Thread by @cinemashoebox

working on a grand unified theory of pride discourse, bella poarch, viral food videos and gen z reactionary politics

oh you thought i was joking? buckle the fuck up

so i have long believed that one of the defining things about cutting-edge internet/Gen Z culture is that it's deeply soaked in fetish culture/imagery

(please note: i am in my early 30s, i.e. old as hell, so probably talking out of my ass)

all those gross-out food videos that are so obviously fetishistic, egirl stuff, snapchat filters: imo all this stuff is heavily shot through with fetish/kink aesthetics. this is not revolutionary to point out...

i recently had the misfortune to watch the video for the new song from famously pointless/pointlessly famous tiktoker Bella Poarch and, again, song and video are fully about really quite dense/weird fetish stuff: sexbots etc

BUT at the same time there's the awful pride discourse and sex-negative gen z...thing. you know, teenagers with avis of anime characters with titanic breasts telling you that wearing leather at pride is violence towards children

so the way i have begun to think of it is...everything in that culture is so deeply impregnated with fetish/kink culture/imagery that it's gotten to the point where it's, like...rude and gauche to point it out? it's so extremely present that there's nothing...to it anymore

it's like how after age, idk, 10, it's rude and dumb to point out that farting are transgressive and funny. like the *are* but saying so is...off, somehow

in just the same way, if you get so soaked in this then pointing at something and going "hey, weird sex stuff" just feels...dumb?

(i'm *not* talking here really about desensitization, certainly not as a bad thing: i don't think that exposure to porn/kink/etc is an inherent negative, just that this, like, hollowing out of it into just imagery creates weirdness)

case in point, via the ultimate Gen Z artist: Old Town Road used lots of gay/kink/leather imagery but used it in a very low-intensity, non-sexual way and people loved it. Montero went "yeah but you know what this is all really about, right?" and people flipped out

so when The Youth see stuff like this at pride -which, to be clear, rocks, we need more of this at pride- they recoil because suddenly they're reminded that *it's about sex, dummy* and suddenly this is unavoidable: so they yell about having it "shoved in their faces" or whatever

which is why it's so important to keep reminding people that pride is about sex and transgression and why it's important to remind people that transgression is liberation and has a certain inherent value

does any of that make any fucking sense? idk. join me next time on another episode of "Is It A Sex Thing?" where i'll be explaining once again that yes, it's a sex thing

also and more importantly solidarity with all the queers being told they're "degenerates" for standing up for what pride - and queerness itself - is all about

(i forgot to say that obviously there are also shitty bigots who hate queer people and want to spread that hate and whose motivations aren't, like, complex or interesting - but the above is part of why those shitty bigots find an audience *among queer people*)