a bit with some market appearances this summer, like the local South Country Fair, and that’s pretty exciting.

Here’s a couple of pieces I’ve made (May 15^th, 2026, hot off the bench) and some in-progress knits.

  (This was a progress shot, but the bolero is now finished, and extremely soft and fluffy, btw)

I’m also enjoying parenthood a lot more than I feared; my son is absolutely wonderful, and a very kind, sweet, bright little creature, full of spirit and curiosity, but also immensely helpful. I couldn’t be a parent without the support structures of my spouses, and I’m so grateful that I get the chance to have this, and to have such a fantastic kid. I was so terrified that I’d hate parenthood, especially this toddler stage – and sure, sometimes it’s very hard work and tiring, but I’m inexpressibly happy and relieved that my greatest fears have been proven utterly wrong.

So that’s all for this post, but expect some political posts and a musing on the ends of, among others, Good Omens Season 3 and some other media properties coming soon, plus some more poetry.

***

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

Fuck Charlie Kirk

[So, I actually wrote this not long after the whole assassination thing happened, buuut it’s December and I feel like posting more poetry this month while I work on some upcoming posts, so that’s what you get!]

They held a rally for the fascist who died
there were pyrotechnics at his funeral
he said people like me
“should be dealt with like they did in the 50s and 60s”
And I’m still being scolded
for not mourning
Their small-featured martyr
apparently a calm white man with a baritone
deserves canonization for
being killed by the same words
he used as weapons

But when people demand grace and patience
without showing any
then say you deserve no quarter in the same breath
that’s just abuse in a cheap red ballcap
the tolerant have left
and if we’re using words as weapons
then catch the sharp end
of my self defense

I will not be quiet
I will not perform sadness
For a monster, a scam artist, or a grifter
I will not gracefully excuse
the fact that my member of Parliament,
Rachel Harder,
called for a standing ovation for a man who said
he’d make his daughter
bear a child of a rape to term
because forcing people to
give birth matters more than
our pain or our choices
I will not sit down and bite my tongue
For the potential of a career in politics
Because pinching our noses and making nice
Is how we got here

And if this poem makes you uncomfortable
and you want me to shut up
or be kinder
then look me in the eye and tell me
why I should care
about your feelings
more than my own or those of my communities

We will not be cowed
by your cowardice or fumbling snatches for power
we said “this pussy grabs back”
and now it’s got teeth

If this poem makes you uncomfortable
you do not have the right
to tell me to be nicer
and you can’t fucking make me.

***

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

 

 

 

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